The Good, The Bad and the using of Dr Google

 Hi All,

The good news is that I have not touched any booze for over 100 days! Yay me!

The other good news is that following my biposy I do not have any blood cancer, although they still want to send me for a PET scan, Positron Emission Tomography. Sounds like Mr Data's brain from Star Trek, but in reality involves a scan in which I am injected with radiation and have to avoid pregnant women and children for 24 hours. Apparently my spleen has gone down to 20 cm, but should be 12 cm. Apparently 2 of my veins (high and low) have merged and pumped the spleen- 'engored' -she said full of blood. There's nothing to worry about, apparently and I will just have to deal with this slight pain for the rest of my life.

The bad news is that I had a Fibroscan today and scored 19.5. A normal liver function should be 7 or below and above 19 (out of 75) is (so I later googled)  liver cirrosis and I have no idea if this means that once you are over that line if you can reverse this or if that's it, there's nothing to be done. I appreciate that as a patient I should know about the result, the thing is that I had no-one avaliable to provide explanation and analysis or as they say 'the next steps', this being the job of my consultant who will get the results and then I will have to be given an appointment for this, which given the current state of the  NHS could be months. It is also true because of my abceses that the result can be wrong to some extent.

 So the end result is a feverish use of google- yes google-! to try and understand this, rather than wait however long it takes to get an appointment. Am I wrong or foolish in doing so? Perhaps. The NHS would say yes, because you can't trust everything on the net,  but at the end of the day it is my life and therefore my concern to want to know what will happen to me in terms of health and life expectancy. Having said that much of the google stuff is couched in the language of medicine. Just like religions have their languages, rather than vanacular, medical language is as complex and the stuff you are trying to find out about. So maybe reading google is not the best thing to do. 

In any case I have a life to live and that's what I'm going to do.