***Warning this post includes medical prognostication (as further testing is required at this point).***
So, about ten years ago my fiance started noticing some serious problems with her health. Symptoms were all over the map, psychological, neurological, rapid and unexplained weight loss, the inability to lose weight when on a strict diet with exercise, almost constant pains that seemed like menstrual cramping, forgetfulness, fatigue, depression, anxiety, insomnia, frequent confusion, dizziness, the whole nine yards. House would have loved this case. Chase would have just chalked it up to her being fat.
The doctors at the time started out with a diagnosis of depression and anxiety and prescribed her meds for both. A few years later (about four years ago) they added insomnia and ADD to the list, so they prescribed her meds for both of those (Adderall and Ambien). Now, depression and anxiety she has a much longer history of, so I'll throw those two out of the list; but the rest of the symptoms pretty much all cropped up suddenly ten years ago, and went largely untreated until four years ago. The doctors ten years ago suggested all of the nice little changes to sleeping habits that work for some people (change your environment, change your mattress, change your pillow, try herbal supplements, etc.), but didn't prescribe anything, and they all kind of wrote the rest off as her being fat.
However, the problem she had wasn't really ADD. I have ADD. I have trouble concentrating when I don't have a chemical stimulant in my system. I have to concentrate really, REALLY hard in order to focus my attention, and even then I can only focus on one thing at a time. When I have some form of stimulant I can multi-task with the best of them (well, the best of them that aren't on speed or crank).
Her problem wasn't that she couldn't concentrate. Her problem was that she felt like she was getting stupider instead of smarter. She had trouble completing sentences not because her attention wandered off, but because she couldn't remember the words she was looking for. For someone who spent years in the chess club and used to be able to predict moves 6 to 10 decisions out and suddenly went down to 1 or 2 moves, this was incredibly frustrating. Add to that the fact that she would frequently become incredibly confused about a task she was working on even though it was the hundredth iteration of that same task.
Now, because she's been on Adderall (and more recently the generic equivalent, for which the bottle actually reads simply, meth amphetamine) and Ambien, and because one and or both of those meds can have an affect on her liver, her doctor has been ordering regular blood tests for the 4 years that she's been taking them, and has been seeing possibly concerning information regarding liver function. Almost every time the test results came back, the nurses would ask her how much she had to drink and how often. She would reply (quite truthfully, we don't fuck around when it comes to health questions) that she has maybe one or two drinks every three or four months. and every time the nurses would seem shocked, but not really go into any further detail.
Recently, her doctor ordered an ultrasound of her liver, and results just came back. She has to go in on Thursday because they believe they have found fatty infiltration of the liver caused by Non-Alcoholic Steatohepatitis, or NASH. Hence the reason for the nurses' drinking questions, ninety percent of the time they see these infiltrations, they are a result of alcoholism.
So now, not only was the meth causing even more problems for her sleeping, and a giant pain in the ass to get on a monthly basis (MMA patients and others who have been/are on Adderall can probably understand this pain. The scrip has to be hand written, can't be faxed in, can't have any pre-authorized refills, etc.); it may not even have been any use at all, because she may not have ADD! Now, I'm not really mad at the doctors, I don't think I have a reason to be (I'm pretty exhausted so I may be angry with them later), I'm more mad at the situation. But for fuck's sake, couldn't you have ordered this test earlier in the four year course of her meth prescription?!