Medical Matters

I have registered with a doctor and she wanted to send me off for the doctoracious tests that all docs want you to take whenever they see you for the first time. My new doc had practised for ten years in China before coming to Canada, then had to do her training all over again. She is very gentle and cautious, good qualities in a doctor.

So my blood tests show that I have high cholesterol, both the good sort and the bad, and am very anaemic, no surprises on either really.
The anaemia's neither here nor there, however it was interesting that the scale used here is quite different from the one I am used to from the UK which is the same as one of my friends in the States is familiar with.
The cholesterol however, needs to be addressed. I seem to be one of those unlucky people who, in spite of eating a reasonably low-fat diet, still has the problem. I have to spend three months trying to reduce my LDL count through diet and exercise.

My real medical fear is diabetes. My mum developed this late in life, as did one of my Aunts, and it seemed to really screw up quite a lot of things in the system. At first, for both of them, it was manageable through diet, but gradually, both ended up on insulin and in my mother's case, in her later years, quite difficult to control even with this. It also turns out that diabetes makes the whole cholesterol thing a far greater problem. At the moment, even with all that slurry slurping along through my arteries, I fall into the 'low risk' category for a heart attack within the next ten years. Should I do something inexplicable such as take up smoking, I move up immediately, likewise if I develop diabetes.

In order to prepare myself for the upcoming events of the next ten years, I read a book called 'Menopause for Dummies'. There wasn't much about the menopause in it, it was all about the perimenopause - ie the years leading up to it. However, it did seem like an exercise in self risk-assessment. What, you have to ask yourself, would I prefer to develop, breast cancer or heart disease? Osteoporosis or risk of stroke? The choice can be yours.

At least you do have choice nowadays though. Professionals, instead of just deciding that you need this or don't need that, are far more likely to show you the options. I know a couple of people in the UK who are having this dialogue with their doctor.
I think the trick here is to sort out what is free choice and what is guidance. There seems little point in having people trained to be experts in their field unless they can give us informed guidance, and even less point if we don't listen to them.

Anyway, I'm off to eat vegetables, oh and since laughter is the best medicine - except for diabetes, etc., etc. - to watch this video clip that Sleepy sent me.