Rabbit,

Thanks again for your thoughtful response. You make all excellent points. My anxiety is its own beast and though I’m making efforts to try not to let it run with my thoughts, it’s not easy.

I’m not a stranger to allergies and maybe the reason I’ve been dismissing them as a possible cause is because I’m used to the “runny nose”, “stuffed up all the time” type allergies. Maybe allergies evolve... I know my dad has tough allergies and his have gotten worse through the years. He sometimes indicates he’s suffering when he seems fine to me though I know he takes lots of medications for them. And TMJ dysfunction is absolutely on the table... prior to all these worries, I’ve always suspected that that is an issue for me. I’ve never been able to open my mouth very wide and have always had pain when I’m chewing something tough for a long time, had to quit chewing gum and catch myself clenching my teeth many times a day.

And I know I was being unfair to the radiologist. I can’t assume that his lack of experience would influence his attention to detail. As someone who used to analyze barium swallow studies (and was pretty awful at it), I used to find things “wrong” all the time that weren’t because I was afraid of missing something.

I’m definitely going to take a list of questions to my ENT on Tuesday (this is a new one) and then on 7/15 I’ll have my follow up questions for the ENT who ordered my CT.

One thing the ENT said to me the other day that I forgot to mention was that sometimes reactive nodes can take 3 months to go down... has anyone ever heard of this? On other boards I read personal stories of folks with nodes that had stuck around for a year or close to it and when they finally had them looked at they were just reactive nodes that were permanently that way. I also found an account of someone saying his nodes had been swollen for a decade. And others who had really large ones that were removed, biopsied and determined to be reactive... and old. My point is, I’m not sure when these nodes appeared. I didn’t feel them until about 3 weeks ago but I was looking for abnormalities when I found them. A simple node check on myself doesn’t reveal them, I have to dig around for them. Who knows if I’ve had them since that time I had bad strep in 2016? I’ve lost about 60 lbs since the beginning of 2018 (intentionally) so undoubtedly the he structure of my face (in terms of fat and skin elasticity) has also changed. Okay, just wondering out loud here about things I don’t have answers to.

I’ll try to hold off for any more posts until after my appointment on Tuesday.