Posted on 06/11/2009 9:05:50 AM PDT by JoeProBono
For eight years, Jessica Terry suffered from stomach pain so horrible, it brought her to her knees. The pain, along with diarrhea, vomiting and fever, made her so sick, she lost weight and often had to miss school. During a science class, Jessica Terry, 18, discovered a tell-tale granuloma in her own pathology slide. During a science class, Jessica Terry, 18, discovered a tell-tale granuloma in her own pathology slide. Her doctors, no matter how hard they tried, couldn't figure out the cause of Jessica's abdominal distress.
Then one day in January, Terry, 18, figured it out on her own. In her Advanced Placement high school science class, she was looking under the microscope at slides of her own intestinal tissue -- slides her pathologist had said were completely normal -- and spotted an area of inflamed tissue called a granuloma, a clear indication that she had Crohn's disease. "It's weird I had to solve my own medical problem," Terry told CNN affiliate KOMO in Seattle, Washington. "There were just no answers anywhere. ... I was always sick." Terry, who graduated from Eastside Catholic School in Sammamish, Washington, this month, is now being treated for Crohn's, says her science teacher, MaryMargaret Welch.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Nope, not in any way, shape or form.
Is that why you are so sensitive about this?
I'm not sensitive about this specific issue, per se, but rather the broadbrushing and blanket statements far too many tend to utilize.
I'm terribly sorry you are unable to discern the difference.
Are you so dense that you must resort to personal insults when you are unable to accept the fact that you made a blatantly opinionated comment in your first post and others have a different position than you?
You’ve had problems with doctors, we’ve all gotten that message loud and clear, others have not and their opinions are just as valid as yours.
I will refrain from posting on this thread again as it appears my comments have you a bit upset.
Young eyes vs. older eyes....makes a world of difference! I can hardly put on my makeup, and am only 53. I do not mind gray hair or wrinkles but do miss the eyesight of my youth. Even with glasses or contacts, the seeing is not what it had been.
I would hate to have to work all day in a lab with a microscope at this age.
WOW! You too, eh?
Son, 10 mos old, screaming constantly and one “cold” after another after another after another. I suggested that maybe he was allergic to milk. The response was “no child this young could be allergic to milk”. Never saw that idiot again. STILL burns me up!
Really good doctors are almost as rare as hen's teeth.
I know this because I've had to diagnose my own thyroiditis and pernicious anemia. Even when one PA test came back positive and the lab analysis indicted an 85% chance of PA, not one doc said boo turkey, and I went to a bunch with all of my many test results trying to get some help. I finally asked for a different PA test, that when it came back positive, indicated a %100 chance of PA. Then I finally got some acknowledgment. And folks, PA is not a rare disease.
Ditto with thyroiditis: I had to ask for the tests I wanted.
So during the multiple years this was all happening, I was slowly dieing, since PA is a fatal disease. And I spent all of my waining energy reading medical papers and medical texts, trying to do for myself what none of my doctors could do for me. I ended up knowing far more than most doctors about my conditions and many others I studied while working on a differential diagnosis.
I've got one really great doc that has helped me do some of these things and prescribe me the tests and medications I need, and even figured out some things I didn't, including when the thyroiditis tipped into overt hypothyroidism. But guess what? This doc doesn't accept insurance! Cash on the barrel-head! He's totally opted out of the insurance game so he can spend the amount of time necessary to figure out what is wrong, and prescribe treatments he feels are appropriate.
Along this path of illness, I came to feel that my survival was an intelligence test. I urge each and every one of you to take the medical well-being of you and your loved ones into your own hands, because almost no one in the medical profession really cares about you. They are mostly just clocking hours. Really, your mechanic and computer guy probably care more about the outcomes of their ministrations than does your doctor, because they have to survive based on the reputation of their work quality.
And it's only going to get worse with socialized medicine. Medicine will be such a cookbook affair, that there will be no discretion for a doctor that might care to try to figure out what is wrong with you. You'll be denied the tests you'll need for diagnosis, and then if you do miraculously mange to obtain a correct diagnosis, you'll receive the cheapest medications in lieu of the most effective medications.
BTW, I live in the Denver-metro area, so this is not one of those total backwoods rural situations, though I have developed a theory that a plot of the density of good doctors will highly correlate with a plot of the density of really good Italian restaurants. (Oh, and I don't think there is a single really good Italian restaurant in Colorado.)
My husband and I were discussing this just the other day. He had an MRI on his knee. Do they have people who do nothing but read MRI's all day? Do they take mandatory breaks? I think after a few hours I'd be cross-eyed and miss bunches of stuff.
I was mostly breastfeeding. But the more I supplemented the less he nursed, the more formula he got. Ear infection, stopped sleeping through the night, cried ALL day and night. I was told my baby was simply spoiled.
It was so bad, I called my mother (lived out of state) and begged her to send us a plane ticket before I hurt my baby. I was worn out and scared to death. We hadn't been with my mom 12 hours before she insisted there was something very wrong. Six month old babies just don't cry like that, she said.
It took a few weeks, but we figured it out.
My experience was nearly EXACTLY the same. Stopped nursing at 10 mos. Put on milk. Immediately started getting sick. It went on and on and on. It was just horrible and to have a completely IDIOT doctor say he couldn’t be allergic to milk was just outrageous. And this is/was actually a VERY well thought of pediatrician. Unbelievable.
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