I Keep Being Sick

Posted May 22, 2022 by thepaincorner

I promise I tried to think of a better title for this blog post.

I keep being sick and I don’t know why.

I would like to say ‘I keep being sick for no reason’, but there is a reason for it that has been picked up on a blood test and hopefully the doctor can help me this week.

I’ll start at the beginning. I have physically been sick every couple of weeks since the beginning of the year. At first, I blamed my daughter bringing home nursery germs. I blamed a bug. I blamed my period. I blamed some antibiotics I was given for tonsillitis.

I don’t actually care too much about being sick. Compared to every other problem I have with my health, being sick is nothing. However, it’s starting to affect my work as I can’t go in the office when I’m being sick and I can barely work from the laptop sometimes. I’m lucky that my manager has been so understanding and that my team are really supportive.

But the biggest problem with being sick all the time is that I can’t keep down my medication for my trigeminal neuralgia. This means an increased risk of flares, it means withdrawal symptoms and it also means I experience awful symptoms when I take my medication again after days without it.

Last week, I was sick again and my best friends convinced me that I needed to call the doctor, which I very reluctantly did. If I was still registered at my last GP practice, I wouldn’t have hesitated to call my doctor, but I’m still unsure about the new GP practice I’m registered with and haven’t built up any trust with any member of staff there.

The doctor I spoke to was actually really lovely and said that we’d try some blood tests to get to the bottom of what might be causing my sickness. When I went in to see the nurse, she was lovely too.

I’m torn both ways about how I feel about what happened next. My blood results came back as ‘abnormal’ in almost every category. I’m partly upset that everything that can go wrong looks like it is wrong, but I’m also relieved that, for once, a medical test is actually backing up how I’m feeling. It is in black and white that something is wrong.

I’m not clinically trained, so looking at my blood results on paper means absolutely nothing to me, but I can see all the things that are marked as ‘high’ – white blood cell count, mean cell volume, red blood cell distribution width, neutrophil count, platelet count, the list goes on and on.

I’m also vitamin D deficient and my liver function needs looking at, but these are problems I’ve had repeatedly, so I’m not too concerned about these.

It’s so strange to be relieved about a blood test coming back so abnormal, but I guess that’s what happens when you’re so used to being told “everything is fine” by multiple doctors when you do not feel fine.

I’ve not been sick today and I’m feeling okay, but I know I only get a couple of weeks at best without being sick, so I’m just dreading the next day I can’t keep my medication down.

I have more bloods and a GP call booked in for the day after tomorrow, so hopefully I’ll have some good news then (and hopefully I won’t be sick on blood test day again)!