TikTok user @omqgabbi recently asked people to share a time when their doctor completely ignored them when it was evident something was very wrong:
In her video, she explains her own experience: "Went to the doctor. Told them I had a bunch of hearing problems. That I couldn't hear low tones, like men's voices, very well. And that if there was background noise, hearing was not a thing. I just — I had to intently focus on you to understand what you were saying. I tell the doctor I hear well in a perfectly silent room. What does he do? He puts me in a silent room and tests my hearing. He proceeds to be like, 'Wow, your hearing is perfectly fine.' He turns to my mother, thinking he's funny, and he goes, 'Maybe your daughter doesn't have a hearing problem, but a listening problem.'" @omqgabbi has an Auditory Processing Disorder.
User @nicole90wv has a heartbreaking story about how she knew something was wrong when her daughter started growing pubic hair at 2 years old. Her doctor dismissed it for years, and her daughter is now being treated for stage 4 cancer:
"At 2 years old, my daughter started growing pubic hair and I asked her pediatrician. He said it was just a burst of hormones and I told him he was wrong. [He] wouldn't listen, wouldn't do any other test. Fast forward — she's 4 years old. Now she's getting acne and really bad body hair, on top of a full bush. Pediatrician says, 'Yeah, that's kinda weird.' Four months later, sends us to an endocrinologist. He does one blood test and says, 'Yeah, her male hormones are slightly elevated.' OK?? Ten months later, we get an MRI. She has a very large tumor growing on her adrenal gland, causing them to turn on. She had the male hormones of a 17-year-old boy at age 5. Fast forward another month — we've been at St. Jude's ever since. My daughter has stage 4 adrenal cancer. A very rare form of it as well. She almost died."
@nails.bygxbby has a horrifying story of what happened after her doctor ignored her when she told him something was wrong while he was assisting her delivering her placenta. He ended up pulling out her reproductive organs:
"When I had my youngest daughter, I gave birth vaginally and then my doctor came in because he was very late to my delivery. So, he starts to pull out my placenta and immediately I knew there was something wrong. I asked him, I'm like, 'Please, something doesn't feel right. Something is wrong.' He looks at me and says, 'No, it's OK. It's almost out.' So, he's like forcefully pulling it out and he proceeds to pull out my placenta attached to my uterus attached to my fallopian tubes. Everything comes out of my cervix. At this point, I pass out and they take me back to the OR and call a code white because there's blood literally everywhere. The last thing I remember is the anesthesiologist and the nurse screaming at each other back and forth and I hear my doctor say, 'We're doing a full hysterectomy.' I woke up an hour later and I had a double blood transfusion."
If user @jazzyohsofresh would have followed the instructions of the two ER doctors, she could have had a stroke or heart attack:
"In college, I hurt my ankle and after a few days of leaving it elevated, my calf was double the size of the other calf. I went to the emergency room and they told me I have a muscle cramp and to just massage it out. I knew this couldn't be right because I've been playing softball for 17 years — I know what a muscle cramp is. I went to the next emergency room and they told me again it was a muscle cramp and now accused me of just being a drug seeker. I go to the third emergency room, where they finally do a sonogram and find a blood clot in my calf, a blood clot in my groin — a piece dislodges and lands in my lung, giving me a pulmonary embolism. Had I massaged my calf the way the first two emergency rooms told me, I could have dislodged the blood clot, giving me a heart attack or a stroke. Ten years later, it took ten years to find out that I have an autoimmune disorder that causes me to be prone to blood clots. Medicine fails Black women."
User @getlostjennie was a teen mom who was ignored over and over again by her daughter's pediatrician:
"I was 15 when my daughter was born and when she was 4, she grew a large lump the size of a golf ball on the left side of her neck. I freaked out and took her to the hospital, where they were like, 'Oh my god, it's totally normal. We'll just do a little incision and drain it.' So they did and it never healed. And every time I took her to the doctor, they rolled their eyes at the stupid teen mom who didn't know anything about healthcare and dismissed me. I started asking for referrals to the sick kids [unit of the hospital] and they refused, like I was questioning their medical judgement. ... One day, I hooked my feet around the legs of a chair [at the doctor's office] and said, 'I'm not leaving without a referral to sick kids.' Doctor comes out and says, 'Don't make me call security.' I said, 'Don't make me call the newspaper.' He gave me the referral, I got her down to sick kids. She was diagnosed with atypical mycobacteria and cured within weeks."
User @bannahada spoke about the time when her severe head pain was shrugged off as a tension headache:
"I said to my GP, it hurts so much when I cough, sneeze, bend over, laugh, anything like that — when I sit up from bed. I said that the pain went all down the back of my neck and that over-the-counter painkillers weren't doing anything. He said, 'Sounds like a tension headache. Take some painkillers!' After a week or so, I went back in agony saying, 'Please, there is something wrong with my head. Please, take me seriously.' He reluctantly referred me for an MRI and said about three times, 'It's probably nothing, but I'll refer you for an MRI, even though it's probably nothing.' I was also having problems with my vision.... I was admitted to the hospital the same day for severe Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension."
After four years of being seen for his back and never getting any relief, user @clockworkbear found out his pain was being written off as "weight-related back issues":
"I was going to a doctor for four years about my back. Like, literally every few months I would go in and go, 'Look, the pain is still there. Nothing is helping. I don't understand what is going on.' They would give me painkillers and fuck me off. After four years, I got really exasperated. I was like, 'When are you actually going to do something about this? This has been going on for ages. Nothing has been done.' And, at the time, the doctor that I was seeing told me that every time I had gone in they had put it down as a separate, weight-related back issue. Don't get me wrong, being overweight can cause many problems, and indeed with your back. But this was because I fell down the stairs and tore two muscles in my back. Four years and they were noting it down as weight."
And, lastly, if it weren't for @everyone_is_a_douchebag firing her doctor and asking for another opinion from a different doctor when she was told her baby was a stillborn, her daughter wouldn't be alive today:
"When I was about 21, I went into pre-term labor (at five and a half months) and had a stillborn. About eight hours later, the nurse brought my baby back in the room and told me that she was actually alive — that she was struggling to breathe and would I like to hold her while she passed away. And, of course, I held her for another eight hours. The doctor kept telling me she was dying. Her Apgar scores are low, she can't breath — I finally fired him. I had another doctor come in and after she checked her, they took her to neonatal intensive care, where she spent the next four months. Today, she's 26 with two sons."
Doctors: Please take your patients seriously and listen to them.
