Absolutely incompetent physicians

The BBQ Pit
1

I’m so disappointed with this situation that I can barely work up any vitriol.

I grew up in a very, very rural part of south Georgia. The town I grew up in had a population of about a thousand. The town where I went to school, just down the road, was somewhat larger but not a sprawling metropolis by any means. It was the sort of place where people had enough spare car parts on their lawn to build a fresh armada, but lacked the motivation and sobriety to cut the grass around them to take inventory.

There was a very, very sweet lady who taught at my middle school who I hadn’t thought of for years who, apparently, hasn’t been feeling well. She had been going to doctors for the past five months in this rural little podunk shithole who just couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her. This was the area she grew up in, and she trusted those doctors, so it took ages and ages for anyone to convince her to go down to Jacksonville, Florida (the nearest big city) to see a “big city doctor.” That was on a Wednesday.

Thursday, the tests were conclusive for advanced leukemia. The doctors told her to go home and get on hospice immediately.

She died Sunday.

I’m not a doctor, nor do I have any medical training, but…I just don’t understand. How do you go for months and months with worsening leukemia and nobody catches it? How fucking incompetent do these doctors have to be to miss it? It took someone less than an hour’s drive away a FUCKING DAY to figure it out!

Two years ago, my dad wasn’t feeling well. He had grown up in Woodbine, Georgia and trusted the local doctors, so it took months and months for us to convince him to go see a big city doctor. When he did, he was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. He died two months later. Almost identical situations. I wonder if my dad might still be alive if the doctors in my home town weren’t so blindly stupid.

Guess I’ll never know. Neither will my teacher’s family. RIP, Mrs. Thompson. RIP, dad. And to the worthless MDs in Woodbine, Kingsland, and St. Mary’s Georgia that didn’t see anything, even after it was too late - thanks for nothing.

2

I dunno…maybe they needed to do a bone marrow biopsy to diagnose the leukemia? The small local doc might not have been set up to do such a procedure. Maybe the doc recommended she get a bone marrow biopsy, and she turned him down too? We don’t know what private counseling was provided.

From Bone marrow aspiration: MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia

Or maybe no one bothered to do a blood count and realize something was wrong. So, maybe they were incompetent. But we don’t know the details of her medical care, so we can’t really comment.

3

ya…leukemia is often caught by the lab during a routine CBC. A differential showing odd blast like cells would be kicked up the chain to a pathologist for further testing and diagnosis. Sounds odd. Maybe the docs didn’t order CBCs (weird, cbcs are easy and give a lot of information) or the lab was completely incompetent and the docs also somehow missed the symptoms. Who knows?

4

Hell, my doctor orders a CBC on me every couple of months or so. I growl at him about it*, but he keeps doing it. I was under the impression that CBC tests are like blood pressure and temperature readings, just something that docs want to do to get routine information.

*He doesn’t growl back, although he probably wants to. I DID apologize to him when I became allergic to yet another antibiotic, and told him I didn’t do these things on purpose.

5

Your timeline here seems to be 5 months from her first visit and complaint about this to her death.

For her have died so quickly, wouldn’t she have already been in an advanced stage 6 months ago? Or does leukemia move that fast?

(not that I suggest this doctor is off the hook for not ordering the appropriate tests)

6

I heard about this after the fact, and fourth-hand from my mother. That was my understanding of the timeline, but I sure wouldn’t swear to it in open court or anything like that.

It just all seems so careless. It makes me sad that we have such excellent doctors who travel abroad to help out the needy in other countries, but that here at home there are pockets where medical care is so…lacking. Not that Doctors Without Borders isn’t a wonderful program, of course, but hell, send QtM down to south Georgia for a week or two to smack some folks in line!

7

Unfortunate though it may be, I think you are right.

8

It’s not just in small towns. I was living in Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, and it took the doctors years to diagnose my epilepsy. They kept trying to pin me with psychiatric diagnoses for my blackouts until my mother witnessed me having a grand mal seizure. Even after having an EEG come up abnormal, one physician’s assistant at Hershey Medical Center tried to convince me that my seizures were psychosomatic.

A big part of it, I believe, is the arrogance that seems to be almost inherent in the medical profession in the US.

9

Yeah, well.

10

The Discovery Channel has “Mystery Diagnosis” which runs late at night. It shows people who have errant diagnoses that lasted years. The truth is not like “House”. One woman suffered for 50 years before they finally got it right. It was not unusual for them to have a doctor say "it is in your head’.
My dad had lung cancer and his doctor missed it for a long time. It was caught because the union offered free chest xrays to employees at work. He was told it was in his mind for a long time.

11

You should have seen the trouble we had when I came back from India with a healthy dose of malaria. They claimed everything - herpes, hepatitis, any other disease. STDs. They kept asking my mother about my sexual activity.

You may say they don’t know how to check for malaria in the States, and the truth is they don’t - but they had been told I just came back from India. It could have been cholera or malaria or a host of other things, and my mother kept telling them to check all of those diseases.

We ended up going to an Indian doctor who diagnosed me immediately.

My sympathies.

12

Did you go get your shots and stuff before you went? It’s been a long time since I visited, but IIRC I always got cholera, typhoid and Hep A shots, plus doxycycline (anti-malarial) pills.

13

Careless. There’s the operative word. When my 68 year old mother went to the doctor complaining of rectal bleeding, the doctor told her it was probably a touch of diverticulitis and sent her home with an antibiotic. Nevermind that colon cancer is the second most common cancer in women. Nevermind that there was a facility not 100 steps away that could have done a colonoscopy. Nevermind that the bleeding was heavy.

We’re talking about a bustling suburban-Chicago environment here. Not some one-pig town a stone’s throw from Dog Patch.

Fucker.