Many years ago, probably just before I started polluting the internet with mind ramblings and enough poorly written prose to poison any large language model harvest, I had a scan. I’ve had lots of scans to be fair, so it’s probably one I’ve talked about before in the 20 odd years I’ve written here. Anyway, I had this scan. It was an ultrasound scan — no not the 90’s alt band but the type where someone puts a load of cold KY jelly on you and rubs something hard up and down you. And I don’t mean a penis either.

Most people who have one of these scans usually do so because they are pregnant or they want to find out if they’re pregnant or they’re weird and have their own ultrasound equipment in their house, but I had mine because, at the time, I was suffering from a lot of discomfort in the tummy area which kind of radiated to the back often resulting a sleepless nights and pain. 

Thankfully, the scan revealed that I wasn’t pregnant. Instead it revealed that I have a bifurcated renal artery and that I should bear this in mind if ever I have kidney ailments in the future — or so said the hospital doctor who explained this to me by drawing a really neat diagram of a kidney (similar to the one above) on the back of my hospital notes (something I would look out for whenever they brought out my notes in later hospital visits).

Then a blood test revealed I had a high cholesterol level and another doctor decided that the pain was probably nothing to do with my kidneys and more likely to be a gall stone — as they were very vogue in the early noughties. However, following a very minor heart attack the pains later went and I attributed the lack of “gall stone” pain to the handy statins and refused surgery in 2006ish as I was about to move to Barnsley and I had other things to think about.

Many years passed — much like my waters — drugs changed, blood pressure rose and rarely fell, cholesterol levels stayed the same until about 2021 when, following a routine blood test,  I was urged urgently by a mysterious man on the telephone to get myself to the A&E at Northampton General and tell them to urgently give me a potassium drip because my potassium levels were low. 

Following a night in A&E being drip fed potassium solution while listening to all the Northampton weirdos, drunks and people in genuine pain having medical treatment for whatever accident or self imposed addition/subtraction they had befall them in the height of a Covid lock-down. I was told by a doctor to “eat more bananas” which rates up
there for top NHS medical advice along with the “Mr Gnomepants needs to lose weight” that the fat doctor told me when I attended the liver clinic in 2019 seeking treatment for my Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease. 

Though to be fair Dr Banana also said stop taking indapamide as it was likely I was allergic having survived — by the skin of my kidneys — a severe case of hypokalemia. Time passed again,  blood pressure lowering drugs were swapped and
added to — along with one which also prevents prostate enlargement, one that kills your testosterone and another that they use for people that can’t sleep. At this time my GP also decided to chuck pre-diabetes at me as well along with a steady course of Metformin under the guise of “It should also have positive effects on your blood pressure”.

Bollocks it did.

Now, normally this cocktail of medications would have the most stubborn of blood pressures heading lower than the deepest mine. No — not me. Instead mine stays stubbornly the same over the 9 months I’m on it. Until, of course, I contract a bad dose of gastroenteritis from goodness knows where. Then it decides to do its job.

Fateful Tuesday morning had me in work, post a bit of a runny bum and feeling a only a little ropey. Standing up momentarily to get something and wham I’m feeling dizzy. I sit back down and announce how ropey I feel — the next hour became a whirlwind of upchucky, more dizziness, worried co-workers, an ambulance and a trip to A&E because my blood pressure is right down there with the lowest thing you can imagine — it is in the hospital that I’m placed on a potassium rich drip and following which I’m told to go home, drink more, speak to my GP about my low kidney function of 60 and rest. Which I did.

For the next four days, Mrs Gnomepants V2.0 and I curled up in bed feeling really bad — missing tablets, meals and drinking lots of water. Me being me, I was determined to get better — determined to return to work that Monday – and decided that Saturday would be better spent in a room other than the bedroom, possibly eating soup and attempting to feel better — beginning with restarting my medication. 

Stupid boy!

For the record, if you take Ramipril and Metformin along with any diuretic blood pressure medications AND you have a bad dose of D&V — stop the ramipril and metformin until you feel better. Otherwise, your blood pressure could go lower than you can imagine and you too could be taken down the stairs of your Victorian workers cottage on a stretcher, chucked in to the back of an ambulance and blue lit all the way to the local hospital where in you too might discover you’re severely dehydrated, hypokalemic and you’re suffering from stage 3 kidney damage. Which for me meant an all expenses two night stay in Northampton’s finest gulag hitched up to more drips, an oxygen mask, a blood oxygen meter, a free chest X-ray and an ECG.

Wonderful!

Oh, I neglected to mention — I’d also received a letter, a week previous, inviting me to Northampton hospital’s NUCLEAR MEDICINE department for a special test involving RADIOACTIVE material on the then approaching Thursday. This required me to abstain from my medication for 48 hours prior to the test…but the A&E guys told me to cease all medication until I’d spoken to my GP — so yeah…that was going to be fun.

I’ll try to remember to tell you all about that in the next post