Before giving me my MS drug last week, the nurse drew blood for tests. The automated test result that I received within the hour included a flag for a low anion gap, whatever that meant. Googling told me that it's related to blood pH, but nothing about why they did that test or what it meant in my case.

I emailed the doctor this morning, and got a quick reply, saying I should ignore it, because that test is only relevant to sick hospitalized patients. I thanked him, and am not going to pursue the question of why that test was even done, or why I've been given it a few times before. (MyChart offered a graph of past test results.)
I got a call from my neurologist's office ten days ago, reminding me to have blood drawn for tests before my next Ocrevus infusion (which is scheduled for April 20th). I had in fact forgotten all about it, and asked them to send me a reminder note in MyChart.

I went over to Mt. Auburn this afternoon, checked in, and walked down to the walk-in clinic, which is also where they collect blood samples. When I handed the phlebotomist my sheet of stickers, he looked at the record, and asked if I wanted this done, because the order was from last year. I thought about it, briefly, and then asked him what the tests were. One of them was hepatitis B, so I told him to go ahead: they won't do the Ocrevus infusion without a negative hepatitis test within the previous year.

It did occur to me that I have friends who would almost certainly have said "never mind" or "can we call the doctor's office to check?" rather than asking what the tests were after the answer to "when were they ordered?" turned out to be September. Me, I'd rather give them some unnecessary samples than make an extra round trip from Brighton. (All my medical stuff is on the other side of the Charles River, in Cambridge, Somerville, Arlington or Watertown.)

I treated myself to a hot fudge sundae on my way home, because it was a pleasant sunny afternoon and nobody was sitting at the table outside Lizzy's.

[I already have the negative hepatitis B test results, released automatically through MyChart.]
I just got automatic notifications of blood test results. Everything in the hepatic function panel is normal. There's one number slightly outside the reference range in the complete blood count.

In addition to the hepatic function panel and complete blood count tests that I knew my neurologist was ordering, he had them run a covid antibody test. The automated report on that is so full of disclaimers that I am wondering why he bothered ordering it:

The explanation notes explicitly that the clinical significance of either a positive or negative test in people who have received a covid vaccine is unknown.

I told Dr. AbdelRazek that I didn't want to pay for unnecessary tests, and after a little discussion decided that it did make sense to have the CBC now rather than waiting four months. But this covid antibody test feels like a perfect example of an unnecessary test: they don't know what a positive result would mean, they don't know what a negative result means, and I have no relevant symptoms. (The result was negative.)
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