Okay, so DarkButterfly (who, as you may or may not know is my 18-year-old daughter) is having some mighty strange symptoms. About four or five months ago, her eating habits got very wierd. And she started gaining weight. Her periods have been very short and very irregular. Just recently, the oddest one of all: her breasts have started leaking milk. Well, you might say, no mystery there; she’s obviously pregnant. Except: urine test after urine test comes up negative. She was just at the health dept. this morning, and they did a urine test, which came up negative. But given her other symptoms, the doctor said she needs to get a blood pregnancy test. She still has MD Physicians Care insurance, until she’s 19. Her PCP is a pediatrician. He won’t deal with pregnancy, because he’s a pediatrician. OBs won’t deal with her without her knowing definitively whether she’s pregnant. The urgent care clinic won’t test her because she has insurance. The ER won’t test her because she isn’t having any “emergency symptoms”. Aaaaarrrrrggggghhh! So frustrating! I understand this is a highly unusual situation, but gosh darn it, everyone keeps telling us it’s someone else’s problem!
For now, on the advice from the doctor at the Health Dept., she is assuming she is pregnant, avoiding unsafe medications etc. The Health Dept. doc said she didn’t know of a single other condition that would cause these symptoms. But by golly, some days you don’t know whether to laugh or cry!
Please note: I am not looking for medical advice! Just sharing some of my frustrations with the cracks in a system.
Can she go to Planned Parenthood for a blood test? I know it would make everybody feel a lot better to have pregnancy ruled out or confirmed, even if that means they have to start looking for other causes.
I have several health problems which aren’t very common. I spent YEARS looking for a doctor who could understand and treat my issues.
I know how incredibly frustrating it can be, but just like any field, there are good doctors and bad doctors, doctors who are determined and doctors who just don’t want to be bothered with a mystery. It’s an enormous pain in the ass, but you just have to keep searching until you find the right one.
Why is her main doctor still a pediatrician when she’s 18? Maybe things are different in the States, but here in Canada I always saw my family doctor for everything - mom went to him when she was pregnant with me, he was supposed to deliver me (but was on vacation), I’ve only just seen him.
I don’t know that the doctor said there was no other possibility, just that she personally didn’t know of one. That’s an interesting link, too. Because if she’s not pregnant, we definitely need to figure out what the problem is.
Unfortunately, the closest one is an hour away, and I don’t have a car during the week. Fortunately, though, I’ve finally talked some sense into her pediatrician who has agreed (at last) to order a blood test at the local lab. She’ll be going later this evening to have the blood test.
A big part of the problem is that this is a small city, and her health insurance is the State sponsored insurance for uninsured children of low income parents. Until recently, all my kids had it. Now, my hubby is well-employed and the rest of the family is covered under his BC/BS. The oldest is not because, being over 18 and not a student, she’s not eligible. It’s hard to find doctors around here to take new patients with this insurance. But, as I said above, at least I’ve gotten her pediatrician to agree to order a test.
Thanks for listening to me, guys. I guess my nerves are frazzled right now.
Well, it’s her insurance. The program that I was able to get her (and my other two children) health insurance through some years ago when money was really tight, was MCHiP, or Maryland Children’s Health Insurance Program. The program only covers children and pregnant women. If you enroll as a pregnant woman, your PCP (primary care physician) is an OB/GYN. If you enroll as a child, your PCP is a pediatrician. In order to see another doctor under this plan, you need a referral from your PCP.
It may sound sucky, but believe me, for years before that, there was no health coverage for children whose parents worked but could not afford health insurance. Many times I was very thankful for the program. But by gosh, it’s been frustrating lately.
I know better than to make a diagnosis sight unseen. But even as a medical student, that sure sounds like hyperprolactinemia versus hypothyroidism. Neither are uncommon. Both can be treated medically. In fact, after a urine pregnancy test comes back negative in a woman with irregular periods, the next thing you should check is thyroid function and prolactin levels.
An endocrinologist isn’t even needed to make this diagnosis, nor to treat this. Any reasonably competent family medicine doctor, internist, OB/Gyn, or pediatrician should be able to nail this. It is also ridiculous for a gynecologist to refuse to see a patient with irregular periods. This is bread-and-butter stuff.
I’m sorry for being abrupt, but if you cannot get this worked up, diagnosed, and treated in short order (I don’t know what’s been done, I don’t want to make a diagnosis, this may have been already extensively worked up but the OP did not describe it as such) you need to remove yourself from the care of any of these medical professionals and seek out other primary care providers. This stuff shouldn’t be missed or even be confusing for a competent physician.
Too tired to hunt for a link, but very recently as of this post, the RAND corporation, I believe it was, released their findings after attempting to look into the notion that non-whites receive poorer medical care than whites.
Their results showed that there was actually very little discrepancy in the care received, and not all discrepancy they even found was always in favor of whites…
But the REAL news is that by the standards according to which they measured quality of medical attention, this level of care that we are all receiving more or less equally is pretty mediocre.
Why don’t you just make an appointment with another doctor, and pay for it yourself? That way, you don’t have to mess with the insurance company saying who you can see. Sounds like the most simple way to do it and it also sounds like she needs to be seeing someone very soon!
Good luck.
Well, did you know that half of all doctors graduated in the bottom half of their classes?
Ha ha. A friend of mine who wrote for the New York Times used that in one of her articles as a sort of ice-breaker lead, and got reamed for it by readers. We both still think it’s funny.
I wasn’t trying to imply that your frustrations were due to ethnicity. The study I referenced was meant to shine light on ethnicity-based discrepancies, but ended up revealing that doctors in this country pretty much treat us ALL like crap.
Well, she’ll be going to the lab for bloodwork later this evening. She even called the lab already to make sure they got the order for it! So, we should know in the next day or two if she’s really pregnant.
I agree that we need to figure out, ASAP, what the problem is, and deal with it!
nonacetone, it partly is a money issue, but we certainly could come up with the $70.00 or so that the docs around here charge for an office visit if we need to. But, as I said, she’ll be getting blood work tonight, and we’ll have rsults in the next 2 hours or so. I don’t think we could get her in to see another doctor faster than that.
Could you tell I wasn’t focusing when I made that last post? I left the ‘e’ out of results, and of course, we’ll know in the next two days or so, not hours. Of course, I’m sure the lab will have results in a couple of hours, but then they have to tell the doctor’s office that ordered the tests, and the tests have to contact us, etc. Ahhh, don’t you just love red tape?
My mother has a friend who has been dealing with some serious and baffling health issues this spring. One week the friend’s husband decided to take his wife to a particular appointment–on the grounds that he wanted to be there when she got the answers. This amused the friend, and my mother, because they were pretty sure that the doctor was NOT going to suddenly have the answers based on whichever test they were running that day. And sure enough, no answers were provided that day. Answers may have been since then, but there is still some uncertainty around. It certainly can be frustrating when one is battling not just mystery health conditions but the medical system in general.