What's up, doc?

I've managed to avoid going to the doctor for the last couple years.

No, I'm not one of those people who thinks doctors are crazy or useless. I'm a big believer in modern medicine. I just haven't really been sick enough to justify seeing a doctor, and my previous doctor retired and I hated finding a new one.

But my knee has been hurting me for the last couple weeks, especially when I go to the gym. After waiting for it to "go away" and it not going away, I finally went to a doc recommended by my friend bsom.

So now I need to make up for all the time I've been doctor-less. I ended up with a stack of referrals the size of a research paper - bloodwork, mri and xray to figure out what's up with the knee, orthopedist to see what's up with the xrays and mri's of the knee, cardiologist (I had open heart surgery when I was 4, but I haven't had an EKG or the like in the last 5 years or so). She also wants me to get a sleep study because she thinks I might have sleep apnea, because my parents snore, I sleep through my alarm clock, and I'm addicted to caffine.

I did the MRI and EKG this morning - luckily, they are pretty much around the corner from my house, and I got an early appointment, so I barely had to miss any time at work. I need to make the orthopedist appointment soon, and get the bloodwork done when I can bring myself to fast for 8 hours. This is bad timing though, because we are in the middle of a giant migration project at work (from Novell Netware to Microsoft Active Directory), which involves my department touching, oh, about 1500 PC's. So I need to schedule my appointments around that.

It would be nice to be able to walk out of the gym without grimacing, though. And it's a lesson that if you procrastinate your doctor's visits, it will catch up to you.

And then after this, I should probably get a pair of glasses that don't fall off my face and get the giant gaping holes in my teeth patched.