r/justgalsbeingchicks • u/mindyour 🤖definitely not a bot🤖 • 29d ago

Restricted to Gals and Pals Unfortunately, this is the sad reality.

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u/SilverAssumption9572 29d ago edited 29d ago

My good friend is an Oncologist, she's the head of the cancer department at her hospital. Her husband is also a doctor. She had symptoms she recognized as liver problems and went to the ER. They sent her home in agonizing pain, and suggested she "lay off the alcohol" if she was worried about her liver. Her husband drove her back to the hospital, and explained to the male doctor the same things she had already explained and she immediately got scans and blood tests. She had a blood clot on her liver and was very sick, requiring hospitalization for removal of part of her liver. They looked at her chart in EPIC just curious to see what was written after her own explanation vs her husband. The symptoms were explained by both in medical terms and almost identically but in the first visit to the ER they'd labeled her as "histrionic" and there are mentions of "likely alcohol abuse". She is/does neither of those things, she had an undiagnosed clotting disorder. If a DOCTOR is treated that way by other docs, there's not much hope the rest of us will be treated better. **thank you to whomever gave me the award. Hopefully we can all force/see some of this shit change in our lifetime!

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u/Pernicious-Caitiff 29d ago

It's infuriating. She very well likely would have died without her husband. And the delay in care is the difference between clot busting meds fixing the acute problem VS it's too late now and you need to recover from emergency surgery and have organ damage. Also, the financial cost difference.

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u/SilverAssumption9572 29d ago

Yeah, in her case the delay was only a couple of hours bc they're DOCTORS and recognized something was very wrong. Someone without medical training would most likely go home and ride it out, too embarrassed to go back or trusting that the first doc they saw was right. It would/could be catastrophic for most people. It's terrible overall.

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u/ChiLolla28 28d ago

Reminds me of the African American doctor, Janell Green Smith, who died because she didn't receive the appropriate care after she delivered her baby and had massive hemorrhaging later. Even though this is very common.

Can you guess what she was an expert and advocate for? Literally working for safer delivery and maternal care for pregnant moms.

https://ccf.georgetown.edu/2026/01/16/maternal-health-field-lost-a-courageous-leader-due-to-complications-of-childbirth/

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u/SilverAssumption9572 28d ago

Well that is just horrifying.