I wrote a nice, long, and very articulate post not too long ago. And then my phone deleted it *sigh* Here is another post, although somewhat shorter and much less articulate than before.
At a doctors appointment recently, my GP helpfully pointed out that my weight has almost doubled in the past 10 years. This came right after I was declined for life insurance because my BMI was over their limit (limit is 51, mine is/was 54) so I gave him the go-ahead to send the referral. I have applied twice before but for various reasons it never went ahead.
When going through the public system there are a few stages. First, the GP sends the referral with a brief medical history of the patient (me!!). Mine was held up briefly here because my med history was missing but that was easy to fix. This initial referral gets sent up to the surgical team for grading. If your grade is high enough then you progress to stage two.
Stage two is a 16 page health questionnaire that the patient fills out. This has questions like "Why do you want surgery now as opposed to last year?", a checklist of all the obesity related health complaints, previous weightloss attempts etc etc. This then gets sent up again for grading and if it passes you get accepted for surgery, assigned a surgeon and consult date, and sent a letter in the mail.
I got my health questionnaire right as we were starting an excessive number of public holidays here in New Zealand (Good Friday, Easter Monday, and ANZAC day all within 8 days of each other) so the postal service was running a bit behind. I sent it back the day after Easter Monday hoping the backlog wouldn't get it lost in the system but kept in mind the lady in charge of my case only works Mon/Tues/Wed. I just phoned the hospital as I haven't heard back from them either way and wanted to be sure they received it (you're only allowed 2 weeks to have it sent back to them). The lady I spoke to sounded a tad confused but said they've received it and it appears as though i'm in a wait-queue to have a surgeon and consult date assigned to me. She's going to chase it up and it shouldn't be much longer.
I'm not going to take her word for it just in case though, seeing as she sounded so confused about the whole situation, BUT it does sound fairly positive. If this is the case, I should (in theory) be having my surgery in 4-5 months.
As for the meltdowns portion of this blog post, things were changing dramatically at work. New managers, existing roles were changing, I was dealing with the bulk of complaints coming into our office etc and it just took it's toll to the point where I did have a breakdown and had to resign effective immediately. I had already handed in my 4 weeks notice, just needed to bring it forwards somewhat rapidly! I slept pretty solidly for 3-4 days after I stopped working - trying to recover I guess. I'm a lot better now, but I was having quite a bit of anxiety over taking our 7yo son on a cruise around Auckland harbour (it went fine).
And Herman. Well. I have the worlds worst hemorrhoid, so I did what any sane person would do and named him Herman (it's hard to follow up a paragraph about my rocky mental health with calling myself sane and naming body parts, but hey, it's done now!). Turns out that Herman is very special. He's a prolapsed internal roid that has thrombosed. Unfortunately for me, that means my GP can't fix it (my GP only sorts external ones) so I've been referred to a specialist for a Hermanectomy. Apparently I'll probably hear from that clinic sometime this week.
Well, that's me. Till next time....!
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