You are a hypochondriac but probably a woman so in his defence it was probably easy to figure out....

---

anonymous 2 years ago

pretty sure the commenter above got his armchair medical degree from ikea. doctors are very bad for being dismissive only for patients to pay the price years later when the worst happens.

---

anonymous 2 years ago

WOMEN'S HEALTH
Doctor dismissed her huge belly, refused to order a scan. She had ovarian cancer
Women need to be more aware of the symptoms of the disease, this survivor says.


Mara Kofoed before her diagnosis, left, and during chemotherapy treatment.Courtesy Mara Kofoed
JUNE 24, 2022, 4:24 PM EDT / SOURCE: TODAY
By Mara Kofoed and A. Pawlowski
Mara Kofoed, 45, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in December 2021 after months trying to figure out vague and seemingly unrelated symptoms. She found doctors dismissed them at every turn and didn’t connect them to a tumor. It took a visit to an emergency room to finally get answers. Kofoed, who lives in Hudson Valley, New York, shared her story with TODAY.

It was the biggest shock of my life to find out that I had ovarian cancer. I would have suspected maybe breast cancer because my grandmother had it, but ovarian cancer was very, very off the radar.


Women need to be trained on this more. We know about breast cancer, but almost no one could rattle off the symptoms of ovarian cancer — I couldn’t have rattled them off. There are all these minor, little things, and it’s very hard for people to put it all together. The doctor wasn’t putting it together either.

In 2017, I started feeling a little pain during sex. That was the earliest thing. Another early symptom was a little bit of a different sensation around my urethra. I thought, “It feels like a UTI, but it’s different.” It felt like something was pressing on my bladder.

There was also a change in my urination patterns — I was getting up in the night to go pee, which was new and different for me. I was going to pee more frequently during the day, too.

I had general fatigue without an explanation. I also suffered from constipation.


Fatigue was one of the symptoms. "Some days, you’re just sitting on the couch going, 'Gosh I am just dead,'”Kofoed said.Courtesy Mara Kofoed
In May of 2021, I started noticing my waist was thicker. I’m very thin and slender normally, so I just noticed a thickness around my belly. I was skinny in other areas, so it looked like I had gained a little bit of weight, but only below the ribs.

I did hear that bloating was a symptom of ovarian cancer, but it’s such a vague symptom. I still wasn’t even thinking cancer. I didn’t know enough about what to look for. The bloating is happening because the tumors are growing and there is fluid surrounding them, a condition called ascites.

Bloating is a very misleading way to describe it. We think of bloating as gas that’s from eating something. But people don’t connect that to the ovaries, so it needs a different language. It’s a thickened abdomen area that's persistent, later growing into a distended belly.

Related: Woman with ovarian cancer who urged others to know symptoms dies at 43


I started having little pains in the ovaries — little pinches and twinges. I also had a couple of episodes with extreme ovarian pain where I was leaning over, grabbing the countertop, telling my husband something is very wrong.

I saw the first gynecologist I could get in with, which wasn’t until November 30, 2021. I told him about all of the symptoms and my belly was very large, but it wasn’t like I went in there going, “I’m ready to get checked for ovarian cancer.” I still had no idea what was wrong with me. I wasn’t stringing these things together, I didn’t know they were all related.

He ignored almost all of the symptoms that I mentioned, but focused on one. He leaned back in his chair and said to me, “Women your age stop wanting sex and so they get dry.” He was focusing on the pain-during-sex part.


This photo shows Kofoed's distended belly.Courtesy Mara Kofoed
He didn’t seem concerned about my belly size. I wanted to get a scan, but he said, “You don’t need a scan.” I left that appointment completely traumatized because of what he said to me, how he ignored me and dismissed what I was saying. His office sent me a document in the mail that said the Pap test was clear and “We’ll see you in a year.”


A week and a half after that appointment, on December 10, I went to a local urgent care off the highway on a Friday night because I didn't think I could get through the weekend. The distended belly was so extreme that it severely affected my walking, breathing, eating, drinking, sleeping, sitting and going to the bathroom. It was adding pressure to every organ — so intense, I thought I might die. It was one of the most painful and scary things I’ve ever experienced.

I told the nurse all of my symptoms. She looked at my belly and took it seriously. She knew right away this was not normal and said, “You need to go to the ER tonight and get a CT scan.”


At the ER, doctors came back in after the scan and said they found a mass. I needed to see an oncologist immediately.

It turned out to be stage 3C ovarian cancer. Each ovary had a tumor — 12 centimeters on one side, 6.5 centimeters on the other. There were two smaller tumors on the rectum and bladder that were about 2 centimeters. Just a week and a half earlier, the doctor examined me and missed that.

Kofoed had to undergo chemotherapy.Courtesy Mara Kofoed
I underwent a debulking surgery on December 28th, 2021. They took out the ovaries, tubes, uterus, cervix and omentum, which is a lining that holds everything together.

I also received six treatments with two chemotherapy drugs. Today, I’m doing very well. I took very good care of myself during chemo treatments.

Recommended
WOMEN'S HEALTH
Mom with terminal cancer planned a farewell trip with her son. Then she was cured
If I had waited a year for my next appointment, as that doctor’s office advised, it would have meant death. I wouldn’t have lasted a year.

One of the most important things for women to look at is their thoughts. Are you saying to yourself: "This is weird. This isn’t normal. I wonder what this is?"

The biggest messages of all with this disease is: If there is a symptom that is persistent, that keeps coming back or maybe it doesn’t go away at all, that is very concerning.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

Mara Kofoed
Mara Kofoed is an ovarian cancer survivor who lives in Hudson Valley, New York. You can find her on Instagram @aboutlovecoaching.

A. Pawlowski
A. Pawlowski is a TODAY health reporter focusing on health news and features. Previously, she was a writer, producer and editor at CNN.


ABOUT
CONTACT
HELP
VISIT
TODAY APPS
AD CHOICES
PRIVACY POLICY
DO NOT SELL MY PERSONAL INFORMATION
CA NOTICE
TERMS OF SERVICE
CAREERS
CLOSED CAPTIONING
TODAY SITEMAP
ADVERTISE
TODAY STORE
SHOP TODAY
SELECT SHOPPING
SELECT PERSONAL FINANCE
© 2022 NBC UNIVERSAL

---

anonymous 2 years ago

Doctors dismissed a teacher's worrisome vomiting and stomach pains as anxiety for a year. It turned out to be cancer.
Anna Medaris Apr 6, 2022, 11:58 AM ET
Download the app

A woman clutches her lower back in Stuttgart, Germany on December 1, 2016. Lino Mirgeler/Picture Alliance/Getty Images
For nearly a year, Heidi Richard's severe and worsening pain was dismissed as anxiety and mono.
After demanding a scan, she learned she had advanced cancer and continues to undergo treatment.
"Medical gaslighting" is when clinicians dismiss symptoms, deny tests, and ultimately misdiagnose patients.
Get the inside scoop on today’s biggest stories in business, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley — delivered daily.

Email address

By clicking ‘Sign up’, you agree to receive marketing emails from Insider as well as other partner offers and accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

Heidi Richard, a 47-year-old elementary school teacher in Worcester, Massachusetts, is a lifelong runner who'd always been healthy. So she knew something was wrong in spring 2019 when she started experiencing severe stomach pains, vomiting, and night sweats.

At the doctor, though, she was told her symptoms were just stress or anxiety. She was given an antacid and sent on her way, she wrote for Today.com.

Richard's pain and vomiting didn't subside, and she unintentionally lost 30 pounds. "I was trying to eat, but I was just unable to — I was just getting so sick," she wrote. This time, doctors chalked it up to mono, despite testing negative for the infection. They told her to keep taking the antacid and prescribed anxiety meds.

Richard's symptoms intensified, and she developed back pain and neck swelling. When doctors tried to give her a muscle relaxer for what they brushed off as a pulled muscle, she demanded an imaging test.


The diagnosis: stage 4 diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which had spread to her abdomen, spleen, bone marrow, sternum, lungs, groin, and neck.

"Doctors kept saying, 'Oh, it's anxiety or you can't handle the stress of your job or you're overreacting. It's not a big problem,'" she wrote. "I don't feel like they would have said those things to me if I had been a man."

Richards underwent chemo, got a stem cell transplant, and continues to receive immunotherapy once every three weeks. On April 18, she'll run the Boston marathon, albeit more slowly than her past races. She's speaking out to encourage other people to listen to their bodies.

"Know what your baseline is and when something is wrong, don't be afraid to ask for a second opinion or ask for that test," she wrote. "Don't be afraid of sounding like a hypochondriac — that's what I was afraid of and luckily I spoke up when I did, because finally I had enough."


Other women have been coming forward with stories of "medical gaslighting"
Medical gaslighting describes when medical professionals dismiss a person's symptoms, deny tests or treatments, and ultimately misdiagnose them. Women are especially vulnerable to the experience.

Since medical literature largely focuses on how symptoms present in white men, students and doctors might not know how to spot these signs in other patients.

Women patients also tend to wait longer for cancer and heart-disease diagnoses than men, The New York Times reported. One study found that younger women were two times more likely than young men to have a medical expert give a mental-health diagnosis when their symptoms pointed more to heart disease.

Chloe Girardier, 23, is one victim of medical gaslighting. She said she sought a doctor's appointment after a persistent cough but was denied at first because it was "just a cough," The Sun reported.


After five months and seven doctor's appointments with no answers, Girardier — who by then had begun losing weight for no apparent reason — said she insisted on a chest X-ray. The scan revealed a 4.25-inch mass in her chest that turned out to be Hodgkin's lymphoma, a rare cancer that required her to undergo intensive chemotherapy.

"I can't believe it wasn't looked into further, and if I hadn't pushed for the chest X-ray, I may still not have a diagnosis," she said.

NOW WATCH: Popular Videos from Insider Inc.





* Copyright © 2023 Insider Inc. All rights reserved.
Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Sitemap Disclaimer Accessibility Commerce Policy Advertising Policies Made in NYC Jobs @ Insider
Stock quotes by finanzen.net Reprints & Permissions
International Editions: INTL AS AT DE ES IN JP MX NL PL

---

anonymous 2 years ago

College Student Diagnosed with Cancer After Doctors Dismissed Her: 'People Need to Speak Up for Themselves'
“The doctors were saying nothing's wrong with her, she's fine… I just started to feel like I was crazy,” Jessica Sanders, 21, tells PEOPLE

By Vanessa Etienne Published on February 2, 2023 12:30PM EST
Jessica Sanders was 15 when she started experiencing constant sharp abdominal pain that made it uncomfortable to exercise or use the bathroom. The pain was so bad that she often had to sit out at soccer practice or go home early from school.


At the time, Sanders — from San Carlos, California — was already "intimidated and scared" of going to the OB-GYN as a teenager, but she made an appointment to figure out the cause. However, she says what followed was years of her pain being dismissed by doctors.


Now, the 21-year-old San Diego State University student is opening up to PEOPLE about being diagnosed with ovarian cancer after years of doctors telling her she's "fine," sharing the importance of women advocating for themselves and their health.

"At first, they would tell me it's just period cramps, it's hormones, you're pregnant. Another time it's a UTI, it's a bladder infection. A doctor also said that my pants are too tight and not to wear thongs because they were causing irritation and pain," Sanders recalls. "One of the doctors really rubbed me the wrong way when he said I probably wasn't wiping myself the right way. So that was really frustrating and that was kind of all the care that I got until I was 20."


"My parents have always been super supportive but they didn't know what was wrong with me either," she adds. "The doctors were saying nothing's wrong with her, she's fine, so I stopped complaining about my pain because I was dismissed. I just started to feel like I was crazy."

21-Year-Old Woman Diagnosed with Ovarian Cancer After Years of Doctors Dismissing Her Pain

Jessica Sanders. COURTESY JESSICA SANDERS
Woman, 24, Told to Lose Weight by Doctors Who Dismissed Her Pain — but She Had Ovarian Cancer

It wasn't until Thanksgiving 2021 that Sanders couldn't tolerate the pain anymore, struggling just to eat breakfast with her family. Assuming she would be dismissed again, she went to the emergency room. This time, an ultrasound revealed that she had a 17-centimeter cyst on her right ovary and would need surgery to remove it.

While in surgery, doctors learned that the cyst had ruptured and Sanders had a liter of blood in her body. They also discovered a tumor wrapped around her right ovary, which ultimately had to be removed — something Sanders says she still hasn't fully processed.


COURTESY JESSICA SANDERS
Sanders was ultimately sent home to recovery and was feeling some relief as her pain was subsiding. However, on Dec. 8 2021 she was called into the doctor's office and told that she had small cell carcinoma of the ovary, hypercalcemic type — a very rare, aggressive form of cancer.


"I just thought, 'This would happen to me after all this time. I'm gonna die.' I just broke down," she says of learning the devastating diagnosis.

Sanders explains that she regrettably spent a lot of time on Google looking up survival rates for her type of cancer and, because it's so rare, she felt hopeless with every result. Sanders' type of ovarian cancer affects younger women more often than more common types of ovarian cancer, but most are diagnosed late.

Tennis Great Chris Evert Reveals She's Cancer-Free After Sister's Death from Same Disease


L: Caption . PHOTO: COURTESY JESSICA SANDERS
R: Caption . PHOTO: COURTESY JESSICA SANDERS
'Chicago Med' Star Marlyne Barrett Reveals She Has Uterine and Ovarian Cancer: 'I'm Holding Onto Faith'
"Even with my family's support, I felt so lonely because I now have this disease in me and I can't control it. It was really frustrating and shocking, especially being a super healthy person," Sanders says, sharing that she started cancer treatments immediately.

"I was stuck there," she continues. "I felt very alone because I'm just a student. All my friends are partying in college and I'm sitting in a chair, surrounded by a bunch of people a lot older than me with cancer."

Sanders ultimately went through six rounds of chemotherapy — three full-day sessions per week, every three weeks — before she was declared cancer-free in April 2022. She then had a stem cell transplant, which she called a "terrible time" in her lengthy treatment plan.

"I was throwing up constantly, I couldn't get out of bed and I couldn't eat for two weeks, I couldn't brush my teeth, or bathe. I couldn't do anything," she recalls.

Though Sanders has come a long way and is doing well today, she admits that the disease has taken a significant toll on her body.

"I went back to school, I started training with my soccer team again, obviously very slowly. But I'm still recovering from stem so I feel it all the time," she says, noting other symptoms like brain fog, nausea, fatigue and neuropathy. "I feel trapped in a 50-year-old body almost because of all the things that I went through. So it's definitely slowed down my body a lot more, which is hard because I was such an active person."

CNN's Christiane Amanpour Shares Her Battle with Ovarian Cancer: 'I Have a Whole New Lease on Life'

COURTESY JESSICA SANDERS
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

The frustration behind her delayed diagnosis is what inspired Sanders to share her story on TikTok and give advice to others who have also had their symptoms dismissed.

"People need to really speak up for themselves and not be afraid to tell doctors when they're wrong and tell them to keep pushing for answers," she urges. "This isn't just happening to me, it's happening to women all over the world."

Sanders' experience also inspired her to launch Fight for Female Health, an organization that sells T-shirts and sweatshirts to raise money for the Small Cell Ovarian Cancer Foundation. She uses her platform to raise awareness about early detection and the symptoms of ovarian cancer.

"As females, we are very much overlooked because of our reproductive organs. A lot of my friends don't even want to go to the OB-GYN because they're scared and they don't know what questions to ask," Sanders tells PEOPLE, adding that she'll continue to speak out on social media and share any information she has.

"If I can help one person, I'll post every day."

Related Articles

21-Year-Old Woman Diagnosed with Ovarian Cancer After Years of Doctors Dismissing Her Pain

Minka Kelly Reveals Details From Her Traumatic Childhood in New Memoir: 'I Carried a Lot of Shame' (Exclusive)

Florida Woman, 20, Has 100-Lb. Ovarian Cyst Removed: 'It Felt Like My Organs Were Being Crushed'

All the Ups and Downs of the 'Here Comes Honey Boo Boo' Cast

Woman, 24, Told to Lose Weight by Doctors Who Dismissed Her Pain — but She Had Ovarian Cancer

Marsai Martin Suffered 'Debilitating Pain' Before Having 'Grapefruit-Sized' Ovarian Cyst Removed

'Chicago Med' Star Marlyne Barrett Reveals She Has Uterine and Ovarian Cancer: 'I'm Holding Onto Faith'

Peloton Instructor Leanne Hainsby Describes Breast Cancer Journey: 'It's Been a Tough Year'

Genevieve Padalecki Had Her Breast Implants Removed After Experiencing 'Super Weird' Symptoms

Bindi Irwin, Olivia Culpo and Chrissy Teigen Suffer from Endometriosis — an Expert Explains the Condition

Oprah Winfrey Reveals the Scary Cardiac Symptom That Was Actually a Sign of Menopause

Mom Reflects on Breast Cancer Diagnosis at 32: 'How Will I Have the Strength and Energy to Care for My Kids?'

Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's Relationship Timeline

Samantha Harris Says She Is 'Healthier Than Ever' After Surviving Breast Cancer (EXCLUSIVE)

'Company' 's Jennifer Simard Transforms the Pain of Her Past Anorexia Battle into Humor on Broadway

Actress McKenzie Westmore Opens Up About Undergoing Reconstructive Surgery After Bad Filler
PEOPLE
NEWSLETTER

Follow Us
NEWS
ENTERTAINMENT
ROYALS
LIFESTYLE
STYLEWATCH
SHOPPING
About Us
PEOPLE Tested
Editorial Policy
Careers
Privacy Policy
Contact Us
Terms of Service
Advertise
PEOPLE is part of the Dotdash Meredith publishing family.
Please review our updated Terms of Service.

---

anonymous 2 years ago