I stopped at the scale, put down my purse and slipped off my shoes. "So you know what to do," the nurse laughed. "I've been to plenty of doctors in my time" was my reply.
When she asked me if I knew how to do a clean catch when sending me for a urine sample, I responded in the affirmative, and repeated as I walked to the bathroom: "I've been to plenty of doctors in my time."
And that I have. I have myriad health problems, and have had since childhood. As far back as I remember, I missed no less than 10-15 days of school per year -- and that before puberty kicked in and I found myself unable to sit upright on the first day of menses. I was always getting "sick." Thing is, I rarely had a sniffly nose, an upset tummy or a fever. Usually, I was just exhausted.
My doctors struggled to come up with an explanation for this bright but languid child. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia at twelve mostly because my mother began specifically asking about it. (I was diagnosed with a 20/200 left eye at the same time -- no one had ever discovered my impaired eyesight.) I did a lot of doctor-hopping throughout my childhood and teenagehood. I found out that most of the doctors in my area were fairly ignorant as to my condition and had no real help to offer. I didn't get effective treatment until I started traveling four hours to Beverly Hills to see the rheumatologist who shared the office with my mother's, who is world-renowned for his work with fibromyalgia patients, but wasn't accepting patients as young as I at the time.
That office watched me grow up. I traveled with my mother every 2-3 months for her appointments with Dr. Silverman, and then I started traveling down there every 2-3 months for my own appointments with Dr. Silver. The nurses were well familiar with me. They watched me grow from a lanky barely-pubescent child, always silent and hiding in the corner with a book, to a tall, lanky young adult, growing more confident and certainly more talkative.
And they took care of me. They listened to what was going wrong with me, and they understood, and when they told me what they thought, they knew what they were talking about. Dr. Silver was never afraid to explain recent research to me when I would bring it up. We could have a two-way conversation without me feeling condescended to. And largely, he recommended treatments that actually made a difference in my quality of life.
That kind of doctor is rare. I've spent more time in the offices of doctors who had poor communication skills, little knowledge of the condition at hand, and poor bedside manner than I have in the offices of doctors who were understanding and accessible and had relevant advice.
There was the doctor who dismissed my concerns about endometriosis as PMDD, primarily a mood disorder, when the only symptoms I had presented were physical, and so severe as to be disabling for the full week every month. There was the pediatric rheumatologist who would poke and prod at my tense and tender shoulders, repeatedly, every visit, exclaiming how tense they were. There was the county psychologist who marked me down for substance abuse when I listed Vicodin as part of my prescription list, even after I explained my disorder and offered to have her call my doctor for confirmation. There was the Pennsylvania doctor's office who consistently denied me prescription refills or otherwise put obstacles in my path, and whose doctors I had to lecture on what fibromyalgia is because they were still relying on information from decades ago. There was the rheumatologist who yelled at me for a full forty-five minutes about how fibromyalgia is actually depression and the medical community was conspiring to put him out of business, and then felt me up ("just checking your liver" -- which has what relevance, exactly?) before I actually ran out of the examining room, grabbed my dozing husband and broke into tears outside of the office.
And then he charged my insurance just short of $400 for the visit.
And that's just a sampling.
These experiences make me all the more grateful when I finally have a positive encounter with a medical professional.
I asked my husband to come with me to my appointment yesterday. I remembered sitting alone in that dark, closet-sized room for twenty minutes waiting for the doctor to examine my sonogram results and tell me whether the lumps I had in my breast were cancer. It was excruciating, and I didn't particularly feel like going through it again.
And when we walked out the door, I sighed to him, it feels so good to have someone actually take care of you.
I have been seeking diagnosis and treatment for my dysmenorrhea for four years. I've been suffering it for about a decade now. And now, only just now, I have someone actually doing the tests required to find out what is causing it.
My gynecologist listened to me while I described my symptoms. She asked questions to clarify. She explained her thoughts to me without condescension.
We're going to rule out infection first, she said, and then if everything comes back negative, we can schedule you for a laparoscopy to check for possible endometriosis.
I can't begin to describe that overwhelming sense of relief that hits you when you hear those words. Someone understands, and they want to make sure you are taken care of. They aren't looking for ways to dismiss you or pass you off to someone else. That pain you've been going through for all this time, and all those other doctors who just shrugged their shoulders and showed you the door -- someone is actually taking you seriously, and believing you when you describe your symptoms, and caring enough to follow through and make sure that it is correctly diagnosed and treated.
Someone is doing their damn job.
We scheduled a laparoscopy for next Friday. It is, thankfully, a fairly minor surgery. But hopefully, by that afternoon, we will have an answer.
