Undiagnosed illness
I read an interesting article on the Stuff website this morning about a retired, surgical oncologist. He had spent his life operating on cancer patients and now he was experiencing symptoms similar to his mother, who had died of pancreatic cancer. He had lost about 7kg and was having bouts of abdominal pain that worsened as the day went on.
Initially, he was relieved when the CAT scan ruled out pancreatic cancer but his relief turned to despair when other tests failed to find the cause of his pain. This man was lucky, in that he had former colleagues in the profession he could turn to and brainstorm his condition with. It had started after a camping trip, when he felt bloated and nauseated and had trouble eating. He thought he might have picked up a parasite but his wife hadn’t got sick and he had used water filters. Also, with the absence of diarrhea, he soon ruled that out.
His doctor suggested he was reacting to food and suggested a grain-free diet, a diagnosis which irked the former surgeon. A further diagnosis of a rare chronic digestive illness was dismissed, after a biopsy showed this wasn’t the cause of his symptoms.
Eventually an MRI was ordered where the problem was discovered. The retired surgeon had a small piece of wire in his upper abdomen. This had actually shown in the initial CT scan but was dismissed as a calcification of a blood vessel. He wondered how the wire had got there, initially thinking it may have come from a wire used to treat a prostate condition but the two were different. It turns out the culprit was from a wire brush used to clean the barbecue and he was not the only person to have ingested one, with similar cases having been documented. He makes a suggestion for people to switch to nylon brushes to prevent this from happening to others.
My take from this story was the way this surgeon felt when no one was able to find the cause of his symptoms. He said the two-month ordeal stirred memories of some of his oncology patients. And it led him to appreciate, in a away he hadn’t previously, how severe undiagnosed pain made him feel alone, frightened and desperate, despite his long experience as a surgeon.
There are so many people whose conditions go undiagnosed, people who are told their symptoms are in their head, yet this story highlights that there can be a cause for many of the things people suffer from.
In my time as a practice nurse, I saw numerous, unwell patients coming into the surgery, whose bloods came back negative. In fact, there were way more negative results than positive ones. Many symptoms resolve on their own but I feel for those people whose symptoms persist, with the lack of a proper diagnosis. Each year, researchers are discovering more and more about the causes of some diseases. I think I have already mentioned the Medical Medium in a previous blog. This man believes there are no such things as autoimmune diseases, for example. He says the body does not attack itself, rather it is fighting an underlying pathogen and says glandular fever is often the culprit as it progresses through many different stages in the body.
This retired surgeon is a good example of an undiagnosed condition, with doctors suggesting allergies and rare digestive disorders. It was a foreign object in his case. It will be a great day when the cause of all diseases are discovered and people are validated for what they are experiencing and treated accordingly, instead of feeling as this surgeon did, alone, frightened and desperate.