I went to my doctors for 8 months, I told him I had cancer and he rolled his eyes. I gave him all the symptoms and he disregarded me. He asked a lot of questions but I could answer them all. I’d lost loads of weight always tired, pain in flank so he tried B12 and I said ‘if you checked my records you’d see I’m already on it’. Thyroid ‘if you check my records you’ll see I already take thhroxine’ and on it went. He looked at previous prescriptions and approx 10 years ago I was given an antacid so I had heartburn.
I went back and forth for 8 months and he told me that I should take a lower dosage of the antacid, take it twice daily and come back in 6 months. I told him it wasn’t heartburn as I know what heartburn feels like and I reminded him that I’d been 6 times and after 3 they are supposed to do a referral.
He grudgingly did the referral and they have the opportunity of having it done in 2 weeks if they think it is cancer but after a week I rang up and he’d put me in the ladt category, basically no rush. I burst into tears, only time I cried, and she got me a cancellation on the Friday. I went in and obviously realised she found something. I eventually got a copy of my CT and the tumour had encapsulated my kidney so I lost that, part of my stomach, core muscles etc. I’m lucky, 10 years on and clear but I got this blown upto poster size, wrote in red marker “Does this look like heartburn to you?’ and grit filled it to his door (a horrendously strong adhesive they use a lot in the building trade).
The tumour was larger than a honey dew melon!
When I was young, underemployed and uninsured, I suffered a familiar burning during urination. Taking my temperature revealed a 99° fever. I peed into a clear juice glass and held my sample up to the light. Floaters. Yep.
The free clinic was always a pain in the ass: a limited number of appointments was available on a first-come-first-serve basis: if you were lucky enough to get past the busy signal before the day’s allotment was fully booked, you took what you were offered. 3pm? I’m there!
After waiting forever and a day, I was finally admitted to an exam room. The doctor working for free as a clinic volunteer cheerfully asked what brings me in today?
”I have a bladder infection and I need a ten-day course of generic penicillin.”
The doctor frowned. “What makes you say that, Ms Susan?”
”I have a low-grade fever, mild cramping and burning on urination, and there’s pus in my urine.”
The doctor seemed annoyed. “Do you mind if I get a lab test?” He held out a sample collection cup and I returned to the waiting room.
Thirty minutes later, I was admitted to the doctor’s office, where he was already sitting at his desk with his prescription pad. He glanced up at me, then
“Penicillin, wasn’t it, Dr. Susan?”
My mother in law was a very active woman, in her mid 80’s. Born in 1928. She’d get in her little truck with her Doberman and say we’d see her when we saw the whites of her eyes. She might be gone a month, a week, 2 months, or more. She’d check in to make sure things were going okay. But she might drive to Alaska, or to Maine, or go over into Canada. We had no idea because she was completely independent and able to manage taking care of herself. Her nature was to get up, get dressed in her designer blouse, a nice skirt, thigh high stockings, and Clarke shoes. Every day, even if she planned on staying home all day. Her hair done weekly on brush rollers.
Completely happy in her life and her health was great.
One day she started feeling poorly. She sent to her PCP and told her she wasn’t feeling like herself. That she was having a hard time getting out of bed, no energy, she didn’t feel like going anywhere or doing anything, normal things that she would be doing every day.
The PCP patted her on the hand and told her she was just getting old and these things were normal. My mother in law kept going to see her, telling her the same thing and it was getting worse.
My father in law saw his cardiologist, he travels once a month to our town, to recommend a good internal physician in the OKC area. That my mother in law wasn’t being taken seriously.
This was the Friday before Christmas.
The cardiologist told my FIL that he’d been an internal physician before he decided to go into cardio medicine. To call his OKC office and tell them HE said to work my MIL in on Monday for a workup.
She went to OKC that Monday and within 10 minutes of going in the room to examine her he had an ultrasound done on her and found small cell cancer on her liver. It had already started spreading.
She started chemo the next week or two, and continued it. My FIL went to Wild Acres for a rock and gem event, came home with a serious stomach bug, he went to the hospital by ambulance and was in there almost a week. When he came home, hubby took care of him and I took care of MIL.
She got the stomach virus and went to the hospital by ambulance and was in there about 2 weeks. When she came home she was just too far gone to do anything else.
She passed July 5. She had been going to her PCP since late summer the year before, telling her that she wasn’t feeling right.
I believe that she would have had a chance to beat this IF the PCP had listened to her at all. At all.
But no, she patted my MIL on the hand and told her she was just getting old.
We noticed at about two years old our youngest daughter would get short of breath, her tummy was as tight as a drum and she couldn’t get up from lying down without rolling onto her front and bringing her knees in. Our GP insisted nothing was wrong.
She got more short of breath and we’d find she had taken herself off to bed so we took her back to the GP. He wasn’t in that day and we saw a locum who did a thorough examination and agreed with us something wasn’t right and sent us to the hospital.
Like our regular GP they treated us with disdain and as though we did not know our own child or were first time parents. They reluctantly agreed to an X-ray just to put our minds at rest. The change in their demeanour after seeing the X-ray did not put our minds at rest, it turned to horror.
They found a huge growth in her abdomen which they thought was attached to her ovaries. They called in the consultant gynaecologist who clearly did not see her as little girl but rather a fascinating object he wanted to chop up as a curiosity.
The nursing staff were whispering to us to get a second opinion, fortunately one of the gynaecologist’s own junior doctors was also appalled at his behaviour and went to see the head of paediatrics who overruled the gynaecologist and sent my daughter to Sydenham children’s hospital(closed now I think) who were brilliant.
They decided to remove it and found it was attached to bowel and not her ovaries, she had to lose a few inches of her bowel. It was a lymphatic cyst, two litres in mass and four pounds in weight, in a two year olds body.
A biopsy confirmed it was benign. It’s right to trust most doctors opinions, but if in doubt you have a right to second opinion.
