Do you trust your doctor?

I'm going to tell you the story of Jayme, in the hopes that this never happens to anyone else.

Coming home from her honeymoon in January, Jayme started experiencing shortness of breath. It was nothing major, and it passed, but it was the start of quite an ordeal for her.

Not long later she started having pain in her abdomen. It got so bad she went to the emergency room. Even though the pain was high and to the side, about mid ribs, they decided she needed her appendix removed. The pain didn't go away because it wasn't her appendix. They decided that it was kidney stones, so they sent her back to work with the advice that she should drink a lot of fluids. Again, they were wrong.

She's fortunate that she works in a medical center. She started feeling some pain in her leg and started limping. A doctor there told her she needed to go back to the emergency room. Her foot swelled up and turned purple while she waited. And the pain never let up.

After several weeks of pain, two wrong guesses by doctors, and an unnecessary surgery, they finally figured out what was wrong. She had TWO pulmonary embolisms (blood clots) in her lung, which is what was causing the pain, and a 21 inch blood clot in her leg.

So she had to have a tube surgically implanted to administer anti-coagulants in her leg and has been in the hospital for another week. She'll be on medication for at least 6 months to try to rid her body of the clots. This is a very serious medical condition, one that can easily kill a person. 15% of all sudden death cases are attributed to pulmonary embolism. This is something that they think started on her honeymoon in December, but it took until late February to get her correctly diagnosed. It's been a terrible ordeal for her and her new husband, one that could have been significantly easier if she'd been diagnosed correctly in the beginning.

Interestingly, one of the major causes of this kind of clot is forced immobility, like a long plane ride. Also, obesity and estrogen containing contraceptives can contribute, along with genetic factors. But most people get this kind of condition from riding in air planes.

So the moral of the story is this: if you have ANY doubt, get a second opinion. When it comes to your health and your body, don't be afraid to stand up for yourself. If she'd insisted it was not her appendix, pain being in the wrong place and all, they might have found this earlier. But she deferred to her doctor, thinking he knew best. Not that I blame her at all. Almost of us would do the same. But we all need to be more proactive in taking care of ourselves, not automatically assuming our doctor knows best. I'd have been saved 3 months of a terrible emotional roller coaster if I'd insisted my doctor give me Ambien instead of all the other weird meds she put me on when I went in for insomnia. I'm coming to realize that, though there is a great deal of science in the practice of medicine, a lot of it is also educated guess work. So don't be afraid to take a stand, or get a second opinion, if you're at all unsure about what your doctor is telling you.
And if you experience any pain, especially in your leg, or unexplained shortness of breath after a long plane ride, go see your doctor immediately.