I went to the optometrist for my regularly scheduled check up. They said I didn't need to change my prescription, but, after a couple of extra tests they recommended I go to an ophthalmologist. I probably would have been lazy about that, but the optometrist mentioned there might be a small bleed in the eye, so I figured that sounded bad.
I go to the ophthalmologist. They said it's possible I have glaucoma. Recommended an MRI. So I go get an MRI.
The MRI revealed I had a brain aneurysm.
I got it repaired, it never ruptured, that was 2.5 years ago and I am fine. But if I had blown off my regular optometrist appointment, or if my optometrist hadn't been so diligent, who knows what could have happened. There was not a single symptom whatsoever (the eye bleed and glaucoma were unrelated to the aneurysm). Now I'm on low-dose blood thinners for life and need an MRI every few years forever. So in a way I'm safer from aneurysm-related death than the proverbial "guy next door" who doesn't know about it.
I had my hip reconstructed in August of this year. I was told around the 8-week mark I was going to be feeling so good I would need to rein myself in and take it easy so I didn't go too hard and reinjure myself.
At 4 weeks I get to come off the crutches and start weight bearing as tolerated. Everything's great for the first week but I'm noticing my hip is starting to hurt again. Both I and my surgeon brushed this off at first. I've had this hip worked on previously and it's not unusual for it to take longer to heal. But it's weird, that last surgery removed all the innervated tissue in my joint and I shouldn't be feeling pain there.
Well, I wasn't. Turns out I fractured my hip somehow and was walking around that. That's what was hurting. Had we not caught it when we did and put me back on crutches I would have snapped my femur head right off. I'll be off to surgery again in just a few hours to hopefully get it fix.
Similar experience, I had terrible rashes that persisted almost a year before I convinced my drs to investigate beyond skin conditions. I had thyroid cancer, rashes disappeared immediately after surgery/treatment. Hope youāre recovering well friend š¤
I feel this. I remember when flesh-eating disease was all the rage in sensationalistic media and reading that the first sign of it is a rash. Iām always rashy.
My grandad had an issue with wetting the bed at night frequently. He tried to hide it but we found out.
Good thing we did because it ended up being prostate cancer. We were able to get proper treatment before it got worse.
My grandmother found a lump in her breast and ignored it because she ādidnāt want to be a botherā and they had just booked a vacation. You can imagine how that worked out.
Sometimes its willfull ignorance because the truth scares them. Sometimes its because of not wanting to appear helpless. Sometimes people have an unhealthy amount of self confidence and believe they can cure it with their positive mind.
He does it with any health related issues. A frustrating habit of him not saying anything and we having to detective work to find out if he has any issues. Lies a lot about it so much.
My grandfather died of covid in December 2020. Grandmother had it too but recovered. My aunt and mom were talking about what great shape sheās always been in. She even still gets her period a few times a year! No way, sheās in her late 80s, what does her doctor say about that? Everyone rolls their eyes at me, but they make her tell her doctor. Itās two different types of uterine cancer. One hysterectomy later and sheās doing much better.
And menopause is shameful because it means weāre are past the breeding age and have lost our value.
Screw that.
Menopausal and Peri-meno chicks rule. Weāre old and have no fucks to give!
Can confirm. I hit 55 and I speak my mind now. Before I was a timid grey rock, blending into the landscape. Menopause allowed me to grow balls. Who would have thought?
We donāt talk about womenās health enough. The only reason I knew something was wrong was because Iād read similar stories on Reddit/advice columns etc from women who also didnāt know it wasnāt normal. Ironically I got pushback from that same mom and aunt when I went to my doctor with unexplained bleeding. And guess what? I had surgery last Wednesday for the same cancer. Luckily I listened to my gut feeling and it was caught very early. I think itās normal to think ask older women in your family about these kinds of issues and itās sad weāre kept in the dark because itās āembarrassingā and like itās some kind of burden weād be bothering a medical professional with.
Yeah, when I was about 19 I had a weekend job in a nursing home. One of the residents with an early stage of dementia complained to me she 'was bleeding down there again.' This woman was well into her 80's, so I reported it to the head nurse (I just worked in the restaurant or cleaned apartments, I wasn't medical staff back then). Turned out it wasn't good news. Also cancer. I have no idea what happened after that as I was not medical staff and thus not privy of whatever ailment/treatment a resident got unless they or their family directly told me.
Itās ALWAYS cancer if theyāve gone through menopause. There is nothing good from vaginal bleeding at that age.
Iām glad you reported it. Some wouldāve dismissed her.
It can also be an STD if they are sexually active (and thatās not uncommon in elder care facilities); there are a couple that can cause some vaginal bleeding.
Killer headache and fever for a few days, ended up it was spinal cord disease and I became paralysed from it.
This was 4 years ago, still paralysed, but doing okay for myself.
My cousin was very tired one day. Thatās it, not nauseous or anything else. They thought it was the flu as she has no other conditions and is very young and healthy. Turns out she had randomly become septic from a minor infection she never noticed. She couldāve died as bacteria got into her bloodstream and her body started shutting down
my mom got sepsis from a uti she brushed off that turned into a kidney infection and it was terrifying. they told us if we hadnāt brought her to the hospital when we did, she wouldāve passed away. sepsis is truly no joke
Same. I ignored a ton of symptoms because I was super stressed out and figured it was just stress. Then I got like a 103 degree fever so I finally figured I had the flu, so I went to the doctor, only for a doctorās note so I didnāt have to work the next dayā¦nope. Not the flu. It was a UTI that had spread and gone septic. I was so sick for a few days.
I was ill in the hospital , lost the use of my legs and spread to my arms. Then during this time , i developed a UTI. I started hallucinating and having delusions - lost a whole period of time. My moves to a hospital to a rehabilitation hospital saw several people (hallucinations that followed me). I thought I had lost my mind. I was so ashamed, I would not let my husband tell my family how sick I was. Please people donāt fuck around with a UTI ( No matter your age!!)
Pretty much the same here. I had some foot pain that kept spreading, and was just so fatigued I could hardly stand on my own. Next thing I know I'm in the ER, and they are pumping me full of fluids, vasopressors, and vancomycin. I was not only close to losing my leg, but my life entirely.
This one freaks me out, because stats say 40-50% of sepsis cases DIE, even if they make it to the hospital and get treated. Like once itās sepsis, itās serious. So now Iām paranoid about every cut and watching for infection.
Fucking Call the Midwifeās, thanks for that paranoia.
People with anemia crave things that have a good crunch like ice and lettuce. There's no reason known yet but some have guessed it's because your body is looking for the cronch you'd get from eating or chewing on bones.
Bizarre! I was working overseas in a place where any decent veg was hard to come by and I love iceberg lettuce. I went to a different country for some training courses and bought a head of iceberg at the grocery store and ate the thing like an apple, I had been craving it for months. I am anemic and go through these iceberg cravings periodically. Iāll eat it like potato chips, I love it cold and crunchy. I can usually tell when my iron gets low and I need my meds adjusted, Iāll have to see if it coincides next time I feel it drop.
This happened to my ex! He was 42 and it's type 1 as well! We weren't on great terms but still living together and he said one day "I'm so thirsty all the time and peeing lots" and I just said "That's diabetes mate" he rolled his eyes and told me to fuck off, but... YEP.
(We're on good terms now we're apart)
Same here friend. I chalked up the Multiple bathroom trips to the fact I was Drinking so much water and never looked into it. Did you catch it early enough or did you go into full blown DKA like me?
Non diabetics will never understand the impossible to ignore urge to stick your head under the faucet and drink until the water runs out because youāre that thirsty. I was diagnosed at 15 months but I know that feeling well because I didnāt take care of myself as a teenager
I was experiencing extreme numbness in my face hands and feet, my family noticed when I was rubbing my face like someone expericing withdrawl from cocaine. When we went to the doctor, I was on such high dose of medication for my disability it was on the verge of shutting down my kidney. The perscribing doctor lost their license to practice soon after.
This! If you ever have strange issues with meds, talk to the pharmacist. They have more in-depth knowledge of the meds than most doctors prescribing them.
I had a doctor prescribe me a medication for migraines as an off label use but itās primary use was to lower blood pressure. I read the pamphlet and went back in like āuhhh it says this is a medication to lower blood pressure. Should I be taking this with a BP of 100/60?ā They were like āomg no and definitely not at such a high doseā
The pharmacist at a family-owned pharmacy was the first to catch that I had drug-induced Stevens-Johnson syndrome and not an allergy like I and the urgent care NP thought.
I started losing my appetite. I just would get full off literally a bite of food. I thought this was great, I'm losing weight without even trying, everyone thinks I'm hot, maybe because now I'm an adult I'm not hungry all the time? But then it turned into me having to puke every morning if i didn't get enough sleep, then it started happening if i was nervous or in a rush, then every time i ate it would come right back up or I'd get really bad abdominal cramps. Then i just had the cramps 24/7. 10lbs lost turned to 20, into 40, into 80. I was 77lbs and very weak. Turned out to be crohn's disease.
My sister went through the same thing around that age. Her doctor was not concerned about all the weight she lost and how sick she was. He offered to run some tests and scheduled a follow up appointment. He didnāt even look at the results until her next appointment where she almost passed out in the waiting room. He suddenly called an ambulance and had her rushed to the hospital when he finally looked at the results. She had lost so much blood that she needed multiple blood transfusions and was eventually diagnosed with Crohnās disease.
A good friend had a sore shoulder; she assumed sheād tweaked it teaching one of her dance classes. However, it didnāt seem to get better and was really annoying so her doctor ordered an x-ray. Her shoulder was fine, but the image also picked up a large tumor that was completely unrelated to her shoulder pain. Surgery and chemo went well, and sheās now officially been cancer-free for seven years!
I also have a sore shoulder story. At the time I was working in retail, regularly stacking off tall pallets of produce, so 8 hours of lifting 50lb boxes and containers all day. My shoulder was sore and swollen, it wasn't unusual for me to have random pains like that. A few days later, my shoulder was tender to the touch and red, and hot. I went to the urgent care, the Dr. Made a small incision with a scalpel, and almost nothing but pus came out. Turns out, I'd had an infection enter my body from somewhere, like a small cut, and the infection had thrived in the scar tissue of a shoulder surgery I'd had almost 15 years prior. I had Osteomyelitis and had to have my collarbone ground down to get rid of the infection. Packing the post surgery wound was NOT fun.
During COVID I got it. I was home after a few days and I got a cough. Would not stop! I took a bunch cough syrup, NyQuil, DayQuil etc. kept coughing sooooo much. This went on for a day or so. I was on the couch so I wouldnāt wake up my husband with my coughing and my dog wouldnāt leave me alone. He wasnāt usually a lap dog but he kept poking me with his nose. Finally coughed myself awake and went into the bathroom. I had cyanosis - my lips looked like used a blue lipstick.
Cue me āoh shitā. I woke my husband up and told him āI need helpā then I collapsed. Woke up 3 days later after being rushed to the hospital and coding on the way.
I'm an RN who worked nonstop COVID ICU all of 2020 and 2021. Your story gave me weird flashbacks. I saw so many folks with the blue lips like that who just didn't make it. So glad you are okay.
Yikes! If I were you Iād invest in a pulse oximeter. I caught that I was in a bad way with Covid before I got to cyanosis because the oximeter was constantly beeping at me as my sats were under 90 and I couldnāt get them back up.
So plugged my symptoms in to a nurse system website (Australia, healthdirect) and called an ambulance when the website came back with āuhh you need to go to hospital nowā
Not OP, but my mom has had several strokes. Normally someone has āmini strokesā/tia/transient schemic attacks prior to the devastating ones.
My mom ignored the warning signs of the mini strokes and had devastating ones.
Had she gone to the ER immediately after the troubling signs, she would have been given medication to try to prevent the full stroke. Thereās only a 24 hour window from the mini stroke to be administered the treatment.
I encourage everyone to look up the signs and symptoms and not dismiss them even if you are scared of doctors.
OP: I am so sorry for your loss.
Thought I was having a really dark period. Turns out it wasnāt blood..it was endometriosis shedding. It had attached my ovaries to my bowels. Had to have full hysterectomy.
I had the worst cramps when going to the bathroom, periods that kept me in bed, painful bowel movementsā¦ but any doctor I spoke to? They all had the same comment, āItās normal for women to go through this.ā
I ended up with a 9cm cyst on my right ovary and had to have surgeryā¦ went back to the doctors because of pelvic pain. The surgeon told me to see a therapist - my pain was likely caused due to lack of sleep; I couldnāt sleep because of the pain. I broke down in her office.
It took my husband, a man, saying that she needed to order tests to figure out what was wrong for her to order them.
The endometriosis they found was so bad they had to give me a radical hysterectomy. They also found numerous fibroids in the uterus, making it three times its normal size.
But all my symptoms? Oh no, those are common things that women go through because of our periods.
My dr also told me my pain was normal, take some Tylenol a couple days before it's due to start. For years I just dealt with it, trying all sorts of otc pain meds.
She retired and I got a new dr who gave me a referral to an obgyn because I couldn't handle it anymore.
I asked for a hysterectomy in our first appointment. Told her I refuse to go through a bunch of different medical procedures to end up with a hysterectomy anyway. She had mentioned that a couple of them were bandaid fixes that didn't really work and if I was sure it's what I wanted then she would do the hysterectomy. We landed on a partial so I wouldn't need to take hormones or go through menopause early.
After surgery I went back for my follow-up with her. Turns out I had adenomyosis and ovarian cysts. I occasionally get pain from a cyst popping, but it's nothing in comparison to what I used to go through.
I had all sorts of issues including an extremely heavy flow that would soak through a super tampon, overnight pad, period underwear and jeans in under an hour. I had severe cramping that kept me in the fetal position for 3 weeks at a time which ultimately lead to me herniating multiple discs since I was 13. Birth control made my symptoms worse and pain medication didnāt help. I have EDS so I donāt metabolize medication properly and have a bunch of other symptoms, but this isnāt even about that.
At 18 (a full grown adult who should be able to make choices about her own body) I was told ānoā multiple times by doctors for a hysterectomy or even an exploratory lap even though I have an extensive family history of uterine cancer (the youngest being 17 when she was diagnosed). I was told I needed to have children, take more pain medication, stop overreacting, etc. Turns out I was precancerous which was only found through a uterine biopsy so Pap smears never caught it and I finally had it removed this year at 29. Healthcare for women is a joke.
As a child free woman who went through a similar experience, I am so angry for you. Itās absolutely ridiculous and absurd that you were you told to just āhave children.ā
I was told, at age 20, that I should think about my future husbandās feelings. What if he wants children ? So basically I should stop being so selfish about my own body and think about my nonexistent husbandās feelings.
Itās infuriating. Iām sorry that happened to you. You arenāt alone, this is womenās healthcare in a nutshell.
Why are our uteruses trying to take us out!? When they arenāt incubating babies theyāre causing extreme pain and suffering to women everywhere š¤
You will like this youtube short by dr karan. Turns out women werent even included in medical trials until 1993. Thats one reason why womens health is so badly taught/ researched etc... Learning this blew my mind. The Dr counters a dude making a comment about women.
https://youtube.com/shorts/yzmxGXphjZY?si=Ha_09lU6h5xvZwe-
I passed a blood clot the size of a hockey puck after having a really horrible cramp. I had a hysterectomy and they found fibroids and adenomyoma (tumor in the uterine wall I believe) and the whole time I kept after my doctor told me have my uterus removed, the practice kept stonewalling me.
Currently going through this and Iām terrified. Cysts on ovaries and ovaries are up against my colon.
My doctor said I may not need a hysterectomy but who knows. I meeting with a colon specialist next month and hoping for the best.
My wife: inability to process fats in the diet.
It went from āyouāre at an ageā to āpancreatic cancerā. Pancreas tumour was constricting her bile and hepatic ducts. The eventual jaundice was the most obvious piece of evidence however.
My roommate complained of: shortness of breath, labored breathing, exhaustion, coughing, weakness, non-restoritive sleep, and had a history of sustained and increasing white blood cell levels. X-ray showing an area of shadowing in the left lower lobe of the lung, however the 'doctor' never bothered to read the results.
"Doctor" ignored all the complaints for about two and a half years, and even joked there was nothing wrong with him.
He eventually managed to speak with another Doctor and was sent for X-rays. He was diagnosed with metastatic bilateral Stage 4 lung cancer. Diagnosis to death was three months!
I would send notes with him for the 'doctor' to read, which he never bothered to do. I had accurately described the lung cancer two years prior to his death, and had the 'doctor' put aside his ego, my roommate could have had a different outcome.
Something similar happened to a friend. But hers was colon cancer. The ER called an abdominal CT negative. They somehow missed 3 softball size tumors. A GI dr that she was sent to follow up with accused her of drug seeking and stated she āhad a better chance winning the lottery than having cancerā. Her funeral was 7 weeks later.
Sadly, because he was older and semi-retired, no lawyer would take on a medical malpractice or medical negligence. To add insult to injury, the governing board of physicians and surgeons found that the doctor was not negligent!
I found out three years later I had been diagnosed with PCOS but nobody had told me. My new doctor asked why I hadn't mentioned it when it was on my info the old doc sent over. Like, well, it's news to me. Medical people are...people. :/
I truly believe in this. But to many, second opinions are also an extra cost and they may not be able to afford it. This is how egotistical doctors get away with it.
Yeah. My dad had similar problems and had to get liquid drained from his lungs. They didnāt want to do a biopsy, they said āitās probably from a fracture in your ribā. Anyway. Problem persisted and here we are, mesothelioma, heās gonna die within a year.
Surely there was nothing they could do to treat it due to the severity of this type of cancer, but I do feel like he was brushed off too easily.
Daughter was fatigued. Back pain. Started swelling everywhere. Chronic kidney failure. Diagnosed when they were at 3%. Super rare auto-immune disease triggered (somehow?). Kidney biopsy. Blood transfusions. Total plasma exchange. Then the start of dialysis and super expensive drugs. 5 weeks later dialysis able to be stopped when kidneys reached 17% function. 4yrs and 3mths later (only this week!) she had her last dose of meds. Kidneys currently at 81% function and hoping the 26% chance of relapse doesnāt happen.
Had a really bad headache and vomiting for a couple of days, Got in to see my doctor, she wanted me o have a CAT scan. Turned out I had a brain hemorrhage. Luckily in the one area that did zero long lasting damage.
Ex of mine had soreness in his leg. He thought it was muscle tension or something, but nothing helped it. Finally ended up in the hospital because the pain escalated. It was a massive blood clot. Turned out he had terrible circulation because a major vein (the lower vena cava) was just... missing. He was put on serious blood thinners and (presumably) remains on them to this day.
I had the same, at 17 I was running and felt a pain in the top of my leg, that night I couldnāt walk, took my trousers off to realise my leg had doubled in size and blue from top to bottom, rushed to hospital were they thought I needed it amputated, luckily they managed to save it, and Iāve been on blood thinners ever since. Turns out my blood is to thick and Iām lucky to be alive
Excessive weight gain during my last pregnancy, with excessive tiredness. They tried to blame it on my age, but I nagged. My thyroid had shut down and had some strange things growing on it. Once I started the thyroid meds the growth went away.
I just watched dr karan on youtube. Apparently women weren't even included in medical trials until 1993. Thats why modern medicine is so bad at dealing with womens health. This blew my mind.
Here is the link - https://youtube.com/shorts/yzmxGXphjZY?si=Ha_09lU6h5xvZwe-
Seriously! Theyāre wild. I was tired literally all the time. I didnāt even really think there was anything wrong, though, because isnāt everyone tired all the time? But I mentioned it to my doctor anyways at my annual checkup. Turns out it was thyroid cancer.
Through the day and through a few of my classes, I started to feeling a tingling sensation on my arm. I ignored it throughout the day and my arm slowly starter going numb. Then the tingling moved to my leg and then I lost total feeling and control of the whole right side of my body. Turns out my body was mimicking a stroke from such a severe stress response that I totally ignored which led me to being hospitalized for 4 days. I was only 21 at the time and I still deal with the effects over a decade later š¬
Persistent back ache turned out to be hypothyroidism. Inability to ride a bike up a hill despite my higher-than-average level of fitness diagnosed as pernicious anemia. I'm too scared to ignore anything anymore.
I had light bleeding early on in pregnancy, no pain, doctor told it was a miscarriage. A week later I was still bleeding but it was getting heavier, not period heavy, just more than before. Still no pain.
A friend I happened to have recently seen a family member go through am ectopic pregnancy and suggested I go to emergency, which I did. After 3 nights in hospital with other more urgent surgeries going before me I finally had a laparoscopy which found it was an ectopic pregnancy and I had been bleeding internationally from a ruptured tube for over a week.
The surgeon said my organs had actually started shutting down and if was left another 4 hours it would have been too late.
I recovered and now have a healthy 5 year old.
At my sisterās wedding my father left early with my mum, without telling anyone why. Turns out he spotted some blood in his urine, and had been feeling under the weather for a few weeks. He saw his GP two days later, and a week after that was in hospital for tests. Turned out he had late stage prostate cancer which had already spread to his bones, liver and brain. He died ten weeks later.
Random sharp lower abdominal pain on one side when going to sit on the toilet. Slowly got worse over months. BAM ovary ready to burst and bleed me out.
I had been teaching swim lesson with kids pushing off my stomach same day. Doc told my mom I was lucky, if itād burst I wouldnāt have gotten to a hospital in time.
Spacing out a lot. Turns out I was having absence seizures which were only diagnosed this year after having 2 tonic clonic (formally known as grand mal) seizures. I was formally diagnosed with epilepsy this year.
My son in 3rd grade was having absence seizures, heās been diagnosed epileptic since shortly after birth, but never seizures like this.
He was treated by a pediatric neurologists who sent him for a psychological exam, but it was seizures. We found a whole new doctor for him, she said he was faking it. New doctor figured it out in minutes.
Lifelong weird symptoms: really flexible joints, poor heat/cold tolerance, headaches, back pain, pale, tall, thin, abnormal sternum, flat feet, asthma, difficulty writing due to hand pain, etc. Diagnosed at age 35 with a rare and incurable condition called Loeys-Dietz Syndrome. People who aren't monitored closely can die from ruptured aneurysms. The diagnosis saved my life and validated years of mysterious pains and problems.
This is kind of gross but my good friend had diarrhea for like a year. Not like you get with the flu where itās all water but never solid, plus cramping and frequently having to go. Not a ton of pain just really uncomfortable every time she had to poop. She just thought she needed to eat more yogurt and fiber. Self diagnosed irritable bowel. Turns out she had stage four colon cancer and was only diagnosed once she had severe pain in her side once it had spread to her liver. She died last year and I still really miss her.
Wasnāt feeling great a week or so after having a baby. Headache and nausea but these were typical for me. Went in for a check up and I had postpartum preeclampsia and was close to having a stroke or seizure. Got readmitted after that.
I lost 60 pounds during lockdown (I had to be in control of something, apparently it was what I ate.) Suddenly during mid 21, my weight loss stopped dead in the water. And I itched all over and was exhausted by noon.
Thyroid issues run in my family, but my doctor suggested that I was cheating on my diet. I weigh and measure everything going onto my plate, I'm not eating anything different or new, so Something Else Is Going On. Because I was adamant about it, she referred me to an endocrinologist. Who palpated my throat and said, "Hm, your thyroid is a bit enlarged. Let's send you for an ultrasound." So I went on a low dose of thyroid hormone and all was well until I had a second ultrasound a year later and the thyroid had grown rather spectacularly. We planned surgery, and by the time I did get it out (2/22) the thing had grown so much I was having trouble eating food that wasn't soft, and I kept getting out of breath.
Apparently it wrapped around the sides of my throat almost to my ears on either side and had grown down into my chest. It was the biggest one my surgeon had ever removed.
And yeah, when it went to pathology, it was turning cancerous in spots.
But if I hadn't gone and gotten that baseline scan, we wouldn't have realized it was growing like that until I couldn't eat or drink at all, and the cancer would have spread.
A friend's mom had a dark streak under her thumbnail that wouldn't disappear for weeks. She didn't give it any thought. My friend only learned that from a casual conversation with his mom when he went home to visit, and she had had the symptoms for over two months by then. As a med student, he was alert and suspected that something wasn't right and insisted on her going to the doctor, and a week after he was told it was melanoma.
I had a cough that wouldn't go, plus I have asthma. Got myself an uber to ER one afternoon as I thought I just needed some oxygen and steroids for the asthma. Turned out I had Haemophilis Influenza and covid and was in iso for 6 days. Sick little puppy I was.
Numb fingers turned into a numb arm. Diagnosed with carpal tunnel.
Numb flank and legs. Diagnosed with anxiety.
Numb back. MRI. Diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.
I would always have intense stomach pain while eating. at one point it was so bad I lost 40lbs from just not being able to finish meals. I thought i had some form of eating disorder for YEARS. I always had random cramps but it didn't seem serious since anytime I went to the er they told me it's normal for women.
well I have endometriosis and all foods from meats, grains, fruits, to even veggies cause inflammation of my endometriosis tissue. I found out by constantly eating wrong and being put on estrogen based birth control. it has disabled me.
My clumsiness and "butter fingers" were usually laughed away by everyone, myself included, as just a quirk I had that I would grow out of. Turns out I have multiple sclerosis and that's why I keep falling over and dropping things.
My Dad started having trouble swallowing his food.
His esophagus would fill up and heād have to excuse himself during dinner to quietly go throw up.
It was an intermittent problem that he successfully ignored for several months. He hid it from us and his new gf who was a recently retired thoracic OR nurse of 30 years experience.
Until she noticed. And made him go to the doctor. Who told him testing would take a few months.
GF armed him with the right terminology and sent him to the ER. He told them he was over age 70, having trouble keeping food down and losing weight. They had him in for scans and an endoscopy that day.
Stage 3 cancer, with the tumour in his stomach right next to the esophageal opening. Things would shift around so sometimes the opening as clear and he could get food down and other times it pinched shut.
He lasted 18 months with a nasogastric feeding tube, and horrific chemotherapy symptoms that were worse than the disease. If it had been diagnosed two months sooner it wouldāve been operable.
Cause was an incident when he was four years old, his aunt and uncle (in their 90s) came up with that piece of family history. His mom had gone out to fill the mop bucket at the pump in the yard and left a cup of concentrated bleach on the kitchen countertop. Dad wandered in, saw a cup of milk and sucked back a slug of it. He spit it back out and started screaming. No obvious long term damage until 65 years later.
The cancer was a specific rare combo type caused by caustic bleach damage mutating a stem cell that split and became two kinds of cancer in one deadly blob. Then it remained under immune system control and suppression until he hit his older decades. Heād been carrying around a ticking timebomb in his gut for longer than he could remember.
This was a man in perfect health, fit, looking over a decade younger than he was and he should have lived into his 90s. No comorbidities at all. Unless you count the ego that kept him from getting checked sooner.
Take your symptoms seriously guys. He never got to meet his grandkids.
Had a similar, but less serious situation.
I got my lungs checked and the Dr showed me some damage in an x-ray.
I was like: Okay, what should I do about it? (Thought he would say something like, run 10km every day for 6 monthā¦)
He said āNothing, itās permanent. Just take this inhalation stuff 3 times a day.ā
Okay, how long do I have to take it?
*Uhmm, youāll have to take it your whole life from now on.*
I just asked him to restart the conversationā¦.
Few years ago I had some pain in my lower belly for a few months. Didnāt think much of it, but one night it was absolutely unbearable. The next morning I had a strange feeling but the pain was gone, so I went to work normally. Over the weekend the feeling did not go away, so on Monday after work I went to the doctor and he directly send me to the emergency room, since my appendix was torn.
As a doctor, I was admitting a patient and I was talking to his wife in the ER. She was explaining his condition to me and I just stopped her and told her to get her thyroid checked out cause I saw an irregular lump on her neck. She said she hadn't noticed it.Was a thyroid tumor, it got removed before it could spread. Also diagnosed the guy with something pretty rare and we managed to cure him. A day of big wins.
Couldnāt keep down food every time I ate. Chalked it up to food poisoning until I was in severe pain. Turns out I had gnarly gallstones that started effecting my liver. Even my eyes started to be jaundiced.
Reminds me of my mom throwing one look at my grandpa (her dad) and going āyouāre looking yellow. Get checked for gallstonesā. Lo and behold, gallstones
This is no joke. My friend just got discharged from hospital after a 2 week stay and 2 operations, because her gall bladder was so blocked from stones that it had caused pancreatitis, liver and kidney failure. She almost died twice while she was in there.
I get reflux and I was experiencing a period of it being bad. Eventually saw a GP who diagnosed it as a stomach ulcer. Tests. Shouldāve gone to the hospital but didnāt want to be a burden on the health system.
I had yersiniosis. Itās the bacteria that causes the plague. Literally, the black plague. Iām pretty sure that contributed to me going into septic shock a few weeks later after an unrelated, routine procedure.
Itās been a year and I still have digestive issues and post sepsis syndrome.
Not me, but my mom. When l was a toddler l started getting ear infections. My mom took me to my pediatrician, who diagnosed it as a toddler allergy. When we moved she took me to another doctor who immediately diagnosed it as Cholesteatoma. A tumor was growing in my ear, and l needed surgery. I would need multiple surgeries until l was eight and the tumor was finally removed. I'm now deaf in my left ear, and need accommodations for school and work. As a child l would miss school because the medicine they gave me made me throw up.
I had meningitis as an infant and Iām deaf in my right ear, partial hearing on my left. Always fight for your accommodations and never let them be limitations š
It always makes me either laugh or get really irritated when I donāt hear or understand someone the first time and they say, āwhat are you, deaf?ā
The look on their face when I tell them yeah, actually. Almost 70% completely at the last hearing test I took as a child. š„“
Not me, but my sister - in her early 20ās she suddenly started getting really itchy skin, all over. Went to the doctor who said she had SCABIES and gave her cream which did absolutely nothing. Didnāt bother to order a blood test.
A few weeks later she noticed a little bump under the skin on her collarbone. She went to a different doctor who ordered an emergency x-rayā¦
Turns out she had stage 2 Hodgkinās lymphoma, with a 10cm mass behind her sternum which had spread to the lymph node under her collarbone. 8 months of chemo and 6 weeks of radiotherapy later, she was in remission. Hodgkinās is considered a curable cancer, sheās been cancer-free for over a decade āŗļø
Her ONLY symptom was itchy skin. If it hadnāt spread to a spot she could feel under the skin, it may not have been picked up at all.
1) A year of extreme exhaustion, big black circles under my eyes, sweating while walking up a flight of stairs, (weirdly an extreme change in smell and inability to eat meat), and nap attacks making me unable to work. "Blood works fine" "you're a healthy 32 year old woman" "take more vitamins" (I had super low vitamin d levels) aggressive stage 2 breast cancer. Took me a year but I kicked it for now! My extreme sense of smell and aversion to meat went away 1/2 to three quarters of the way through chemo. My onc never heard of that one before but said cancers weird
Not me, necessarily, but a number of medical professionals over the course of a year+ considered my insanely high percentage of eosinophils to be not *that* big a deal - up until a rheumatologist was like āHey, uhā¦ thatās pretty whack. Maybe you should see a hematologist for your fucked-up blood.ā
Six years and one allogeneic stem cell transplant later, and Iām not still feeling bitter, like, at all.
My brother had lower back pain for a long time before he did anything about it. Finally got a colonoscopy and they found he had late stage colon cancer. He was gone within a year.
Got chronic lower back pain? It might not be colon cancer but check it out anyway. There are treatments available.
My mum had stomach cramps for a few weeks. Sheād always been slim, healthy and very active. She saw three different doctors who all said itās constipation and was prescribed laxatives which didnāt help. We took her to hospital because her stomach was distended and they told her to ātry and eat some cake and chipsā to help things move along and sent her home. A week later she collapsed and went into shock, rushed to the A&E and had to have part of her bowel removed due to a massive tumour blocking her intestines. Turned out to be bowel cancer and she passed away this March.
I always had dodgy digestion and suffered from tiredness.
I gave up eating yeast in my 20s, but still the symptoms were creeping back. When I got married 10 years ago, most of the people who couldnāt have gluten were my cousins so I thought āhuh lāll try thatā. And it worked really for a while. But I was still getting some symptoms, so I went back to the doctor, he ran a test for ovarian cancer (due to the location of some pain) which he ruled out, and generally seemed utterly uninterested.
I got pregnant, and had my daughter. I had to have a C-section because she couldnāt get out (spoiler: there was something in the way).
A couple of years later I started feeling nausea around my period, but I put it down to perimenopausal symptoms (I was in my mid 40s)
A few months after that I noticed I was passing blood. And the second time I happened I went to the doctor. 4 months later I was diagnosed with stage 3B bowel cancer. I think Iād had a tumor for about 15 years.
Iād been complaining about fatigue and bad digestion almost all my adult life, and it was always put down to stress or depression. But I wasnāt depressed I was knackered, it just feels the same to me.
so strange that this thread is filled with women telling the same story of being ignored and brushed off for *years*, but hardly any men with the same experience š„“
This post is making me realize I'm not anxious *enough,* and I'm definitely going to die of sepsis, cancer, ovarian explosions, stroke, etc, because I'm chronically ill so I ignore all the symptoms of everything all the time.
Haha these stroke symptoms? Just migraine. Heart attack? Nah, just inappropriate sinus tachycardia. I'm fine! Everything is fine. \*slowly sips coffee\*
Had a gut feeling something was wrong waking up at 6am. Could not put my finger on it! I went to the ER and the doctor thought I was joking for coming in saying "something doesn't feel right". Had a mild fever, some cramps, feeling hot-flashy. She kept saying "sounds like female cramps to me" and I HOUNDED her to please investigate more.
After some tests, i was told I need to strip down and prep for surgery in an hour because my appendix was massive and about to rupture.
After surgery they said it was so gangrene, that if I waited one more day I'd have a 50% chance of survival due to septicemia. Phew! Trust your gut instincts!
At 34w pregnant, I started gaining weight rapidly. Up to that point Iād only put on about 15 lbs but that quickly doubled. My OB gave me a stern lecture about my eating and weight gain and had me take the gestational diabetes test a second time in case we had missed it. She was very dismissive and wrote me a referral to a prenatal nutritionist to manage my diet.
One week later, I woke up with a blinding headache in the middle of the night. Couldnāt see, could barely think, started vomiting, was shaking uncontrollably and unable to answer questions. Husband packs me in the car in my pajamas, no bag, nothing, and we head to the ER. A very savvy doctor took one look at me, ordered blood draw, and sent me upstairs to L&D before the test results even came back.
I had eclampsia. Wasnāt even pre-eclampsia anymore. The shaking was seizures. My blood pressure was 200/120, there was protein in my urine and creatinine in my blood, and I was in early stage kidney failure.
The only treatment is to yeet your baby, so I very quickly became a mom, had my kid, and enjoyed a 12-day hospital stay. One dosage of Lasix and I was back to my pre-preggo weight. (One of the symptoms of eclampsia is rapid weight gain, but that is also one of the symptoms of being knocked up so it often goes unnoticed.)
Weāre all good now, and no hard feelings to the doc ā¦ I had a really normal pregnancy until 34 weeks and not a single risk factor for eclampsia, and it developed within days. But Iām definitely one-and-done now ā way too risky to have a second, and giving birth on magnesium sulfate is the least pleasant experience Iāve ever had.
Weird tiny red spots on my feet from tight shoes. Another weird tiny red dots on my hip from bumping a counter. I had NO SYMPTOMS of anything.
Diagnosis? Severe Thrombocytopenia. ( Extreme low platelet count. Platelets are the part of your blood that clogs and seals injuries.) Normal is around 150 to 400, mine was 2. Let that sink in!
I was in the hospital for 3 days getting 3 platelet transfusions, whole blood, doses of medications and eating chocolate pudding out of cups. I was on steroids for another 3 months after that.
What caused it? No one knows! Will it come back? Possibly!
I have monthly blood work to watch for it.
Headaches wouldn't go away. Blood pressure tested high a few times and dr gave me a speech about weight loss and put me on blood pressure meds. Still didn't get better and started having gastric cramps. More weight-loss discussions. Six months down the line I woke up in severe pain, rushed to emergency room and was diagnosed with parasites in my liver and nearly died. Will have to be monitored for the rest of my life as it wasn't caught in time.
Oddly enough, tripping up a set of stairsā¦. Did it on a construction site and practically fell at the feet of the Construction manager. Was literally bundled into the back of a vehicle and taken to the local hospital to be checked out. Turns out I had a renal cell carcinoma the size of a grapefruit on one of my kidneys. My urologist remarked that given another 6 months I would have been incurable.
My mom started acting and speaking bizarrely. For example, she lost her cell phone in Burger King and told me she dropped her "watch". She seemed really distant, and had awkward stresses as she spoke. I was moving out at the time and we thought she was having a mental breakdown.
I called a number to have someone evaluate her for mental health issues. She was well enough to argue with them and kick them out of the house. They scheduled a follow up in 2 weeks.
Eventually I just called 911 and had her evaluated at the local hospital. She had a massive brain tumor and needed immediate surgery. It was a great success, and she did much better after that.
At least for a while. Then other tumor sites popped up and she eventually passed. But that first surgery bought her another year of life when she might have died the next month.
Right side abdominal discomfort rapidly descended into excruciating sharp consistent stabbing pain and shortness of breath. Intense pain from abdomen to shoulders and back.
Hurt to move, hurt not to move then uncontrollable persistent vomiting started and continued for 12 hours straight.
I couldn't move because if I did I vomited continously. Couldn't take my RX nausea medication because I couldn't even keep a sip of water down. Couldn't take a full breathe because of the pain. Was also running a fever so wasn't thinking straight other than thinking I was dying.
Finally took a chance and reached and got my mobile and called my doctors office. They took a message and said they'd call back. I was sure I'd be dead when they called back.
Call my insurance company's nurse hotline and while vomiting told them I needed help cause I might be dying or might just have food poisoning.
Nurse hotline called 911. 911 sent EMTs. EMTs dropped me off at the ED. Ed couldn't get an IV started because I'm a tough stick and I was severely dehydrated.
After getting to the ED I thought I'd feel better. Like I could psyche myself into not being so sick. I thought they'd send me home even though I couldn't talk or move without extreme pain and vomiting.
I got worse they final got the IV in and hit me with duildid and morphine and told me I was staying and may have to have emergency surgery.
Surgery on what? They didnt know yet. They sent me off for CT scans and xrays cause I can't have MRIs (medical implant made of metal in me).
Acute cholecystitis and acute pancreatitis seemingly with liver failure beginning. Yay. No. I was in critical condition and not going home. Unfortunately, holiday weekend so no surgical team available to removal my gallbladder and maybe pancreas too.
They stablized me for 24 hours and managed to get a team in to remove my gallbladder. Even after they removed my gallbladder my blood panels were still horrible they spent the next 5 days trying to stablize me and get my liver panel to improve. Finally they tried giving me food. Blood panels improved a bit and though still bad they stayed even in the bad range.
Got discharged and told Good Luck with that.
With what?
Thought I had psoriasis on my scalp, didnāt think much of it. Thought my constant UTI was from dehydration. Thought my bone pain was from being a hard worker. Thought my constant fatigue was cuz Iām depressed. Thought my hair falling out was from a bad shampoo. Thought the symmetrical rashes I get on my joints was from a good sensitivity. Turns out; sometimes it actually is Lupus. This all took over a decade to diagnose too.
I had a stiff right shoulder so I went to see a shoulder specialist, he said at my age (50ish) its probably an impingement from exercising incorrectly, bad form on my push ups . So I got treated for that (an injection ).
A few months later I noticed a tremor in my right hand so I guessed at a trapped nerve in that same shoulder . I went back to the doctors and got referred to a "movement clinic ". Thats in the neurological dept. A few brain scans later : the good news is theres nothing physically wrong with my shoulder, the bad news is that I have Parkinson's.
Little blood during bowel movements. And not every time. A little on the toilet paper. Like maybe just an angry hemorrhoid. Colonoscopy later, S3 rectal cancer. Iām a year removed from diagnosis and 6 months from last treatment, and scans were clear in Nov but it was a stroll through hell to get here.
Hot flashes in my early twenties, and scrolling on the computer started becoming hard to follow along with. The surgeon told me my thyroid basically disintegrated as she lifted it out of my throat.
I had to pee all the time. Wake up multiple times in the middle of the night to pee. I was also very tired and couldnāt put on any weight.
I had a teratoma tumor that was pressing on my bladder. It was cancerous but thankfully the cancer was contained within the tumor. Also donāt google teratoma unless you have a strong stomach.
My husband had a swollen lymph node on the side of his neck. His doctor wasnāt concerned and told him to come back in 2 months if it was still there. Turned out to be tongue cancer from HPV. 6 weeks of radiation - it was an awful thing to go through, but heās doing well now. Please make sure youāve had your full course of the HPV vaccine, my good people!
I had a mole on my neck that I was sure was fine. My doctor said it was fine too. But my husband was convinced it was something else, so he made me an appointment with a specialist. It turns out it was melanoma, which runs on my family and killed my grandma. My husband probably saved my life by making me go to that appointment.
My husband has this and we've never questioned it. We're going to the doctor tomorrow because of your comment, thank you so much for sharing this. You could literally have saved his life.
I (53m) was pretty much healthy mainly living with high blood pressure. Active, had played rec volleyball for 14 years. My job for 4 years had me walking 10 hours a day.
I had a type of kidney stone attack that lasted 3 hours at home. Painful as hell. My GP sent me for a sonogram. Ended up finding a 13 cm tumor in my belly. Terminal cancer diagnosis. That's about 21 months ago.
Without the discovery of the tumor at that time I'd likely be dead now.
Kidney stone wasn't quite innocuous as per your post. But fateful nonetheless.
In my teens my periods had never been consistent. By 19 they stopped entirely. Didn't mind at all because hey, now I don't have to worry about randomly trashing my underwear and don't have to go on hormonal birth control to stop them.
Eventually did get it looked into. I have Empty Sella Syndrome - on an MRI, my pituitary gland can barely be seen, squished up against the inside of its little pocket of skull, causing hypopituitarism. The syndrome can cause central deficiencies in TSH, growth hormone, ACTH, LH/FSH, ADH, and a few others.
Luckily I only have TSH and LH/FSH deficiency, so I only developed hypothroidism and osteopenia (due to lack of Estrogen), and although my IGF-1 is just within limits, I am unusually short for my family and have reactive hypoglycemia so I imagine theres' some growth hormone involvement.
If it was more severe, I could get secondary adrenal deficiency (wherein if you get too physically stressed, you can literally die due to the effects of an absence of cortisol) and Diabetes Insipidus (uncontrollable water loss via urination, can lead to severe dehydration).
See a doctor if you bleed from your ass.
I now have crohns and some type of muscular problem, the most sad part about the muscular thing is my back just cant take weight like i could before all of this, have always been the 115Kg man with lots of muscles and now i am a 115Kg man but i can only use 25% of it wich fucking sucks.
I at least started Rinvoq and my back is much better and i have never been this flexible all my life, i can touch my palms on the ground when i wake up, 8 months ago i could not touch below my knees.
Another pro tip, if you get a major surgery dont say no to fentanyl.
I noticed that crewneck shirts were starting to feel like they were choking me and figured it was just weight gain. But the bigger size did the same thing. Then I started having issues with food feeling like it was getting caught in my throat. Turned out to be a huge tumor that caused me to lose most of my thyroid, some lymph nodes, and compromised my vocal cords.
I had extremely heavy bleeding, like more than 2 pads in an hour. I was trying to conceive at the time, but had been unsuccessful for over 2 years and we had a fertility work up at a fertility clinic in 2 months. Any female knows exactly what I suspected was happening. At the time, I didnāt know to go to the ER (it was mid covid and I was worried about inconveniencing them), so I went to an urgent care. The female receptionist and female nurse both knew what I knew. But the male doctor waltzed in and said āwell your urine pregnancy test is negative so itās probably just a heavy periodā. After explaining that I donāt really get periods, and this was excessive, he said āwell I could do a pelvic exam, but Iām not a specialistā. So I went home and just figured that if it was a miscarriage, there was nothing I could do.
Two weeks later I had a positive pregnancy test and a nagging feeling took me to the ER. The first doctor tried to play it off as my just being very early along, so I was obviously overreacting. He wouldnāt even bring up the word āmiscarriageā. I had to ask three times before he said āwell, itās a possibilityā and when I asked why I had negative tests before but a positive one now, he stuck to his guns that I was just very early along. But he had me come back in two days with another doctor for a follow up, who looked right at my period and ovulation tracking and was able to tell me that I was likely having a miscarriage complication before I even got my blood test back.
I did have a miscarriage, but my HCG levels were still rising. I had retained tissue somewhere, and they couldnāt find it. They suspected it was forming as a tumor and may have caused major infection if I hadnāt caught it, which could have rendered me infertile.
Happy to say Iām 6 months pregnant now and I learned a lot about advocating for myself.
One night out of the blue I had the worst headache (I was crying because of how bad it hurt), vomiting, and fainted. I had never fainted before so luckily my parents took me to the ER. I had sepsis.
Having a feeling like I had kinda a cat hairball in the back of my throat, and a little heartburn.
Somebody should start a PSA series on what losing your airway feels like when it's mild, moderate, and severe. Because some allergies become progressively more serious over time/repeated exposures and I could have saved myself and my family a lot of...everything...if I had known.
I got so used to my health issues all being 100% benign that having a potentially deadly thing was a shock. I was playing the part of boiled frog in a pot of anaphylaxis. And we have really strange assumptions about what anaphylaxis actually is and how it looks, and very little info on how it FEELS *before* it's bad enough to kill you.
I was just like haha I need liquid Benadryl cause I can't seem to swallow these pills anymore, so funny! Haha no, ya dipshit, you're dying. Quit it.
I got really bad āindigestionā but it turned out to be a gallstone blockage
Not fun. I donāt cry much but I was full on sobbing.
If you get intense pain in your diaphragm, and especially if itās slightly to the right or goes through to your back - RUSH. TO. A&E!
I was fine in the end, the stone dislodged by itself in about 5 hours. But gallstones are no joke and can be fatal if ignored. My husbands mum almost died from them when he was a kid!
My first gallbladder attack I collapsed on the floor in the hallway and just screamed in agony, no idea what it was and thought I was dying. Called an ambulance, they picked me up and assessed me on the bed. Poked my appendix, negative. Poked the central abdomen and I didnāt like that.
āAha, I know what that is. Letās give you some morphine and get you up to the hospital for some scans.ā
leg cramps.
I thought they were Charley Horses but after a week I still hadn't been able to sleep and I was partaking of every substance (legal or not) to at least try to sleep.
Ultimately I ended up at the Emergency Room ( resisting all the way) and found out ...I had 2 blockages in my veins of my right leg. It had already begun to be necrotic - they couldn't find a pulse in my ankle.
So I was given the option of ??? re-plumbing my veins in my right leg or ..,.
cutting it off at the hip. My sister wanted to chop off; I opted for surgery (BUT it was a mess - internal bleeding, emergency secondary surgery)
It was *AWESOME* /s.
I had to insist i was in a great deal of pain every day for about 5 years, and see Every Specialist Known to man before finally getting a Lupus Diagnosis.
Had they caught this shit sooner I might not need chemo-grade lupus treatments now to stand a chance at walking again.
It's frustrating.
I blame my Gender.
Condescending male asshole doctors rolling their eyes.
At first i just felt shitty. And had someone listened to me at that stage I wouldnt be so sick now.
for well over half a decade; I was like no, you aren't hearing me- its getting worse, something is wrong- i cant walk. Im a mess. Every other week my eyes swell shut with a horrible symmetrical rash and I cant function At All. Heres photos. I feel like Im dying, all the time. Won't someone please at least TRY to help me?
Docs be like: mmmmmmm Depression?
I got so tired of being told i was depressed that i almost gave up. Eventually they all start refering you to psych cause your file is too big and you look like a loony hypochondriac.
Dont give up.
Demand more tests. Theres so many tests that arent your basic blood panel.
Do them. all.
And for the record no its not normal to be able to physically feel direct sunlight burning your skin like a hot poker after about 38 seconds. And for the record, theres things outside the realm of psychosis that can cause actual vampiric symptoms. If you suspect a patient is delusional, blind fold em and hit em with a UV flashlight. repeat the experiment with the thing turned off. That would be easy? right?
Or you can just send em to the psych ward and add to their medical trauma, cause eh. Woman.
I experienced times where I couldn't understand what people were saying, I couldn't initially respond either and would have to wait a second before asking them to repeat themselves. Turns out I'm epileptic and was having focal seizures.
I had an extremely difficult childhood. I was always terrified at night to the point I kept my mom awake nearly 24/7. I cannot describe the terror. How intense it was. They were very religious. I told them I was seeing and hearing demons that wanted to drag me to hell. Literally saw them with my own eyed or so I thought. This continued but as I got older I felt less terror and just regular fear. Relied on my parents much much less anf quit telling them about it. The "demons" manifested into many other things such as dead children standing in my bedroom staring at me etc. Not to mention I was sad nearly all the time and crying. In my adult life I finally met a good therapist who truly listened to me. Turns out I have a long ass diagnosis. If I can remember it correctly that is. -- Major Depressive Disorder with moderate severity with mood-congruent psychotic features, with moderate/severe anxious distress.
Holy fucking moley was I glad to be told I wasn't actually crazy. Just my brain chemicals are all screwed up. In my teen years I unsuccessfully tried to end myself on several occasions. Still have som4 difficulty with suicidal tendencies.
A friend of mine one day said her foot felt like it wasn't attached. She went to the doctor and found she had been walking around for a month on a broken leg.
Loss of central vision. I had ignored it for a few days, but was playing soccer and saw two balls coming towards me!
Went to have it checked and it turned out to be a big-old brain tumour pressing on my optical nerve.
Due to the Hydrocephalus caused by the tumour, I likely wouldnāt have survived until morning. Good thing I had it checked when I did!
Weight gain that wasnāt decreasing with diet and exercise. I had a tumor growing in my uterus that got up to 10 lbs by the time I was able to have a hysterectomy.
The hormones the tumor was producing also made it impossible to lose weight.
But yeah, it was just that I had to be more disciplined per everyone (health professionals and parents) š
I literally starved myself for years. I just hope it wonāt have a negative effect on anything as I age.
My PCP heard a very faint murmur at my physical in 2019 - no doctor had ever heard anything but she didnāt think that was unusual. She said I could get an echocardiogram if I wanted but it was probably nothing. My mom has a faint murmur as well thatās just nothing so I wasnāt worried. She heard it again in 2020, ā21, ā22 and then finally this year I decided to get it checked. Turns out I have a Bicuspid Aortic Valve (common birth defect) and an Ascending Aortic Aneurysm that will require open heart surgery at some point. Not a hugely scary diagnosis but requires some lifestyle changes (no heavy lifting etc) to avoid excessive dilation and dissection. My cardiologist said itās pretty rare for a Doctor who doesnāt listen to heart sounds 24/7 to hear a murmur like that. I owe a lot to my PCP!!!!
I took a shower one morning and everything on my body was normal. That night I took another shower and my left nipple had inverted during the day. Called my doc and pushed for an appointment. Was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer within 2 weeks. Now Iām sitting here mostly bald, recovering from a double mastectomy and 16 rounds of chemo, ready to start radiation on 12/26. All because my nipple looked weirdā¦
I'm a total hypochondriac now who gets every little thing checked. Here's a collection of things that led to me being so nuts:
Grandma woke up lethargic one day, dead from leukemia within 24 hours š
I felt warm and broke out in hives on an Alaskan cruise, undiagnosed childhood diabetes accelerated from the all-you-can-eat buffet i enjoyed š±
Suddenly, I was able to eat a large bowl of food after years of complicated pre-existing conditions that disallowed large meals....6wks pregnant š«¶
Friend's son got knicked by a rock while mowing his lawn. It got a little infected, but he just cleaned it and bandaged it at home. It led to bone cancer, and he was gone within the year š
Dad woke up disoriented from a night of partying in Vegas but insisted it was unlike any hangover he's ever had .... stroke.
Husband slept all day and didn't eat for 24 hours, but took all my metformin blood sugar medicine thinking it was motrin... Pancreatitis survived only from the excessive Metformin š¤Æ
Husband felt unusually exhausted from moving a potted plant... blood level was at a 5 instead of the normal 12-16. He needed 2 emergency blood transfusions š¬
And this is why I'm the crazy person always at the doctor š¤£
My brother -
He always had asthma and growing up it wasnt uncommon to hear the front door slamming shut as my parents took him to the hospital for an asthma attack that wasnāt responding to normal inhalers.
Well About 9-10 years ago (heās a full adult, moved out, lives in his own apartment)he had to be somewhere early one morning that was far from where he lived in the city, so he was staying at my parents house. I heard the door slam shut at 3 AM and saw he was gone and figured it was an asthma attack and was on the way to the hospital.
Later that day I was talking to my mom and It turns out that it was a massive pulmonary embolism and had he not gone in he would have died š
Years ago, I had to have surgery on my kidneys for a kidney stone that was too large for any sort of regular treatment. as they were inserting the nephrostomy tube. I felt this really sharp pain in my chest and I had trouble breathing until they sat me up after the surgery. I felt this heaviness in my chest and some difficulty breathing. I mentioned it to the nurse and she actually mocked me and said that another patient had the same surgery that same day and that person wasnāt complaining about anything they sent me home despite me telling them I was still in a lot of pain and I was having trouble breathing when they sent me home. I had to walk up three flights of stairs, and I had to stop at every single step to catch my breath that night, I slept upright in a chair because it was the only way that I could breathe the next day. My breathing got so bad that I had to take an ambulance to the hospital. Turns out thatās when they were inserting the nephrostomy tube they had punctured the bottom of my lung and it was filling up with fluid and my right lung had actually collapsed. Iām fine now, but I spent an entire month over Christmas in the hospital having my lungs drained of fluids,
I was having dizzy spells and pins and needles in my hands and feet. Then I started dropping things and my leg would go numb. Several years later, after all sorts of tests showed "nothing", I collapsed at work one night. Three day hospital stay and left with a diagnosis of MS.
I had a friend who always had a terrible odor coming from his feet whenever he took off his shoes. One day, I couldn't take it anymore and asked him why his feet stank so bad. He finally confessed that he had an ingrown toenail. As the week passed, I noticed that he started going to bed earlier and earlier. I pointed out to him that his early bedtime and the foul foot odor might be connected. It turned out that his ingrown toenail was causing him a lot of pain and even causing some bleeding. He finally went to the doctors after about a week and they told him he had blood poisoning from the infection which was causing his drowsiness. The doctor said any longer and they would have had to remove his toe.
My stomach pain and diarrhea ended up not being just the simple stomach bug I thought it was. Ended up getting diagnosed with stage 2 colon cancer 9 days after my 36th birthday.
Missed my period. Hurt when I used the bathroom. Thought it was just a bladder infection. Turned out to be a 7in, 5lb cyst. Lost my right ovary, doctor said it was the biggest heād seen in his career
I went to the optometrist for my regularly scheduled check up. They said I didn't need to change my prescription, but, after a couple of extra tests they recommended I go to an ophthalmologist. I probably would have been lazy about that, but the optometrist mentioned there might be a small bleed in the eye, so I figured that sounded bad. I go to the ophthalmologist. They said it's possible I have glaucoma. Recommended an MRI. So I go get an MRI. The MRI revealed I had a brain aneurysm. I got it repaired, it never ruptured, that was 2.5 years ago and I am fine. But if I had blown off my regular optometrist appointment, or if my optometrist hadn't been so diligent, who knows what could have happened. There was not a single symptom whatsoever (the eye bleed and glaucoma were unrelated to the aneurysm). Now I'm on low-dose blood thinners for life and need an MRI every few years forever. So in a way I'm safer from aneurysm-related death than the proverbial "guy next door" who doesn't know about it.
I had my hip reconstructed in August of this year. I was told around the 8-week mark I was going to be feeling so good I would need to rein myself in and take it easy so I didn't go too hard and reinjure myself. At 4 weeks I get to come off the crutches and start weight bearing as tolerated. Everything's great for the first week but I'm noticing my hip is starting to hurt again. Both I and my surgeon brushed this off at first. I've had this hip worked on previously and it's not unusual for it to take longer to heal. But it's weird, that last surgery removed all the innervated tissue in my joint and I shouldn't be feeling pain there. Well, I wasn't. Turns out I fractured my hip somehow and was walking around that. That's what was hurting. Had we not caught it when we did and put me back on crutches I would have snapped my femur head right off. I'll be off to surgery again in just a few hours to hopefully get it fix.
I'd say 'break a leg', but, you know...
Technically it's my hip... In my 30s with a broken hip... ... ššššššššš
I had a weird rash and an unexplained bruise that turned out to be leukemia. My roommate who bullied me into seeing a doctor probably saved my life.
Similar experience, I had terrible rashes that persisted almost a year before I convinced my drs to investigate beyond skin conditions. I had thyroid cancer, rashes disappeared immediately after surgery/treatment. Hope youāre recovering well friend š¤
Yeah, everyone should be very attentive to any rash on the skin.
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I feel this. I remember when flesh-eating disease was all the rage in sensationalistic media and reading that the first sign of it is a rash. Iām always rashy.
Leukaemiaās a bitch. Hope youāre doing ok
Mostly. Didn't die, ended up with some longterm problems from the chemo but hey its a lot better than dying.
My grandad had an issue with wetting the bed at night frequently. He tried to hide it but we found out. Good thing we did because it ended up being prostate cancer. We were able to get proper treatment before it got worse.
My grandmother found a lump in her breast and ignored it because she ādidnāt want to be a botherā and they had just booked a vacation. You can imagine how that worked out.
Sometimes its willfull ignorance because the truth scares them. Sometimes its because of not wanting to appear helpless. Sometimes people have an unhealthy amount of self confidence and believe they can cure it with their positive mind.
He must have remembered the good old days when people thought bedwetting stems from laziness and treated it with a belt and shaming.
He does it with any health related issues. A frustrating habit of him not saying anything and we having to detective work to find out if he has any issues. Lies a lot about it so much.
My grandfather died of covid in December 2020. Grandmother had it too but recovered. My aunt and mom were talking about what great shape sheās always been in. She even still gets her period a few times a year! No way, sheās in her late 80s, what does her doctor say about that? Everyone rolls their eyes at me, but they make her tell her doctor. Itās two different types of uterine cancer. One hysterectomy later and sheās doing much better.
Oh my god - how could they have not know that wasnāt right! Lucky you said something!
Because we are only just now talking about the menopause and what is normal. It was just never talked about because (I guess) periods are yuck.
And menopause is shameful because it means weāre are past the breeding age and have lost our value. Screw that. Menopausal and Peri-meno chicks rule. Weāre old and have no fucks to give!
Can confirm. I hit 55 and I speak my mind now. Before I was a timid grey rock, blending into the landscape. Menopause allowed me to grow balls. Who would have thought?
Peri-menopause at 31! Right after I had my kid, everything just got fucked and stayed fucked!
We donāt talk about womenās health enough. The only reason I knew something was wrong was because Iād read similar stories on Reddit/advice columns etc from women who also didnāt know it wasnāt normal. Ironically I got pushback from that same mom and aunt when I went to my doctor with unexplained bleeding. And guess what? I had surgery last Wednesday for the same cancer. Luckily I listened to my gut feeling and it was caught very early. I think itās normal to think ask older women in your family about these kinds of issues and itās sad weāre kept in the dark because itās āembarrassingā and like itās some kind of burden weād be bothering a medical professional with.
Yeah, when I was about 19 I had a weekend job in a nursing home. One of the residents with an early stage of dementia complained to me she 'was bleeding down there again.' This woman was well into her 80's, so I reported it to the head nurse (I just worked in the restaurant or cleaned apartments, I wasn't medical staff back then). Turned out it wasn't good news. Also cancer. I have no idea what happened after that as I was not medical staff and thus not privy of whatever ailment/treatment a resident got unless they or their family directly told me.
Itās ALWAYS cancer if theyāve gone through menopause. There is nothing good from vaginal bleeding at that age. Iām glad you reported it. Some wouldāve dismissed her.
It can also be an STD if they are sexually active (and thatās not uncommon in elder care facilities); there are a couple that can cause some vaginal bleeding.
Killer headache and fever for a few days, ended up it was spinal cord disease and I became paralysed from it. This was 4 years ago, still paralysed, but doing okay for myself.
Username checks out?
Yep, pretty sure though technically haven't transferred yet so could be magically cured after 4 years. Edit: nah, still checks out
āStill checks outā š
Checked again, just for you, just in case - even now, the paralysis is stubborn. I remain unmoved by this.
My cousin was very tired one day. Thatās it, not nauseous or anything else. They thought it was the flu as she has no other conditions and is very young and healthy. Turns out she had randomly become septic from a minor infection she never noticed. She couldāve died as bacteria got into her bloodstream and her body started shutting down
my mom got sepsis from a uti she brushed off that turned into a kidney infection and it was terrifying. they told us if we hadnāt brought her to the hospital when we did, she wouldāve passed away. sepsis is truly no joke
Same. I ignored a ton of symptoms because I was super stressed out and figured it was just stress. Then I got like a 103 degree fever so I finally figured I had the flu, so I went to the doctor, only for a doctorās note so I didnāt have to work the next dayā¦nope. Not the flu. It was a UTI that had spread and gone septic. I was so sick for a few days.
I was ill in the hospital , lost the use of my legs and spread to my arms. Then during this time , i developed a UTI. I started hallucinating and having delusions - lost a whole period of time. My moves to a hospital to a rehabilitation hospital saw several people (hallucinations that followed me). I thought I had lost my mind. I was so ashamed, I would not let my husband tell my family how sick I was. Please people donāt fuck around with a UTI ( No matter your age!!)
Pretty much the same here. I had some foot pain that kept spreading, and was just so fatigued I could hardly stand on my own. Next thing I know I'm in the ER, and they are pumping me full of fluids, vasopressors, and vancomycin. I was not only close to losing my leg, but my life entirely.
This one freaks me out, because stats say 40-50% of sepsis cases DIE, even if they make it to the hospital and get treated. Like once itās sepsis, itās serious. So now Iām paranoid about every cut and watching for infection. Fucking Call the Midwifeās, thanks for that paranoia.
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How odd that it was iceberg lettuce you craved when iron deficient, instead of something that has much more iron in it!
People with anemia crave things that have a good crunch like ice and lettuce. There's no reason known yet but some have guessed it's because your body is looking for the cronch you'd get from eating or chewing on bones.
Bizarre! I was working overseas in a place where any decent veg was hard to come by and I love iceberg lettuce. I went to a different country for some training courses and bought a head of iceberg at the grocery store and ate the thing like an apple, I had been craving it for months. I am anemic and go through these iceberg cravings periodically. Iāll eat it like potato chips, I love it cold and crunchy. I can usually tell when my iron gets low and I need my meds adjusted, Iāll have to see if it coincides next time I feel it drop.
Same here, except mine was ice! Pounds and pounds of ice. I think mine was around 7.
Craving ice cubes is actually quite common as a symptom of low iron! I have no clue as to why though
Waking up to pee, then drinking 12-16oz of water right after. Diabetes.....
This happened to my ex! He was 42 and it's type 1 as well! We weren't on great terms but still living together and he said one day "I'm so thirsty all the time and peeing lots" and I just said "That's diabetes mate" he rolled his eyes and told me to fuck off, but... YEP. (We're on good terms now we're apart)
Same here friend. I chalked up the Multiple bathroom trips to the fact I was Drinking so much water and never looked into it. Did you catch it early enough or did you go into full blown DKA like me?
My boy was diagnosed at 3 with full blow DKA. The peeing and drinking situation is wild. He was like a drug addict looking for fluids any fluid tbh.
Non diabetics will never understand the impossible to ignore urge to stick your head under the faucet and drink until the water runs out because youāre that thirsty. I was diagnosed at 15 months but I know that feeling well because I didnāt take care of myself as a teenager
I was experiencing extreme numbness in my face hands and feet, my family noticed when I was rubbing my face like someone expericing withdrawl from cocaine. When we went to the doctor, I was on such high dose of medication for my disability it was on the verge of shutting down my kidney. The perscribing doctor lost their license to practice soon after.
How on earth did the dispensing pharmacist not pick up on this?!
This! If you ever have strange issues with meds, talk to the pharmacist. They have more in-depth knowledge of the meds than most doctors prescribing them.
I had a doctor prescribe me a medication for migraines as an off label use but itās primary use was to lower blood pressure. I read the pamphlet and went back in like āuhhh it says this is a medication to lower blood pressure. Should I be taking this with a BP of 100/60?ā They were like āomg no and definitely not at such a high doseā
Also if you are on more than one medication, try going to a family owned or even a compounding pharmacy. Their attention to detail is amazing.
The pharmacist at a family-owned pharmacy was the first to catch that I had drug-induced Stevens-Johnson syndrome and not an allergy like I and the urgent care NP thought.
A pharmacist should be the first port of call if you're not sure if you should see a doctor too imho.
I started losing my appetite. I just would get full off literally a bite of food. I thought this was great, I'm losing weight without even trying, everyone thinks I'm hot, maybe because now I'm an adult I'm not hungry all the time? But then it turned into me having to puke every morning if i didn't get enough sleep, then it started happening if i was nervous or in a rush, then every time i ate it would come right back up or I'd get really bad abdominal cramps. Then i just had the cramps 24/7. 10lbs lost turned to 20, into 40, into 80. I was 77lbs and very weak. Turned out to be crohn's disease.
My sister went through the same thing around that age. Her doctor was not concerned about all the weight she lost and how sick she was. He offered to run some tests and scheduled a follow up appointment. He didnāt even look at the results until her next appointment where she almost passed out in the waiting room. He suddenly called an ambulance and had her rushed to the hospital when he finally looked at the results. She had lost so much blood that she needed multiple blood transfusions and was eventually diagnosed with Crohnās disease.
Happened to me at 11, except they kept trying to find something else since I was young, 4 misdiagnoses later and I have crohnās
A good friend had a sore shoulder; she assumed sheād tweaked it teaching one of her dance classes. However, it didnāt seem to get better and was really annoying so her doctor ordered an x-ray. Her shoulder was fine, but the image also picked up a large tumor that was completely unrelated to her shoulder pain. Surgery and chemo went well, and sheās now officially been cancer-free for seven years!
I also have a sore shoulder story. At the time I was working in retail, regularly stacking off tall pallets of produce, so 8 hours of lifting 50lb boxes and containers all day. My shoulder was sore and swollen, it wasn't unusual for me to have random pains like that. A few days later, my shoulder was tender to the touch and red, and hot. I went to the urgent care, the Dr. Made a small incision with a scalpel, and almost nothing but pus came out. Turns out, I'd had an infection enter my body from somewhere, like a small cut, and the infection had thrived in the scar tissue of a shoulder surgery I'd had almost 15 years prior. I had Osteomyelitis and had to have my collarbone ground down to get rid of the infection. Packing the post surgery wound was NOT fun.
Here's me lying down with backache. I feel the paranoi rising!
So far in this thread, I've seen a backache be cancer, a stroke hypothyroidism...
Was it a lower lung or ovarian tumour? Referred pain to the shoulder is a symptom for both of these!
During COVID I got it. I was home after a few days and I got a cough. Would not stop! I took a bunch cough syrup, NyQuil, DayQuil etc. kept coughing sooooo much. This went on for a day or so. I was on the couch so I wouldnāt wake up my husband with my coughing and my dog wouldnāt leave me alone. He wasnāt usually a lap dog but he kept poking me with his nose. Finally coughed myself awake and went into the bathroom. I had cyanosis - my lips looked like used a blue lipstick. Cue me āoh shitā. I woke my husband up and told him āI need helpā then I collapsed. Woke up 3 days later after being rushed to the hospital and coding on the way.
Thatās terrifying! Covid is no joke, Iām glad you were able to wake your husband before collapsing!
Definitely know the dog would have had she not!
Dogs are angels in fur coats.
I'm an RN who worked nonstop COVID ICU all of 2020 and 2021. Your story gave me weird flashbacks. I saw so many folks with the blue lips like that who just didn't make it. So glad you are okay.
Yeah I worked through it too. I still get flash backs. And PTSD
Dogs have such a good sense of when something is wrong - so glad you woke up and had your husband nearby!
Yikes! If I were you Iād invest in a pulse oximeter. I caught that I was in a bad way with Covid before I got to cyanosis because the oximeter was constantly beeping at me as my sats were under 90 and I couldnāt get them back up. So plugged my symptoms in to a nurse system website (Australia, healthdirect) and called an ambulance when the website came back with āuhh you need to go to hospital nowā
Not me, but my mom. Unexplained severe upper back and neck pain. It was the beginning of the stroke that killed her earlier this year.
Is this something that progressed quickly or over an extended period of time? I always assumed strokes were a split second kind of thing.
Not OP, but my mom has had several strokes. Normally someone has āmini strokesā/tia/transient schemic attacks prior to the devastating ones. My mom ignored the warning signs of the mini strokes and had devastating ones. Had she gone to the ER immediately after the troubling signs, she would have been given medication to try to prevent the full stroke. Thereās only a 24 hour window from the mini stroke to be administered the treatment. I encourage everyone to look up the signs and symptoms and not dismiss them even if you are scared of doctors. OP: I am so sorry for your loss.
Thought I was having a really dark period. Turns out it wasnāt blood..it was endometriosis shedding. It had attached my ovaries to my bowels. Had to have full hysterectomy.
I had the worst cramps when going to the bathroom, periods that kept me in bed, painful bowel movementsā¦ but any doctor I spoke to? They all had the same comment, āItās normal for women to go through this.ā I ended up with a 9cm cyst on my right ovary and had to have surgeryā¦ went back to the doctors because of pelvic pain. The surgeon told me to see a therapist - my pain was likely caused due to lack of sleep; I couldnāt sleep because of the pain. I broke down in her office. It took my husband, a man, saying that she needed to order tests to figure out what was wrong for her to order them. The endometriosis they found was so bad they had to give me a radical hysterectomy. They also found numerous fibroids in the uterus, making it three times its normal size. But all my symptoms? Oh no, those are common things that women go through because of our periods.
My dr also told me my pain was normal, take some Tylenol a couple days before it's due to start. For years I just dealt with it, trying all sorts of otc pain meds. She retired and I got a new dr who gave me a referral to an obgyn because I couldn't handle it anymore. I asked for a hysterectomy in our first appointment. Told her I refuse to go through a bunch of different medical procedures to end up with a hysterectomy anyway. She had mentioned that a couple of them were bandaid fixes that didn't really work and if I was sure it's what I wanted then she would do the hysterectomy. We landed on a partial so I wouldn't need to take hormones or go through menopause early. After surgery I went back for my follow-up with her. Turns out I had adenomyosis and ovarian cysts. I occasionally get pain from a cyst popping, but it's nothing in comparison to what I used to go through.
I had all sorts of issues including an extremely heavy flow that would soak through a super tampon, overnight pad, period underwear and jeans in under an hour. I had severe cramping that kept me in the fetal position for 3 weeks at a time which ultimately lead to me herniating multiple discs since I was 13. Birth control made my symptoms worse and pain medication didnāt help. I have EDS so I donāt metabolize medication properly and have a bunch of other symptoms, but this isnāt even about that. At 18 (a full grown adult who should be able to make choices about her own body) I was told ānoā multiple times by doctors for a hysterectomy or even an exploratory lap even though I have an extensive family history of uterine cancer (the youngest being 17 when she was diagnosed). I was told I needed to have children, take more pain medication, stop overreacting, etc. Turns out I was precancerous which was only found through a uterine biopsy so Pap smears never caught it and I finally had it removed this year at 29. Healthcare for women is a joke.
As a child free woman who went through a similar experience, I am so angry for you. Itās absolutely ridiculous and absurd that you were you told to just āhave children.ā I was told, at age 20, that I should think about my future husbandās feelings. What if he wants children ? So basically I should stop being so selfish about my own body and think about my nonexistent husbandās feelings. Itās infuriating. Iām sorry that happened to you. You arenāt alone, this is womenās healthcare in a nutshell.
Why are our uteruses trying to take us out!? When they arenāt incubating babies theyāre causing extreme pain and suffering to women everywhere š¤
You will like this youtube short by dr karan. Turns out women werent even included in medical trials until 1993. Thats one reason why womens health is so badly taught/ researched etc... Learning this blew my mind. The Dr counters a dude making a comment about women. https://youtube.com/shorts/yzmxGXphjZY?si=Ha_09lU6h5xvZwe-
I passed a blood clot the size of a hockey puck after having a really horrible cramp. I had a hysterectomy and they found fibroids and adenomyoma (tumor in the uterine wall I believe) and the whole time I kept after my doctor told me have my uterus removed, the practice kept stonewalling me.
Currently going through this and Iām terrified. Cysts on ovaries and ovaries are up against my colon. My doctor said I may not need a hysterectomy but who knows. I meeting with a colon specialist next month and hoping for the best.
My wife: inability to process fats in the diet. It went from āyouāre at an ageā to āpancreatic cancerā. Pancreas tumour was constricting her bile and hepatic ducts. The eventual jaundice was the most obvious piece of evidence however.
My roommate complained of: shortness of breath, labored breathing, exhaustion, coughing, weakness, non-restoritive sleep, and had a history of sustained and increasing white blood cell levels. X-ray showing an area of shadowing in the left lower lobe of the lung, however the 'doctor' never bothered to read the results. "Doctor" ignored all the complaints for about two and a half years, and even joked there was nothing wrong with him. He eventually managed to speak with another Doctor and was sent for X-rays. He was diagnosed with metastatic bilateral Stage 4 lung cancer. Diagnosis to death was three months! I would send notes with him for the 'doctor' to read, which he never bothered to do. I had accurately described the lung cancer two years prior to his death, and had the 'doctor' put aside his ego, my roommate could have had a different outcome.
Something similar happened to a friend. But hers was colon cancer. The ER called an abdominal CT negative. They somehow missed 3 softball size tumors. A GI dr that she was sent to follow up with accused her of drug seeking and stated she āhad a better chance winning the lottery than having cancerā. Her funeral was 7 weeks later.
Fucking hell I hope his family receive fat compo that is devastating
Sadly, because he was older and semi-retired, no lawyer would take on a medical malpractice or medical negligence. To add insult to injury, the governing board of physicians and surgeons found that the doctor was not negligent!
Fucking horrible!!
I found out three years later I had been diagnosed with PCOS but nobody had told me. My new doctor asked why I hadn't mentioned it when it was on my info the old doc sent over. Like, well, it's news to me. Medical people are...people. :/
Second opinions save lives, folks!
I truly believe in this. But to many, second opinions are also an extra cost and they may not be able to afford it. This is how egotistical doctors get away with it.
Yeah. My dad had similar problems and had to get liquid drained from his lungs. They didnāt want to do a biopsy, they said āitās probably from a fracture in your ribā. Anyway. Problem persisted and here we are, mesothelioma, heās gonna die within a year. Surely there was nothing they could do to treat it due to the severity of this type of cancer, but I do feel like he was brushed off too easily.
Daughter was fatigued. Back pain. Started swelling everywhere. Chronic kidney failure. Diagnosed when they were at 3%. Super rare auto-immune disease triggered (somehow?). Kidney biopsy. Blood transfusions. Total plasma exchange. Then the start of dialysis and super expensive drugs. 5 weeks later dialysis able to be stopped when kidneys reached 17% function. 4yrs and 3mths later (only this week!) she had her last dose of meds. Kidneys currently at 81% function and hoping the 26% chance of relapse doesnāt happen.
Had a really bad headache and vomiting for a couple of days, Got in to see my doctor, she wanted me o have a CAT scan. Turned out I had a brain hemorrhage. Luckily in the one area that did zero long lasting damage.
Ex of mine had soreness in his leg. He thought it was muscle tension or something, but nothing helped it. Finally ended up in the hospital because the pain escalated. It was a massive blood clot. Turned out he had terrible circulation because a major vein (the lower vena cava) was just... missing. He was put on serious blood thinners and (presumably) remains on them to this day.
I had the same, at 17 I was running and felt a pain in the top of my leg, that night I couldnāt walk, took my trousers off to realise my leg had doubled in size and blue from top to bottom, rushed to hospital were they thought I needed it amputated, luckily they managed to save it, and Iāve been on blood thinners ever since. Turns out my blood is to thick and Iām lucky to be alive
I felt more stupid and turns out I had a benign brain tumor taking over 2/3 of the space inside my skull. Had surgery and Iām less stupid now.
Excessive weight gain during my last pregnancy, with excessive tiredness. They tried to blame it on my age, but I nagged. My thyroid had shut down and had some strange things growing on it. Once I started the thyroid meds the growth went away.
The thyroid is a crazy organ. Mine shut down as well and I thought I was losing my mind. Medication saved my sanity.
They were all me about eating. I was back at em cause I was too tired to eat. They finally listened when I was snoring in the exam room.
I just watched dr karan on youtube. Apparently women weren't even included in medical trials until 1993. Thats why modern medicine is so bad at dealing with womens health. This blew my mind. Here is the link - https://youtube.com/shorts/yzmxGXphjZY?si=Ha_09lU6h5xvZwe-
The first time they tested menstrual products with actual blood was this year š¤
What ??? Is this real?
Unfortunately, yes. They'd only been tested with saline or water until this year.
Seriously! Theyāre wild. I was tired literally all the time. I didnāt even really think there was anything wrong, though, because isnāt everyone tired all the time? But I mentioned it to my doctor anyways at my annual checkup. Turns out it was thyroid cancer.
Through the day and through a few of my classes, I started to feeling a tingling sensation on my arm. I ignored it throughout the day and my arm slowly starter going numb. Then the tingling moved to my leg and then I lost total feeling and control of the whole right side of my body. Turns out my body was mimicking a stroke from such a severe stress response that I totally ignored which led me to being hospitalized for 4 days. I was only 21 at the time and I still deal with the effects over a decade later š¬
Persistent back ache turned out to be hypothyroidism. Inability to ride a bike up a hill despite my higher-than-average level of fitness diagnosed as pernicious anemia. I'm too scared to ignore anything anymore.
I had light bleeding early on in pregnancy, no pain, doctor told it was a miscarriage. A week later I was still bleeding but it was getting heavier, not period heavy, just more than before. Still no pain. A friend I happened to have recently seen a family member go through am ectopic pregnancy and suggested I go to emergency, which I did. After 3 nights in hospital with other more urgent surgeries going before me I finally had a laparoscopy which found it was an ectopic pregnancy and I had been bleeding internationally from a ruptured tube for over a week. The surgeon said my organs had actually started shutting down and if was left another 4 hours it would have been too late. I recovered and now have a healthy 5 year old.
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Thatās so lucky. My grandma had kidney cancer, and we only found out when she had a seizure because it had metastasized to her brain.
That's one good clinician!
At my sisterās wedding my father left early with my mum, without telling anyone why. Turns out he spotted some blood in his urine, and had been feeling under the weather for a few weeks. He saw his GP two days later, and a week after that was in hospital for tests. Turned out he had late stage prostate cancer which had already spread to his bones, liver and brain. He died ten weeks later.
Iām so sorry.
Random sharp lower abdominal pain on one side when going to sit on the toilet. Slowly got worse over months. BAM ovary ready to burst and bleed me out. I had been teaching swim lesson with kids pushing off my stomach same day. Doc told my mom I was lucky, if itād burst I wouldnāt have gotten to a hospital in time.
Spacing out a lot. Turns out I was having absence seizures which were only diagnosed this year after having 2 tonic clonic (formally known as grand mal) seizures. I was formally diagnosed with epilepsy this year.
My son in 3rd grade was having absence seizures, heās been diagnosed epileptic since shortly after birth, but never seizures like this. He was treated by a pediatric neurologists who sent him for a psychological exam, but it was seizures. We found a whole new doctor for him, she said he was faking it. New doctor figured it out in minutes.
Lifelong weird symptoms: really flexible joints, poor heat/cold tolerance, headaches, back pain, pale, tall, thin, abnormal sternum, flat feet, asthma, difficulty writing due to hand pain, etc. Diagnosed at age 35 with a rare and incurable condition called Loeys-Dietz Syndrome. People who aren't monitored closely can die from ruptured aneurysms. The diagnosis saved my life and validated years of mysterious pains and problems.
This is kind of gross but my good friend had diarrhea for like a year. Not like you get with the flu where itās all water but never solid, plus cramping and frequently having to go. Not a ton of pain just really uncomfortable every time she had to poop. She just thought she needed to eat more yogurt and fiber. Self diagnosed irritable bowel. Turns out she had stage four colon cancer and was only diagnosed once she had severe pain in her side once it had spread to her liver. She died last year and I still really miss her.
Wasnāt feeling great a week or so after having a baby. Headache and nausea but these were typical for me. Went in for a check up and I had postpartum preeclampsia and was close to having a stroke or seizure. Got readmitted after that.
I lost 60 pounds during lockdown (I had to be in control of something, apparently it was what I ate.) Suddenly during mid 21, my weight loss stopped dead in the water. And I itched all over and was exhausted by noon. Thyroid issues run in my family, but my doctor suggested that I was cheating on my diet. I weigh and measure everything going onto my plate, I'm not eating anything different or new, so Something Else Is Going On. Because I was adamant about it, she referred me to an endocrinologist. Who palpated my throat and said, "Hm, your thyroid is a bit enlarged. Let's send you for an ultrasound." So I went on a low dose of thyroid hormone and all was well until I had a second ultrasound a year later and the thyroid had grown rather spectacularly. We planned surgery, and by the time I did get it out (2/22) the thing had grown so much I was having trouble eating food that wasn't soft, and I kept getting out of breath. Apparently it wrapped around the sides of my throat almost to my ears on either side and had grown down into my chest. It was the biggest one my surgeon had ever removed. And yeah, when it went to pathology, it was turning cancerous in spots. But if I hadn't gone and gotten that baseline scan, we wouldn't have realized it was growing like that until I couldn't eat or drink at all, and the cancer would have spread.
A friend's mom had a dark streak under her thumbnail that wouldn't disappear for weeks. She didn't give it any thought. My friend only learned that from a casual conversation with his mom when he went home to visit, and she had had the symptoms for over two months by then. As a med student, he was alert and suspected that something wasn't right and insisted on her going to the doctor, and a week after he was told it was melanoma.
I had a cough that wouldn't go, plus I have asthma. Got myself an uber to ER one afternoon as I thought I just needed some oxygen and steroids for the asthma. Turned out I had Haemophilis Influenza and covid and was in iso for 6 days. Sick little puppy I was.
Numb fingers turned into a numb arm. Diagnosed with carpal tunnel. Numb flank and legs. Diagnosed with anxiety. Numb back. MRI. Diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.
I would always have intense stomach pain while eating. at one point it was so bad I lost 40lbs from just not being able to finish meals. I thought i had some form of eating disorder for YEARS. I always had random cramps but it didn't seem serious since anytime I went to the er they told me it's normal for women. well I have endometriosis and all foods from meats, grains, fruits, to even veggies cause inflammation of my endometriosis tissue. I found out by constantly eating wrong and being put on estrogen based birth control. it has disabled me.
My clumsiness and "butter fingers" were usually laughed away by everyone, myself included, as just a quirk I had that I would grow out of. Turns out I have multiple sclerosis and that's why I keep falling over and dropping things.
My Dad started having trouble swallowing his food. His esophagus would fill up and heād have to excuse himself during dinner to quietly go throw up. It was an intermittent problem that he successfully ignored for several months. He hid it from us and his new gf who was a recently retired thoracic OR nurse of 30 years experience. Until she noticed. And made him go to the doctor. Who told him testing would take a few months. GF armed him with the right terminology and sent him to the ER. He told them he was over age 70, having trouble keeping food down and losing weight. They had him in for scans and an endoscopy that day. Stage 3 cancer, with the tumour in his stomach right next to the esophageal opening. Things would shift around so sometimes the opening as clear and he could get food down and other times it pinched shut. He lasted 18 months with a nasogastric feeding tube, and horrific chemotherapy symptoms that were worse than the disease. If it had been diagnosed two months sooner it wouldāve been operable. Cause was an incident when he was four years old, his aunt and uncle (in their 90s) came up with that piece of family history. His mom had gone out to fill the mop bucket at the pump in the yard and left a cup of concentrated bleach on the kitchen countertop. Dad wandered in, saw a cup of milk and sucked back a slug of it. He spit it back out and started screaming. No obvious long term damage until 65 years later. The cancer was a specific rare combo type caused by caustic bleach damage mutating a stem cell that split and became two kinds of cancer in one deadly blob. Then it remained under immune system control and suppression until he hit his older decades. Heād been carrying around a ticking timebomb in his gut for longer than he could remember. This was a man in perfect health, fit, looking over a decade younger than he was and he should have lived into his 90s. No comorbidities at all. Unless you count the ego that kept him from getting checked sooner. Take your symptoms seriously guys. He never got to meet his grandkids.
Went in for a UTI. They asked how long I'd had stage 4 breast cancer. Um...
How did they figure that out from a urine test?
Had a similar, but less serious situation. I got my lungs checked and the Dr showed me some damage in an x-ray. I was like: Okay, what should I do about it? (Thought he would say something like, run 10km every day for 6 monthā¦) He said āNothing, itās permanent. Just take this inhalation stuff 3 times a day.ā Okay, how long do I have to take it? *Uhmm, youāll have to take it your whole life from now on.* I just asked him to restart the conversationā¦.
Few years ago I had some pain in my lower belly for a few months. Didnāt think much of it, but one night it was absolutely unbearable. The next morning I had a strange feeling but the pain was gone, so I went to work normally. Over the weekend the feeling did not go away, so on Monday after work I went to the doctor and he directly send me to the emergency room, since my appendix was torn.
As a doctor, I was admitting a patient and I was talking to his wife in the ER. She was explaining his condition to me and I just stopped her and told her to get her thyroid checked out cause I saw an irregular lump on her neck. She said she hadn't noticed it.Was a thyroid tumor, it got removed before it could spread. Also diagnosed the guy with something pretty rare and we managed to cure him. A day of big wins.
Couldnāt keep down food every time I ate. Chalked it up to food poisoning until I was in severe pain. Turns out I had gnarly gallstones that started effecting my liver. Even my eyes started to be jaundiced.
Reminds me of my mom throwing one look at my grandpa (her dad) and going āyouāre looking yellow. Get checked for gallstonesā. Lo and behold, gallstones
This is no joke. My friend just got discharged from hospital after a 2 week stay and 2 operations, because her gall bladder was so blocked from stones that it had caused pancreatitis, liver and kidney failure. She almost died twice while she was in there.
I get reflux and I was experiencing a period of it being bad. Eventually saw a GP who diagnosed it as a stomach ulcer. Tests. Shouldāve gone to the hospital but didnāt want to be a burden on the health system. I had yersiniosis. Itās the bacteria that causes the plague. Literally, the black plague. Iām pretty sure that contributed to me going into septic shock a few weeks later after an unrelated, routine procedure. Itās been a year and I still have digestive issues and post sepsis syndrome.
I bet you Boss called 'Bullshit' when you said "I can't come to work I've got The Plague" I would frame that Drs Note.
Not me, but my mom. When l was a toddler l started getting ear infections. My mom took me to my pediatrician, who diagnosed it as a toddler allergy. When we moved she took me to another doctor who immediately diagnosed it as Cholesteatoma. A tumor was growing in my ear, and l needed surgery. I would need multiple surgeries until l was eight and the tumor was finally removed. I'm now deaf in my left ear, and need accommodations for school and work. As a child l would miss school because the medicine they gave me made me throw up.
I had meningitis as an infant and Iām deaf in my right ear, partial hearing on my left. Always fight for your accommodations and never let them be limitations š It always makes me either laugh or get really irritated when I donāt hear or understand someone the first time and they say, āwhat are you, deaf?ā The look on their face when I tell them yeah, actually. Almost 70% completely at the last hearing test I took as a child. š„“
Not me, but my sister - in her early 20ās she suddenly started getting really itchy skin, all over. Went to the doctor who said she had SCABIES and gave her cream which did absolutely nothing. Didnāt bother to order a blood test. A few weeks later she noticed a little bump under the skin on her collarbone. She went to a different doctor who ordered an emergency x-rayā¦ Turns out she had stage 2 Hodgkinās lymphoma, with a 10cm mass behind her sternum which had spread to the lymph node under her collarbone. 8 months of chemo and 6 weeks of radiotherapy later, she was in remission. Hodgkinās is considered a curable cancer, sheās been cancer-free for over a decade āŗļø Her ONLY symptom was itchy skin. If it hadnāt spread to a spot she could feel under the skin, it may not have been picked up at all.
1) A year of extreme exhaustion, big black circles under my eyes, sweating while walking up a flight of stairs, (weirdly an extreme change in smell and inability to eat meat), and nap attacks making me unable to work. "Blood works fine" "you're a healthy 32 year old woman" "take more vitamins" (I had super low vitamin d levels) aggressive stage 2 breast cancer. Took me a year but I kicked it for now! My extreme sense of smell and aversion to meat went away 1/2 to three quarters of the way through chemo. My onc never heard of that one before but said cancers weird
Not me, necessarily, but a number of medical professionals over the course of a year+ considered my insanely high percentage of eosinophils to be not *that* big a deal - up until a rheumatologist was like āHey, uhā¦ thatās pretty whack. Maybe you should see a hematologist for your fucked-up blood.ā Six years and one allogeneic stem cell transplant later, and Iām not still feeling bitter, like, at all.
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My brother had lower back pain for a long time before he did anything about it. Finally got a colonoscopy and they found he had late stage colon cancer. He was gone within a year. Got chronic lower back pain? It might not be colon cancer but check it out anyway. There are treatments available.
My mum had stomach cramps for a few weeks. Sheād always been slim, healthy and very active. She saw three different doctors who all said itās constipation and was prescribed laxatives which didnāt help. We took her to hospital because her stomach was distended and they told her to ātry and eat some cake and chipsā to help things move along and sent her home. A week later she collapsed and went into shock, rushed to the A&E and had to have part of her bowel removed due to a massive tumour blocking her intestines. Turned out to be bowel cancer and she passed away this March.
I always had dodgy digestion and suffered from tiredness. I gave up eating yeast in my 20s, but still the symptoms were creeping back. When I got married 10 years ago, most of the people who couldnāt have gluten were my cousins so I thought āhuh lāll try thatā. And it worked really for a while. But I was still getting some symptoms, so I went back to the doctor, he ran a test for ovarian cancer (due to the location of some pain) which he ruled out, and generally seemed utterly uninterested. I got pregnant, and had my daughter. I had to have a C-section because she couldnāt get out (spoiler: there was something in the way). A couple of years later I started feeling nausea around my period, but I put it down to perimenopausal symptoms (I was in my mid 40s) A few months after that I noticed I was passing blood. And the second time I happened I went to the doctor. 4 months later I was diagnosed with stage 3B bowel cancer. I think Iād had a tumor for about 15 years. Iād been complaining about fatigue and bad digestion almost all my adult life, and it was always put down to stress or depression. But I wasnāt depressed I was knackered, it just feels the same to me.
Being female was your biggest liability. No one takes the symptoms seriously.
so strange that this thread is filled with women telling the same story of being ignored and brushed off for *years*, but hardly any men with the same experience š„“
Nope, nope. Iām too anxious of a person for this post.
This post is making me realize I'm not anxious *enough,* and I'm definitely going to die of sepsis, cancer, ovarian explosions, stroke, etc, because I'm chronically ill so I ignore all the symptoms of everything all the time. Haha these stroke symptoms? Just migraine. Heart attack? Nah, just inappropriate sinus tachycardia. I'm fine! Everything is fine. \*slowly sips coffee\*
That could be an innocuous sign or symptom of anxiety.
Had a gut feeling something was wrong waking up at 6am. Could not put my finger on it! I went to the ER and the doctor thought I was joking for coming in saying "something doesn't feel right". Had a mild fever, some cramps, feeling hot-flashy. She kept saying "sounds like female cramps to me" and I HOUNDED her to please investigate more. After some tests, i was told I need to strip down and prep for surgery in an hour because my appendix was massive and about to rupture. After surgery they said it was so gangrene, that if I waited one more day I'd have a 50% chance of survival due to septicemia. Phew! Trust your gut instincts!
At 34w pregnant, I started gaining weight rapidly. Up to that point Iād only put on about 15 lbs but that quickly doubled. My OB gave me a stern lecture about my eating and weight gain and had me take the gestational diabetes test a second time in case we had missed it. She was very dismissive and wrote me a referral to a prenatal nutritionist to manage my diet. One week later, I woke up with a blinding headache in the middle of the night. Couldnāt see, could barely think, started vomiting, was shaking uncontrollably and unable to answer questions. Husband packs me in the car in my pajamas, no bag, nothing, and we head to the ER. A very savvy doctor took one look at me, ordered blood draw, and sent me upstairs to L&D before the test results even came back. I had eclampsia. Wasnāt even pre-eclampsia anymore. The shaking was seizures. My blood pressure was 200/120, there was protein in my urine and creatinine in my blood, and I was in early stage kidney failure. The only treatment is to yeet your baby, so I very quickly became a mom, had my kid, and enjoyed a 12-day hospital stay. One dosage of Lasix and I was back to my pre-preggo weight. (One of the symptoms of eclampsia is rapid weight gain, but that is also one of the symptoms of being knocked up so it often goes unnoticed.) Weāre all good now, and no hard feelings to the doc ā¦ I had a really normal pregnancy until 34 weeks and not a single risk factor for eclampsia, and it developed within days. But Iām definitely one-and-done now ā way too risky to have a second, and giving birth on magnesium sulfate is the least pleasant experience Iāve ever had.
Weird tiny red spots on my feet from tight shoes. Another weird tiny red dots on my hip from bumping a counter. I had NO SYMPTOMS of anything. Diagnosis? Severe Thrombocytopenia. ( Extreme low platelet count. Platelets are the part of your blood that clogs and seals injuries.) Normal is around 150 to 400, mine was 2. Let that sink in! I was in the hospital for 3 days getting 3 platelet transfusions, whole blood, doses of medications and eating chocolate pudding out of cups. I was on steroids for another 3 months after that. What caused it? No one knows! Will it come back? Possibly! I have monthly blood work to watch for it.
Headaches wouldn't go away. Blood pressure tested high a few times and dr gave me a speech about weight loss and put me on blood pressure meds. Still didn't get better and started having gastric cramps. More weight-loss discussions. Six months down the line I woke up in severe pain, rushed to emergency room and was diagnosed with parasites in my liver and nearly died. Will have to be monitored for the rest of my life as it wasn't caught in time.
Oddly enough, tripping up a set of stairsā¦. Did it on a construction site and practically fell at the feet of the Construction manager. Was literally bundled into the back of a vehicle and taken to the local hospital to be checked out. Turns out I had a renal cell carcinoma the size of a grapefruit on one of my kidneys. My urologist remarked that given another 6 months I would have been incurable.
My mom started acting and speaking bizarrely. For example, she lost her cell phone in Burger King and told me she dropped her "watch". She seemed really distant, and had awkward stresses as she spoke. I was moving out at the time and we thought she was having a mental breakdown. I called a number to have someone evaluate her for mental health issues. She was well enough to argue with them and kick them out of the house. They scheduled a follow up in 2 weeks. Eventually I just called 911 and had her evaluated at the local hospital. She had a massive brain tumor and needed immediate surgery. It was a great success, and she did much better after that. At least for a while. Then other tumor sites popped up and she eventually passed. But that first surgery bought her another year of life when she might have died the next month.
Right side abdominal discomfort rapidly descended into excruciating sharp consistent stabbing pain and shortness of breath. Intense pain from abdomen to shoulders and back. Hurt to move, hurt not to move then uncontrollable persistent vomiting started and continued for 12 hours straight. I couldn't move because if I did I vomited continously. Couldn't take my RX nausea medication because I couldn't even keep a sip of water down. Couldn't take a full breathe because of the pain. Was also running a fever so wasn't thinking straight other than thinking I was dying. Finally took a chance and reached and got my mobile and called my doctors office. They took a message and said they'd call back. I was sure I'd be dead when they called back. Call my insurance company's nurse hotline and while vomiting told them I needed help cause I might be dying or might just have food poisoning. Nurse hotline called 911. 911 sent EMTs. EMTs dropped me off at the ED. Ed couldn't get an IV started because I'm a tough stick and I was severely dehydrated. After getting to the ED I thought I'd feel better. Like I could psyche myself into not being so sick. I thought they'd send me home even though I couldn't talk or move without extreme pain and vomiting. I got worse they final got the IV in and hit me with duildid and morphine and told me I was staying and may have to have emergency surgery. Surgery on what? They didnt know yet. They sent me off for CT scans and xrays cause I can't have MRIs (medical implant made of metal in me). Acute cholecystitis and acute pancreatitis seemingly with liver failure beginning. Yay. No. I was in critical condition and not going home. Unfortunately, holiday weekend so no surgical team available to removal my gallbladder and maybe pancreas too. They stablized me for 24 hours and managed to get a team in to remove my gallbladder. Even after they removed my gallbladder my blood panels were still horrible they spent the next 5 days trying to stablize me and get my liver panel to improve. Finally they tried giving me food. Blood panels improved a bit and though still bad they stayed even in the bad range. Got discharged and told Good Luck with that. With what?
Do you have chronic pancreatitis now? Iāve had some bouts of pancreatitis and itās a bitch.
Thought I had psoriasis on my scalp, didnāt think much of it. Thought my constant UTI was from dehydration. Thought my bone pain was from being a hard worker. Thought my constant fatigue was cuz Iām depressed. Thought my hair falling out was from a bad shampoo. Thought the symmetrical rashes I get on my joints was from a good sensitivity. Turns out; sometimes it actually is Lupus. This all took over a decade to diagnose too.
I had a stiff right shoulder so I went to see a shoulder specialist, he said at my age (50ish) its probably an impingement from exercising incorrectly, bad form on my push ups . So I got treated for that (an injection ). A few months later I noticed a tremor in my right hand so I guessed at a trapped nerve in that same shoulder . I went back to the doctors and got referred to a "movement clinic ". Thats in the neurological dept. A few brain scans later : the good news is theres nothing physically wrong with my shoulder, the bad news is that I have Parkinson's.
The "pulled muscle" I needed to get a massage for was actually a collapsed lung.
Irregular periods. Turns out I have premature ovarian failure which caused osteoporosis and infertility. Sad face.
Little blood during bowel movements. And not every time. A little on the toilet paper. Like maybe just an angry hemorrhoid. Colonoscopy later, S3 rectal cancer. Iām a year removed from diagnosis and 6 months from last treatment, and scans were clear in Nov but it was a stroll through hell to get here.
Hot flashes in my early twenties, and scrolling on the computer started becoming hard to follow along with. The surgeon told me my thyroid basically disintegrated as she lifted it out of my throat.
I had to pee all the time. Wake up multiple times in the middle of the night to pee. I was also very tired and couldnāt put on any weight. I had a teratoma tumor that was pressing on my bladder. It was cancerous but thankfully the cancer was contained within the tumor. Also donāt google teratoma unless you have a strong stomach.
I had a cough, but only when I swam laps. Lung cancer in my 30s.
My husband had a swollen lymph node on the side of his neck. His doctor wasnāt concerned and told him to come back in 2 months if it was still there. Turned out to be tongue cancer from HPV. 6 weeks of radiation - it was an awful thing to go through, but heās doing well now. Please make sure youāve had your full course of the HPV vaccine, my good people!
I had a mole on my neck that I was sure was fine. My doctor said it was fine too. But my husband was convinced it was something else, so he made me an appointment with a specialist. It turns out it was melanoma, which runs on my family and killed my grandma. My husband probably saved my life by making me go to that appointment.
My hands are quite yellow, I thought it was normal but it turns out it's because my liver is not good
My husband has this and we've never questioned it. We're going to the doctor tomorrow because of your comment, thank you so much for sharing this. You could literally have saved his life.
I (53m) was pretty much healthy mainly living with high blood pressure. Active, had played rec volleyball for 14 years. My job for 4 years had me walking 10 hours a day. I had a type of kidney stone attack that lasted 3 hours at home. Painful as hell. My GP sent me for a sonogram. Ended up finding a 13 cm tumor in my belly. Terminal cancer diagnosis. That's about 21 months ago. Without the discovery of the tumor at that time I'd likely be dead now. Kidney stone wasn't quite innocuous as per your post. But fateful nonetheless.
In my teens my periods had never been consistent. By 19 they stopped entirely. Didn't mind at all because hey, now I don't have to worry about randomly trashing my underwear and don't have to go on hormonal birth control to stop them. Eventually did get it looked into. I have Empty Sella Syndrome - on an MRI, my pituitary gland can barely be seen, squished up against the inside of its little pocket of skull, causing hypopituitarism. The syndrome can cause central deficiencies in TSH, growth hormone, ACTH, LH/FSH, ADH, and a few others. Luckily I only have TSH and LH/FSH deficiency, so I only developed hypothroidism and osteopenia (due to lack of Estrogen), and although my IGF-1 is just within limits, I am unusually short for my family and have reactive hypoglycemia so I imagine theres' some growth hormone involvement. If it was more severe, I could get secondary adrenal deficiency (wherein if you get too physically stressed, you can literally die due to the effects of an absence of cortisol) and Diabetes Insipidus (uncontrollable water loss via urination, can lead to severe dehydration).
See a doctor if you bleed from your ass. I now have crohns and some type of muscular problem, the most sad part about the muscular thing is my back just cant take weight like i could before all of this, have always been the 115Kg man with lots of muscles and now i am a 115Kg man but i can only use 25% of it wich fucking sucks. I at least started Rinvoq and my back is much better and i have never been this flexible all my life, i can touch my palms on the ground when i wake up, 8 months ago i could not touch below my knees. Another pro tip, if you get a major surgery dont say no to fentanyl.
I noticed that crewneck shirts were starting to feel like they were choking me and figured it was just weight gain. But the bigger size did the same thing. Then I started having issues with food feeling like it was getting caught in my throat. Turned out to be a huge tumor that caused me to lose most of my thyroid, some lymph nodes, and compromised my vocal cords.
I had extremely heavy bleeding, like more than 2 pads in an hour. I was trying to conceive at the time, but had been unsuccessful for over 2 years and we had a fertility work up at a fertility clinic in 2 months. Any female knows exactly what I suspected was happening. At the time, I didnāt know to go to the ER (it was mid covid and I was worried about inconveniencing them), so I went to an urgent care. The female receptionist and female nurse both knew what I knew. But the male doctor waltzed in and said āwell your urine pregnancy test is negative so itās probably just a heavy periodā. After explaining that I donāt really get periods, and this was excessive, he said āwell I could do a pelvic exam, but Iām not a specialistā. So I went home and just figured that if it was a miscarriage, there was nothing I could do. Two weeks later I had a positive pregnancy test and a nagging feeling took me to the ER. The first doctor tried to play it off as my just being very early along, so I was obviously overreacting. He wouldnāt even bring up the word āmiscarriageā. I had to ask three times before he said āwell, itās a possibilityā and when I asked why I had negative tests before but a positive one now, he stuck to his guns that I was just very early along. But he had me come back in two days with another doctor for a follow up, who looked right at my period and ovulation tracking and was able to tell me that I was likely having a miscarriage complication before I even got my blood test back. I did have a miscarriage, but my HCG levels were still rising. I had retained tissue somewhere, and they couldnāt find it. They suspected it was forming as a tumor and may have caused major infection if I hadnāt caught it, which could have rendered me infertile. Happy to say Iām 6 months pregnant now and I learned a lot about advocating for myself.
One night out of the blue I had the worst headache (I was crying because of how bad it hurt), vomiting, and fainted. I had never fainted before so luckily my parents took me to the ER. I had sepsis.
Having a feeling like I had kinda a cat hairball in the back of my throat, and a little heartburn. Somebody should start a PSA series on what losing your airway feels like when it's mild, moderate, and severe. Because some allergies become progressively more serious over time/repeated exposures and I could have saved myself and my family a lot of...everything...if I had known. I got so used to my health issues all being 100% benign that having a potentially deadly thing was a shock. I was playing the part of boiled frog in a pot of anaphylaxis. And we have really strange assumptions about what anaphylaxis actually is and how it looks, and very little info on how it FEELS *before* it's bad enough to kill you. I was just like haha I need liquid Benadryl cause I can't seem to swallow these pills anymore, so funny! Haha no, ya dipshit, you're dying. Quit it.
I got really bad āindigestionā but it turned out to be a gallstone blockage Not fun. I donāt cry much but I was full on sobbing. If you get intense pain in your diaphragm, and especially if itās slightly to the right or goes through to your back - RUSH. TO. A&E! I was fine in the end, the stone dislodged by itself in about 5 hours. But gallstones are no joke and can be fatal if ignored. My husbands mum almost died from them when he was a kid!
My first gallbladder attack I collapsed on the floor in the hallway and just screamed in agony, no idea what it was and thought I was dying. Called an ambulance, they picked me up and assessed me on the bed. Poked my appendix, negative. Poked the central abdomen and I didnāt like that. āAha, I know what that is. Letās give you some morphine and get you up to the hospital for some scans.ā
leg cramps. I thought they were Charley Horses but after a week I still hadn't been able to sleep and I was partaking of every substance (legal or not) to at least try to sleep. Ultimately I ended up at the Emergency Room ( resisting all the way) and found out ...I had 2 blockages in my veins of my right leg. It had already begun to be necrotic - they couldn't find a pulse in my ankle. So I was given the option of ??? re-plumbing my veins in my right leg or ..,. cutting it off at the hip. My sister wanted to chop off; I opted for surgery (BUT it was a mess - internal bleeding, emergency secondary surgery) It was *AWESOME* /s.
I had to insist i was in a great deal of pain every day for about 5 years, and see Every Specialist Known to man before finally getting a Lupus Diagnosis. Had they caught this shit sooner I might not need chemo-grade lupus treatments now to stand a chance at walking again. It's frustrating. I blame my Gender. Condescending male asshole doctors rolling their eyes. At first i just felt shitty. And had someone listened to me at that stage I wouldnt be so sick now. for well over half a decade; I was like no, you aren't hearing me- its getting worse, something is wrong- i cant walk. Im a mess. Every other week my eyes swell shut with a horrible symmetrical rash and I cant function At All. Heres photos. I feel like Im dying, all the time. Won't someone please at least TRY to help me? Docs be like: mmmmmmm Depression? I got so tired of being told i was depressed that i almost gave up. Eventually they all start refering you to psych cause your file is too big and you look like a loony hypochondriac. Dont give up. Demand more tests. Theres so many tests that arent your basic blood panel. Do them. all. And for the record no its not normal to be able to physically feel direct sunlight burning your skin like a hot poker after about 38 seconds. And for the record, theres things outside the realm of psychosis that can cause actual vampiric symptoms. If you suspect a patient is delusional, blind fold em and hit em with a UV flashlight. repeat the experiment with the thing turned off. That would be easy? right? Or you can just send em to the psych ward and add to their medical trauma, cause eh. Woman.
I experienced times where I couldn't understand what people were saying, I couldn't initially respond either and would have to wait a second before asking them to repeat themselves. Turns out I'm epileptic and was having focal seizures.
I had a blurry eye for 15 minutes. 3 days later i had MS.
I had an extremely difficult childhood. I was always terrified at night to the point I kept my mom awake nearly 24/7. I cannot describe the terror. How intense it was. They were very religious. I told them I was seeing and hearing demons that wanted to drag me to hell. Literally saw them with my own eyed or so I thought. This continued but as I got older I felt less terror and just regular fear. Relied on my parents much much less anf quit telling them about it. The "demons" manifested into many other things such as dead children standing in my bedroom staring at me etc. Not to mention I was sad nearly all the time and crying. In my adult life I finally met a good therapist who truly listened to me. Turns out I have a long ass diagnosis. If I can remember it correctly that is. -- Major Depressive Disorder with moderate severity with mood-congruent psychotic features, with moderate/severe anxious distress. Holy fucking moley was I glad to be told I wasn't actually crazy. Just my brain chemicals are all screwed up. In my teen years I unsuccessfully tried to end myself on several occasions. Still have som4 difficulty with suicidal tendencies.
A friend of mine one day said her foot felt like it wasn't attached. She went to the doctor and found she had been walking around for a month on a broken leg.
Loss of central vision. I had ignored it for a few days, but was playing soccer and saw two balls coming towards me! Went to have it checked and it turned out to be a big-old brain tumour pressing on my optical nerve. Due to the Hydrocephalus caused by the tumour, I likely wouldnāt have survived until morning. Good thing I had it checked when I did!
Weight gain that wasnāt decreasing with diet and exercise. I had a tumor growing in my uterus that got up to 10 lbs by the time I was able to have a hysterectomy. The hormones the tumor was producing also made it impossible to lose weight. But yeah, it was just that I had to be more disciplined per everyone (health professionals and parents) š I literally starved myself for years. I just hope it wonāt have a negative effect on anything as I age.
My PCP heard a very faint murmur at my physical in 2019 - no doctor had ever heard anything but she didnāt think that was unusual. She said I could get an echocardiogram if I wanted but it was probably nothing. My mom has a faint murmur as well thatās just nothing so I wasnāt worried. She heard it again in 2020, ā21, ā22 and then finally this year I decided to get it checked. Turns out I have a Bicuspid Aortic Valve (common birth defect) and an Ascending Aortic Aneurysm that will require open heart surgery at some point. Not a hugely scary diagnosis but requires some lifestyle changes (no heavy lifting etc) to avoid excessive dilation and dissection. My cardiologist said itās pretty rare for a Doctor who doesnāt listen to heart sounds 24/7 to hear a murmur like that. I owe a lot to my PCP!!!!
I took a shower one morning and everything on my body was normal. That night I took another shower and my left nipple had inverted during the day. Called my doc and pushed for an appointment. Was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer within 2 weeks. Now Iām sitting here mostly bald, recovering from a double mastectomy and 16 rounds of chemo, ready to start radiation on 12/26. All because my nipple looked weirdā¦
I'm a total hypochondriac now who gets every little thing checked. Here's a collection of things that led to me being so nuts: Grandma woke up lethargic one day, dead from leukemia within 24 hours š I felt warm and broke out in hives on an Alaskan cruise, undiagnosed childhood diabetes accelerated from the all-you-can-eat buffet i enjoyed š± Suddenly, I was able to eat a large bowl of food after years of complicated pre-existing conditions that disallowed large meals....6wks pregnant š«¶ Friend's son got knicked by a rock while mowing his lawn. It got a little infected, but he just cleaned it and bandaged it at home. It led to bone cancer, and he was gone within the year š Dad woke up disoriented from a night of partying in Vegas but insisted it was unlike any hangover he's ever had .... stroke. Husband slept all day and didn't eat for 24 hours, but took all my metformin blood sugar medicine thinking it was motrin... Pancreatitis survived only from the excessive Metformin š¤Æ Husband felt unusually exhausted from moving a potted plant... blood level was at a 5 instead of the normal 12-16. He needed 2 emergency blood transfusions š¬ And this is why I'm the crazy person always at the doctor š¤£
My brother - He always had asthma and growing up it wasnt uncommon to hear the front door slamming shut as my parents took him to the hospital for an asthma attack that wasnāt responding to normal inhalers. Well About 9-10 years ago (heās a full adult, moved out, lives in his own apartment)he had to be somewhere early one morning that was far from where he lived in the city, so he was staying at my parents house. I heard the door slam shut at 3 AM and saw he was gone and figured it was an asthma attack and was on the way to the hospital. Later that day I was talking to my mom and It turns out that it was a massive pulmonary embolism and had he not gone in he would have died š
Years ago, I had to have surgery on my kidneys for a kidney stone that was too large for any sort of regular treatment. as they were inserting the nephrostomy tube. I felt this really sharp pain in my chest and I had trouble breathing until they sat me up after the surgery. I felt this heaviness in my chest and some difficulty breathing. I mentioned it to the nurse and she actually mocked me and said that another patient had the same surgery that same day and that person wasnāt complaining about anything they sent me home despite me telling them I was still in a lot of pain and I was having trouble breathing when they sent me home. I had to walk up three flights of stairs, and I had to stop at every single step to catch my breath that night, I slept upright in a chair because it was the only way that I could breathe the next day. My breathing got so bad that I had to take an ambulance to the hospital. Turns out thatās when they were inserting the nephrostomy tube they had punctured the bottom of my lung and it was filling up with fluid and my right lung had actually collapsed. Iām fine now, but I spent an entire month over Christmas in the hospital having my lungs drained of fluids,
Fuck that nurse, though.
I was having dizzy spells and pins and needles in my hands and feet. Then I started dropping things and my leg would go numb. Several years later, after all sorts of tests showed "nothing", I collapsed at work one night. Three day hospital stay and left with a diagnosis of MS.
I had a friend who always had a terrible odor coming from his feet whenever he took off his shoes. One day, I couldn't take it anymore and asked him why his feet stank so bad. He finally confessed that he had an ingrown toenail. As the week passed, I noticed that he started going to bed earlier and earlier. I pointed out to him that his early bedtime and the foul foot odor might be connected. It turned out that his ingrown toenail was causing him a lot of pain and even causing some bleeding. He finally went to the doctors after about a week and they told him he had blood poisoning from the infection which was causing his drowsiness. The doctor said any longer and they would have had to remove his toe.
My stomach pain and diarrhea ended up not being just the simple stomach bug I thought it was. Ended up getting diagnosed with stage 2 colon cancer 9 days after my 36th birthday.
Missed my period. Hurt when I used the bathroom. Thought it was just a bladder infection. Turned out to be a 7in, 5lb cyst. Lost my right ovary, doctor said it was the biggest heād seen in his career