Here's a patient point of view ( just me ) sometimes how I feel living with Peripheral Artery Disease and other comorbidities that go along with it, which doctors need to understand!
It's all about doctor visits here and there, this test and that test, wait here, wait there, this surgery that surgery!
On top of all of that, we are still working on trying to live a productive life between it all...many times without access to immediate answers and explanations for how we feel.
It feels like I am just a number, not human with real pain as it doesn't seem that there's any expediency on the part of our care team to find me some relief!
I sit here at home with results to leg artery tests and coronary tests, seeing the tech write-up showing blockages which may explain my misery.
But I'm told that maybe the doctor will have time to review my results sometime the next week.
So I have to sit at home and suffer, with increasing anxiety and stress as to whether I have to live in this way forever, and just how long I even have on this earth.
Sometimes I feel like one of them broken toys on the island of misfits toys, waiting on someone to rescue me or come wave a magic ferry wand and heal me!
In the meantime I still have to keep living the life that is front of me today with the best smile I can produce that day, paying bills, family, relationships, work, paying bills, groceries, just walking some days, living in different levels of pain daily, losing this fight with each step some days.
Some days I can’t even walk to kitchen, some days can’t or don’t want to get out of bed or off couch.
In the meantime I've got to focus on becoming more active in being my own and best advocate for my self with no instruction book to follow sometimes!
That's what it's like living with Peripheral Artery Disease.
Just thinking here is all out loud !!!
~PAD Warrior Chief Douglas