Hospital Tales and Musings on Medical Mysteries: An Update from David Watts

Right. Another episode. What's involved? I thought I'd just give you a quick update on life, the universe and everything. So if you remember, we'd spoken and I think in the last one, I'd given you my shopping list of things that could potentially be wrong. And they were still waiting on a diagnosis on whether I have this polymyositis as well. So part of the journey to the diagnosis involved me having to go into a hospital yesterday for a muscle biopsy. Now, apparently this was quite a thing. So there's about four centimeter incision on my thigh where they had to go in and get down apparently to the right depth where the right muscle was. And then they had to cut out a piece of that particular muscle or muscle group. And it had to be one centimeter by three centimeters. So centimeter wide, three centimeters long, they had to send it then they had to cut a thing and sorry, they excised that. And then they had to cut it into three bits and hand it off to the people from the pathologists that were waiting in the operating room. And then it had to get rushed off to go and do whatever it is and whatever wizardry they perform, which should, and I say should theoretically, get me a diagnosis on that.

And this is one of those things where you kind of go, I kind of hope they do get a diagnosis, at least I know. But then on the other hand, you're going, I really don't want it to be this poly myositis because, well, it's just not fun. And adding another autoimmune to my growing collection is really not something that I want to look forward to. But the amazing things is and I always like to observe and watch. And, you know, when you go into hospital, you often see people at their worst and we take the nursing staff and the doctors and everything for granted. I went to a different hospital yesterday, one which the one I normally go to one specific hospital for most of the stuff and the polygame treatments, et cetera, et cetera. This one, however, was different. I believe it was because he was an orthopedic surgeon and one of the very few people that could perform this particular type of muscle biopsy. So off I went, booked in and they said to me, you know, it's not like a long operation. You might be in the theater for about an hour or so. And then when you come back and you're out and you've recovered and you can, you know, kind of remember your own name, you can go home. So I was there at 6 and I think I went into the theater at around 8, but for me, while I'm now lying on the table, all the bright lights, they're now busy giving me the, the, the anesthetic, et cetera, et cetera.

I look around the operating theater and here I see these two poor ladies from the pathologist waiting in anticipation to take my sacrifice of living flesh and go and take it down to the labs and that the look on their faces, they were, they were like horrified. Obviously they'd never done this before and they'd never been in a theater when a surgery was being performed and, and then had to sort of take the, the, the sample as such and rush it into a lab. And as I'm going under, I remember looking at these two poor women and I thought, well, you know, this is, there's a first for everything and whatever you guys do, please don't trip and fall because I'm not doing this again. So anyway, off they went, I went to sleep, woke up and sort of, as soon as I was able to, I was like, right, I'm, I'm out of here and got to learn it to come and pick me up. And we came home. Initially it wasn't too bad. I thought, okay, I can, I can deal with this because they sort of pumped the area around the cut full of local anesthetic as well. And I was wondering why they'd given me all these painkillers and anti-inflammatories, et cetera, et cetera, right up until I woke up this morning and I saw that my left thigh looked the way it used to look and not like a little stick. And that was mainly due to the swelling. So now I've got one sort of normal because it's all swollen looking thigh and one little stick thigh. And I just thought I'd report in and let you know. So now we wait, now we wait and we see what those results are. And I think, I don't know if I've, I don't know if I mentioned, I mean, we know this, that my brain is like porridge at the best of times, but I think I mentioned a friend of mine who let me know, or maybe that was on Facebook, I think it was, that she'd gone to the doctor and out of the blue, they detected breast cancer and she's going to have to have a double mastectomy. And she said to me, she said, you know, the worst part for her is the waiting and the not knowing. And I think that's true. It's that waiting and that not knowing and that anxiety all the time. And of course, all of the mental issues. So if you haven't checked out what I'm going to be doing on Facebook, just kind of look at what's W-A-T-T-S involved or David Watts. I think David Watts is probably the better one. And there's been quite a, quite a lot of interaction on Facebook. And I love that.

And I encourage that because I think in today's world, and you might be one of those people,

there's just so many of us that are going through so much stuff and it doesn't have to be physical like me, mental, emotional, spiritual, and we don't talk. We don't discuss what's going on with us or how we feel. And we sit in our little corners and we all feel totally alone and we feel lost and abandoned. And it's one of the things that I want to do. I want people, whoever they are, that may be experiencing pain of any form, as I said, mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, to be able to talk about it and to have this kind of environment where I'm saying, okay, look, here I am, what's and all, let's have a chat. And I'd love people to have a chat. And a couple of people have already said to me, yeah, we'd love to, we'd love to be on the show with you. So we're going to set that up and find out a bit more about them because, you know, you listening to me going, oh, woe is me for 250 episodes, may get a little bit much. I also want to bring in what else we do, because at the moment, for me, it's a lot about sort of traditional Western medicine. So it's polygum. And if this polymyotosis thing is, is, you know, if they diagnose it as that, apparently the treatment for that is some form of a mild chemo. So yay me. But what are other people doing? What happens to people don't have a medical aid or a hospital plan facility and an organization that will pay for this. You know, every time we have to ask for something new, my heart sinks, because I never know what, you know, are they going to say yes, they know what happens. I know we couldn't afford this if we had to pay for it ourselves, there would just be no way. And we already are in terms of our business, not being as successful as I'd like, and as we would like, purely because I'm not able to contribute as much.

So I want to talk to these people and I want to find out how it affects them and what we can do, what are the other things that you can do? You know, there's, there's, I've heard a lot of stuff about oxygen therapy, for example. I've heard a lot of talk about vitamins and what vitamins you should use or herbs or this or that on the next thing. I've heard a lot about mindsets. I've heard a lot about meditation from from my side at this stage. Meditation is certainly one thing I do. I use it for two things. Number one, to try and switch my brain off at night so I can go to sleep without too much pain. And, you know, the other one is just to kind of clear my mind and just try and get into a better mindset because it can go up and down. I mean, I can go from feeling like, all right, today I've got you. You, I have got today to feeling like I want to lie on my bed in the fetal position and listen to depressing music with the blinds closed and just feel sorry for myself. So those are the kind of things we're going to be talking about. As I said at the beginning of the video, just want to give you a bit of an update as to what was happening with me and this whole muscle biopsy. And then also the bit I forgot to mention, our office is downstairs.

So if you if you have a look and you can no doubt see in the pictures behind me, you can see the animals are wandering around and there's all sorts of things. Many, many lots of fish tanks. We might talk about that at some stage, but it's downstairs being your operative thing. I got up this morning and decided I need to do this. I've got another online meeting a little bit later on this morning and sort of hobbled my way out here and then realized hole in the leg, fresh surgery, walking downstairs, not so much fun. Anyway, the tractors arriving outside, which is probably a sign that I should sign off. So to each and every one of you, listen, thank you. If you like what you hear, you know, there's that whole like and subscribe thing. Please do that. It'll certainly help me and hundreds of thousands of other people. Take care. Look after yourselves. Be kind. We'll chat soon.