New Doctor

Last September I had a physical. A couple of weeks later I got the dreaded, "call the office for your lab results" note in my mail. This lets you know something's up which just serves to raise your blood pressure. I put off calling by a week. When I did call the nurse told me my glucohemoglobins (sp) and cholesterol were both "a little elevated". I asked her if I should get fasting bloodwork (FB) done, she responded with something on the order of, "I don't think that's necessary." I thought that in itself was odd since I'd always had to do fasting bloodwork when I got the card in the mail. I told her to check with the doctor and if the doctor didn't want anything done, she wouldn't need to call me back, and if the doctor did want me to come in to have someone call me. She said ok, we said goodbye and hung up.
Months go by and this April I contacted MGH to see why I hadn't heard from them about an appointment with the weight control center (first step to gastric bypass). They never recieved any calls from my primary's office. Hmmmm... So I call the office to see what's up. The secretary told me the girl who handles those calls was out of the office and would call me in about an hour. I checked on my last lab results and she said that although she had no medical background, that she has seen the doctor asking them to come in for FB when they have numbers like mine. Hmmmm...
The woman didn't call back that day at all. A couple of days later she did call and told me I should have come back in for FB and the doctor had wanted me seen every 3 - 6 months. Hmmm... Originally I made arrangements for an appointment with the doctor and was going to go in the following week for FB. I thought about it, called around and found a new doctor. Cancelled the appointment, went down to my former doctor to arrange for copying my records ($15, fill out a form and wait two weeks). I called the morning of my appointment with my new doctor and they weren't done (apparently it was more important for the girl who does the copying to input patient's records into the computer than provide me with my records on time).
I love my new doctor. So far we only did bloodwork, talked about bypass, and a few other things and she told me she'd like me to loose 1 lb by the next time I see her (6 wks). She also wants me to walk 15 minutes a day for a while, upping it by 5 minutes until I get to 30 comfortably. I didn't get a full physical, we're waiting on the bloodwork and my records. The full physical will be in 6wks when we will do the FB. If anything shows up on the bloodwork she'll let me know in the meantime.
Ok, time for brutal honesty, hold onto your hats here comes my weight: I weighed 317.5 lbs. (at home today I weighed 222 lbs). I'm only 5'2" tall (well...if I haven't shrunk since I was last measured). I'll be posting about this whole adventure as I go. I had my appointment yesterday and didn't walk. I'm waiting until after sunset today (it's in the 80's here and I HATE hot weather). Tomorrow I'll have to wait until after sunset again if it's hot (working at the cat shelter during the day). I'll get Fred to take new pics in my swimsuit and have him measure me too. That way if I don't loose weight, but loose inches I'll know and not get discouraged. I'm going to plot out my weight loss and inch loss on graph paper too...I hope seeing the progress will help me. Hey...guess what, I'm hungry. It's 1:19pm, so I should be hungry (after all I did eat around 7am). I'm going to go see what I can get into that isn't horrendously bad for me. I'll post what I eat later.