Day 4 most disheartening thing a doctor has told me

When my symptoms were at their worst, I saw a lot of doctors.

I was struggling with fibromyalgia, interstitial cystitis, depression, anxiety with panic attacks, and insomnia. So I had to visit multiple departments at the same time.

Urology, psychiatry, neurology, rheumatology, and more. All of those doctors passed me around like I was some kind of uncomfortable burden.

For example, when I had trouble urinating and went to a urologist, they told me it was just a side effect of my psychiatric medication. But when I went to a psychiatrist, they told me I needed treatment from a urologist.

When I had neck pain and visited a neurologist, they said my MRI was clean and told me to see a rheumatologist. The rheumatologist diagnosed me with fibromyalgia and explained that there’s no cure, only symptom-relieving medications—then told me to seek help from a psychiatrist. But at the psychiatrist’s office, they said pain wasn’t their area and that I should go to a pain management clinic. It went on like that.

Throughout that entire process, I felt like a patient who would never get better. Or more accurately, I felt like I wasn’t even seen as a real patient at all. To them, I was just a “hysterical and overly sensitive young woman”—in a very negative sense.

When I went to a large hospital’s neurology department after experiencing weakness and numbness in my legs (What’s more, I genuinely was experiencing leg weakness, and I had gone to the neurologist with a referral from another doctor who believed it needed to be looked into.), the neurologist said, “There’s nothing wrong with you. Go see a psychiatrist!” The tone of his voice felt like he was telling me I was crazy.

Even when I sought help at a pain clinic, I was treated poorly. I had experienced side effects from a nerve block injection in the past, so I was hesitant about getting it again. When I asked the doctor if there was another option, he said me rudely, asking why I even came to the hospital if I wasn’t going to take the shot. I was so dumbfounded I blurted out, “Because I’m in pain!”

There were some good doctors too, but even they only sympathized with my pain—they never told me it was something that could be treated. Looking back on it positively, maybe it was because of all that hardship that I was able to deeply resonate with Dr. John Sarno’s book when I first read it.