symptoms

France, night

The most frequent question I heard since friday is: are you pregnant?

I am not pregnant and I didn't gain weight enough to have something like the belly of a pregnant woman. It just seems that whatever person or doctor I talk to, as soon as I say that I have a nausea as soon as I put something in my mouth, the first thing they got to think is that I am pregnant.
Compared to a possible pregnancy, the possibility of having an arsenic intoxication is not interesting enough, so since friday I am begging the doctors I saw to prescribe me the test to confirm or not the intoxication. After the pregnancy, the question I got at the toxicology lab here has been: - did you by any chance eat or drink arsenic?
- No, I didn't.
- Ok, so no reason to get a test.

Except the fact that I have been exposed for a month to arsenic, for at least 5 hours a day. The fact that I developed some symptoms that could be a lot of things, including arsenic poisoning and the fact that I still don't feel well.

I have a bad relationship with physicians. The thing is, I am not going to take medications if I don't need them. If I have something that goes on since quite some time and it is not clear what I have, before bombarding me with random general medicaments, I still believe that it would be better to just run some test and see what I may or may not have. In these days I got prescribed any kind of medicament for stomach problem (which didn't improve anything anyway), some homeopathic stuff to "clean" my organism (which I didn't take it because I don't believe that anything homeopathic is anything different than a placebo), sulfur (which seems to help in case of arsenic intoxication), and nothing more just because I was firmly opposed to get anything else.

At the end, this morning I got the blood test and I brought it to the toxicology lab (at the lab they don't take any sample...you have to get the blood or urine sample somewhere else and then bring those to them)...A normal question for me was to ask when they think the results will be ready. The answer has been: - we don't know.
- you don't know?!? are we talking about a few days or a week?
- it may be longer than a week, this friday is holidays, then we have to mail the results to you and you know, next friday is holidays too.
I should have taken a picture of my face, as I stared at him with my mouth wide open before to ask him: - so, it could be that I don't get any result before 10-15 days, right? can I call or come here to get the results without having to wait to get them in my mail box?
Him: - We will mail them to you. I am not the person in charge of this, he is on a meeting. This is his phone number. Try to call him later.
Me: - How later?
Him: -30 minutes, 1 hour.

I called multiple times during the entire day. None answered. I called the person with whom I spoke this morning
Him: - ah yeah, he is still in a meeting. Call him between 5.30-7.00 pm today.
I did. None answered of course. Not only I don't know when to expect the results, but I was not even able to know how sensitive are the tests that they run.

This is the problem. I don't have anything evidently extremely urgent. I am not pregnant. So, I am a totally non-interesting medical case. Thus, none pays any attention to me. I called my general doctor back this evening. She was not there. I left a message. Basically, the general strategy of whatever physicien, wherever you are (except in Holland I have to say), it is to fill you with any kind of possible multifunction medicaments to just hope that the symptoms will disappear, as most of the time they have no clue of what it is going on.......
Isn't this nice?

PS. I am pretty sure I don't have a swine flu. I don't have any flu-like symptoms.