What reality are you in? No, really?

[Kisa]

So I was at the doctors for a well visit. I had planned to ask for a script for pain meds. Long story short, I've had chronic pain for a while and no non-perscription medication does the trick. My usual doctor, who I love, was not in this particular day, so I saw a different doctor who I hated. I have only seen her twice in my life.

First Time

I am also a chronic allergy sufferer. I went to try to find a new allergy medication.

Sucky Doctor: What are your allergy symptoms?
Me: I have post nasal drip, drowsiness, and sometimes a runny nose and/or itchy throat.
SD: Do you have nasal congestion?
Me: No.
SD: Do you have itchy, watery eyes?
Me: No.
SD: Do you have trouble breathing?
Me: No.
SD: Do you have a cough?
Me: No
SD: Do you get sore throats?
Me: No, not really.
SD: *does some stuff, checks eyes, ears, nost throat etc.* Ok. I'm going to write you a couple scripts.
Me: Ok, thank you.
SD: Here's one for eye drops for your itchy, watery eyes.
Me: But I don't have itchy, watery eyes.
SD: Well, this will help. Here's one for your asthma.
Me: I don't have asthma.
SD: And one for nasal congestion.

It went on like this until I had 5 scripts (none of which were helpful, none of which I filled) in hand. She gave me one for every allergy symptom imaginable, EXCEPT the one's I ACTUALLY HAD!!

Second Time

She checked me over. I casually brought up the pain meds. She asked what the problem was. I went over my basic symptoms, and also told her I was seeing 2 other doctors for it but was unable to get a perscription because one doctor is on vacation and the other is helping the Peace Corps in Africa for 3 months. My main sypmtom is pain. Mostly in my abdomen, but also in other parts like my legs, sholders, ribs and back. She laid me down on the table and asked me where it hurt the most right now. I pointed out the spot which was near my hip. She then proceded to push on my stomach all over until I was in TEARS, sat me up, and told me the pain wasn't real. :wtf:

SD: You are depressed and your depression is making you imagine pains.
Me: I'm not depressed. And I'm not making this up.
SD: You have stress-induced depression. You need to go on anti-depressants and you need a psychiatrist.

I then told her about a few examples of my pain. Once, my stomach hurt so bad I fell down the stairs because I couldn't stand up anymore. I lay there, crying, unable to move until the pain ebbed a bit. I was able to CRAWL into my room, but I couldn't stand up to get on my bed, so I curled up into a ball and cried on the floor for a half hour. Another time, I woke up at 3am because my stomach hurt SO bad. I took 3 Advil (I know you're only supposed to take 1-2) but it did nothing at all. I couldn't stand up, I couldnt sit, I couldn't lay down, I couldn't stand still, I had to limp around the room at a 85 degree angle. I couldn't stop crying, I was grinding my teeth, and I was in so much pain, I couldn't think straight. If the Advil bottle wasn't so far away, I would have taken 3 more in a heartbeat. Sometimes, my stomach hurts so bad, I throw up if I eat anything at all.

SD: Which is why you need anti-depressants.
Me: You're diagnosis doesn't cover all my symptoms.
SD: Acid reflux.
Me: I don't have heartburn or acid etching on my throat.
SD: Acid reflux and Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
Me: The pain isn't consistant with my stress level, or my eating schedule.
SD: Well that's what you have.
Me: Regular Doctor and Specialist Doctor both told me it was not anything to do with my digestive system or my emotions. Are you saying you are a better doctor than they are?
SD: No. I'm saying I'm right.

She told me I had acid reflux, IBS, stress-induced depression, anorexia and imaginary pain.
My other 2 doctors told me it sounded like Endometriosis or scar tissue in my intestines. Occam's Razor anyone?

In the end, she started telling me I was in denial and that I should stop being childish and see things her way. I saw red. I told her to leave now and to not say another word to me.

When Specialist Doctor came back from his Africa trip, he gave me Tylenol 3 that helps quite a bit. Not as much as I had hoped though...

[iradney]

Please tell me you reported Sucky Doctor? Writing scripts for symptoms you DON'T have is such a big, screamingly neon red flag....

[rose_metal_nz]

Please tell me you reported Sucky Doctor? Writing scripts for symptoms you DON'T have is such a big, screamingly neon red flag....

^ THIS. :eek: that woman scares me from several continents away.

[EricKei]

Indeed. Her insistence upon the depression and psych stuff, despite the evidence to the contrary, suggests a slightly-too-close connection to either a shrink, a place that makes depression meds, or both...>_<

[Sapphire Silk]

Is your regular doc doing any follow up to confirm the diagnosis?

If it is scar tissue, there may not be much that can be done.

Endometriosis, otoh, is treatable. Is the pain connected with your cycle? If not, I'd be more inclined to think of other things.

[BlaqueKatt]

Endometriosis, otoh, is treatable. Is the pain connected with your cycle? If not, I'd be more inclined to think of other things.

uterine fibroid tumors can be quite painful, as can kidney stones....I've had both, still have the tumors....

[Sapphire Silk]

uterine fibroid tumors can be quite painful, as can kidney stones....I've had both, still have the tumors....

I've had kidney stones as well . . . excruciating. :cry:

[Kisa]

Please tell me you reported Sucky Doctor? Writing scripts for symptoms you DON'T have is such a big, screamingly neon red flag....

I did make a call. Sadly, she wrote in my chart that I told her I had those symptoms so they changed my chart and apologised for her :rolleyes:

Is your regular doc doing any follow up to confirm the diagnosis?

If it is scar tissue, there may not be much that can be done.

Endometriosis, otoh, is treatable. Is the pain connected with your cycle? If not, I'd be more inclined to think of other things.

The pain doesn't restrict itself to my "mentration days" but the pain does follow my (irregular and extreme) cycle perfectly. I'm seeing a gynecologist and I had 3 ultrasounds and a battery of tests done. They found a big cyst on my ovary and a few smaller ones. They shrank with bc, but I stopped taking them. Bc pills make me queesy....:o

[Kisa]

I added a post with a better discription of my symptoms. Link (http://www.customerssuck.com/board/showthread.php?t=78891)

[LadyAndreca]

I think I'm VERY lucky that my awesome-but-extremely-busy doctor added an equally-awesome doctor to his practice to help with the workload. Yours was nuts!

[XCashier]

I did make a call. Sadly, she wrote in my chart that I told her I had those symptoms so they changed my chart and apologised for her :rolleyes:
:headscratch: Just from what I'm reading here, it sounds to me like she's pulled this stunt on other patients before. I wonder if there's any way they can fire her?

Are your ususal doctor and the sucky doctor the only two doctors at your clinic? Are there any others you can go to if Usual Doctor is unavailable? You don't need to deal with Sucky Doctor's crap on top of everything else.

[Sapphire Silk]

I did make a call. Sadly, she wrote in my chart that I told her I had those symptoms so they changed my chart and apologised for her :rolleyes:

Not cool. Not cool at all. That's falsification of documentation, and it is a CRIME. She should be reported to the Medical Board.

The pain doesn't restrict itself to my "mentration days" but the pain does follow my (irregular and extreme) cycle perfectly. I'm seeing a gynecologist and I had 3 ultrasounds and a battery of tests done. They found a big cyst on my ovary and a few smaller ones. They shrank with bc, but I stopped taking them. Bc pills make me queesy....:o

Hmm. Sounds like a GYN problem to me. Did you talk to your GYN about a different type of BC? Did the symptoms go away on the BC? If they did, another formulation might work better for you, have fewer side effects.

But I understand the issue with BC. I quit taking it because it make me gain a lot of weight.

[Captain Trips]

Sounds like an "old school" doctor.

You say you have pain. You're a woman, so you're wrong. You don't have pain, you have an emotional need to pretend to be in pain so you can get the pills you addicted yourself to. You don't have pain, you have depression. Like all women. Oh, and you don't have any of the symptoms you were asked about -- you are a woman, so you are lying about that, too. Here are the meds to treat what you don't say you have -- and let's put this in your chart so that you won't be able to lie about this again...after all, you are a woman, so you don't know a darned thing about your own medical condition.

And this was a woman doctor that took this attitude? Just wait until SHE gets ovarian fibroids! (I'm not a woman, but being married to one for almost 16 years I've learned a few things -- like how so many doctors have their heads firmly planted in the 19th century!)

[Ben_Who]

I will never have a medical symptom as scary as a doctor who refuses to listen to me when I tell him that I have it.

I had a dentist where, if I explained to him about pain I was having, you could literally see his eyes glaze over. He simply wasn't interested in anything his patients had to say. It got worse if the pain was associated with something he'd already worked on (he gave me a poorly-fitted crown). THEN he got huffy. When the tooth became noticeably infected, he threw me out of his office.

I went in for my usual annual eye appointment. I've always been a bit deuteranopic, and said so when the clinician put up the Ishihara test. "That one's 37...that one's 5...I don't see a number in the next one...or the next...Nope, no number in that one, either..." She got a look of concern on her face and all but fled the room. A moment later, the opthalmologist himself was in the room asking me some questions in a Grave And Serious tone of voice. He said that the test had shown no anomalies last year...

I thought about that and said, "But you didn't give me an Ishihara test last year."

Turned out that the clinician who was supposed to have given me the test had forgotten, and covered up by insisting that I'd passed with flying colors, so to speak, and dutifully recording so on my chart. This gave the staff the impression that I had developed severe color-blindness over the course of a few months for no discernable reason. No wonder they were all freaking out.

[BrenDAnn]

The doctor in the OP would fit in well at the local band-aid station hospital/doctor's office. They (a PAC, by the way, not even a doctor, because hey, small town place, etc) managed to misdiagnose my mother not once but twice, when she had every symptom imaginable of pancreatic cancer. Needless to say, I don't go to said hospital or the doctor's office that is part of it unless I have something very minor--like a cut needing a band-aid, or the flu--going on with me.

[Sakka]

When I was fourteen, the optometrist that my family had been going to for years decided that it was time to retire and sold his practice and records to the other optometrist office in town. Approximately, eight months later, I go in to the new place for my yearly eye checkup.

I go through the various tests, noticing that there were not only a LOT more then with the previous eye doc, but that they seemed to be more comprehensive as well. For some of the exams, I needed to surrender my glasses, which promptly disappeared with one of the techs.

I’m still going through one of the preliminary exams when the tech who took my glasses storms back into the room and starts grilling me about my glasses. In particular, she wanted to know just what the :censored: was with the lenses. Apparently previous eye doc had done the prescription so that one of the focusing prisms was at ninety-degrees to normal. There were some other oddities with the lenses, but that is the only one I remember almost twenty years later.

The tech was getting more and more frustrated when my answer to every single question was, ‘Previous optometrist was Retired Doc, and I was told that he sold his practice and records to this office.’ I have no idea what Tech was expecting, I was fourteen years old and didn’t know the details of my eyes inside and out. Especially as my eyes were changing often enough that I needed new glasses every other year or so.

The questions about my glasses finally ended when the Dr wandered over to see what the holdup was and overheard me asking the tech what happened to the records from Retired Docs office, and that all of the info she needed about my eyes and glasses should be in said records. :innocent:
After a quick conversation between Dr and Tech, I’m given the last couple preview tests (something about a blinking light and then that evil, evil puff of air into the eye.) Then ushered into the exam room to be subjected to the bright, bright lights of the proper eye exam.

I’ve been going to that same office ever since and the Doc and I banter back and forth during the exam now. Mostly her commenting that I should be bouncing off of things like a human pinball, me commenting that she hasn’t seen me drive. :devil: :whistle: :D

I have learned a few things about my eyes; I have a lazy eye and only see out of one eye at a time. Average pupil width for people is 3mm, mine is 6mm. Which explains why I have always hated bright daylight and could see in darkness when most people were still stumbling around blind. … As an aside, an easy way to freak people out in the dark is to tell someone which way to go so they don’t walk into any furniture. :whistle:

[emt_cookies]

Are you sure it's not cysts? My cysts hurt like hell when they burst.

[hornet95]

It sounds like a version of PCOS. I also agree with emt_cookies; could be large cysts bursting.

[teh_blumchenkinder]

I thought about that and said, "But you didn't give me an Ishihara test last year."

Turned out that the clinician who was supposed to have given me the test had forgotten, and covered up by insisting that I'd passed with flying colors, so to speak, and dutifully recording so on my chart. This gave the staff the impression that I had developed severe color-blindness over the course of a few months for no discernable reason. No wonder they were all freaking out.

:roll: that's hilarious!

And Sakka... dang. Good thing RetiredDoc is Retired. :eek: and you weren't driving yet!

Kisa... geeze. At least you have a chance to return to sanity.

[EricKei]

Speaking of problems with eye docs ~_~... My brother was born with Lazy Eye. We had a guy as our eye doc who was supposedly "the best". He didn't catch my brother's lazy eye until bro was in third grade...and you (in theory) really need to catch it before about age 3 or so to be able to fix it substantially. As a kid, he didn't wear the eyepatch regularly (just ripped it off as soon as he got to school); as a teen, he did manage to self-train the eye somewhat, but you can still tell if you look him right in the eyes. As a result, bro now has one eye which has a contact in it that...we think...allows him to at least have sterescopic vision at a rating better than 20/200. On the upside, due to having used the other eye almost exclusively for 15 years, the good eye is somewhere around 20/10, meaning he can see MORE clearly out of it than most people.

Me, I'm just nearsighted and need specs to bring me to the 20/30ish range >_< Blind as a bat without 'em. Even friends who have strong 'scripts will try them on on occasion and go WTF dude O_O Apparently my lenses would make good backups for the Hubble...

[Sakka]

Speaking of problems with eye docs ~_~... My brother was born with Lazy Eye.

That is one of the big issues mom had with Retired Doc. She kept insisting there was a problem with my eyes, but kept getting brushed off. The weird prism in the one lense was an attempt by Retired Doc to 'pull' my eye into proper position. Gave me blinding headaches for the first week or so until I learned how to look around the prism.

I never clued in that I had a lazy eye until well into my teens. My eyesight was so poor that I had to get close to the mirror and turn my head so I could see that eye clearly. There was also very little change in my peer group growing up, so no one commented about my eyes, other then that I was blind as a bat and had lousy hand-eye coordination. :P

as a teen, he did manage to self-train the eye somewhat, but you can still tell if you look him right in the eyes.

Only training, self or otherwise, was making note of under what conditions I use each eye, and that I unconsciously turn my head slightly so whichever eye I am using will have the best field of view. The off eye provides peripheral vision on the other side of my head, but isn't good for much else. Until I switch focus to it. ... I've made a couple people almost seasick by quickly switching focus between eyes trying to figure out which one provides the best view. Had one friend continously looking over his shoulder wondering what I was looking at. I was annoyed with him that day so didn't let him know I was looking through my other eye until after a few minutes and he started to look a little paranoid. :D :angel:

At the start of each appointment, New Eye Doc comments that I should be bouncing off of door frames and such when walking, until I point out that my vision has been like that as long as I can remember.

And of course, New Eye Doc has to play with the big flat plastic spoon over one eye for a couple minutes just watching how the uncovered eye flicks back and forth as each eye is covered.

Cover left eye -> right eye stays the same -> cover right eye -> left flicks over to look at New Eye Doc -> quickly switches cover to left eye -> right eye flicks to look at New Eye Doc -> Repeat several times until I ask if she's having fun because I'm starting to get a headache.

On the downside, I will never see in 3d.

Even friends who have strong 'scripts will try them on on occasion and go WTF dude O_O Apparently my lenses would make good backups for the Hubble...

One of my best friends growing up is over six feet tall. He tried my glasses once. ... He looked down and said his size thirteen feet looked smaller then his thumbnail. :roll:

[EricKei]

Ah yes, You reminded me of something I had inadvertently left out -- I did not wear corrective lenses of ANY kind until 6th grade, when they it had gotten to the point where I HAD to sit in the front row of class and squint to make out those fuzzy marks on the chalkboard -- if I wasn't squinting, or sitting anywhere else, I was lucky to be able to tell that there WERE any marks on the chalkboard at all. Note that I was one of those kids who sat 3 feet from the TV as a 4-year old *because I couldn't tell what was going on if I didn't*... Yup, same "legendary" eye doctor. The school's annual quarter-ass (calling them halfass would be too generous) hearing/eye tests marking me down as Normal on both didn't help, either.

For those who wear specs, my last scrip was ~6.75 in the "good" eye and 7.25 in the other, on a nearsightedness prescription. I don't know if that's magnification or what, but it sure seems that way >_> Both of my eyes, like my brother's, are worse than 20/200 without glasses. I've tried contacts to no avail, even those lightweight samplers they use at the eye doc's office HURT; it felt like several pounds of plastic was pressing down upon my eyes. To give you a good idea: Ya know how, if you're driving during a heavy downpour -- one so bad that it doesn't seem to make a difference whether your windshield wipers are on or not -- lights in particular will all turn "sparkly"? Now apply that effect to everything, illuminated or not, and smear a tub of vaseline over the windshield. That's what the world looks like to me without glasses. x.x

[Seshat]

Did you get those funky lenses and light beams to play with in physics class? If not, go to your local science museum (assuming you have one) and play with them.

Every lens has what's called a 'focal length'. Eyes have lenses....

To grossly oversimplify, assume that light starts out parallel, like =.
When you put light through a lens, it distorts it. No longer parallel, now >.

Now, if your retina (the back of your eye) is exactly at the peak of the >, you have normal vision. If your retina isn't, then everything is blurry because you're either seeing about halfway down the > ... or if your retina is too far back, the light beams have actually crossed, and you're seeing beyond the cross - basically, like x.

That's shortsightedness and longsightedness - where your retina is in front of or behind the perfect focal length for your eye's lens.
The correction for those is to stick another lens in front of your eyes - one where the focal length of THAT lens is either > or < and the combination of the two lenses (your glasses and the natural eye lens) puts the focal length right at your retina.

Astigmatism is where the lens is actually a wonky shape - a barrel-shape - and the eye doctor has to figure out a kind of reverse-barrel-shape for your eyes.

Keratoconus, what I have, is where the cornea (rather than the lens) is the wrong shape.

[EricKei]

i knew *some* of that, but not most of it ^_^ Cool! In other words, having an unusual eyeball shape was a potential cause of near/farsightedness; I recall seeing something about that as a kid.

I neglected this earlier, too, but my bro has Astigmatism in addition to the other fun stuff he's got going on with his eyes. He does wear contacts, tho -- One reeeally powerful in the bad eye, and a placebo lens in his good eye.