This sometimes doesn’t work. My wife is severely ill. Has been for years. A couple years ago she developed a wound on her heel that just wouldn’t heal. She spent a week in hospital while doctors tried to figure it out. In the end, they just thought she was fucking nuts given her constellation of symptoms and the fact that she is a woman. This dumbfounded me because she had a fucking wound on her heel. I told her that the wound was finally proof that she was sick and it was a good thing. Man I was fucking so wrong.

We finally found an expert in mcas who was like, yep you have mcas, you are the worst I’ve ever seen and here is a med for it. She is still severely ill, but her heel wound, which inspired no curiosity in the hospital doctors, is finally closing.

Happens to men too unfortunately.

Went into the hospital last year in extreme pain between my chest and abdomen. This is the exact pain both my mother and father felt before their gallbladders had to be rapidly extracted.

Now, when I say pain, I fucking mean pain. They were giving me crazy amounts of high strength pain killers and they were lasting for more minutes. Then they prescribed me something and discharged me. Next day I'm back and worse than ever, so they finally admit me and assign me to the surgeon.

Man comes in immediately acting like I'm just here seeking drugs. I'm reeling in pain and we're all explaining what's happening. Dick head refused to do any tests, he just wanted to wait me out, so the bastard puts me on a no food, no liquids diet, so now I get to sit there and suffer in pain while also being incredibly thirsty and hungry.

Next day's Saturday. I'm still in pain and I've heard nothing from the surgeon. I'm doing everything short of getting on my knees and begging for water. Still no tests. Still won't take me off the diet.

Next, we threaten to leave and seek care elsewhere. The patient advocate comes in and we explain what's been happening. They're clearly shocked by his behavior, but can't say much. So, without warning, she calls the surgeons personal number and puts him on speaker. We can all hear him out on a boat doing God knows what instead of testing me. So I go nuclear and loudly proclaim that he had better get his ass off that boat or the next phone call will be from my lawyer.

Within the hour I'm finally getting my blood drawn and tested.

The next morning, I still haven't seen the surgeon. I'm woken up at 6am by a nurse telling me I have surgery in an hour. Turns out some levels were so high that they had to call in an emergency surgery team to do exactly what I had told this Dr. Cox wannabe dick head two days earlier.

Basically, the surgeon was content to let me lay there and die to prove I was drug seeking.

I honestly should've looked into malpractice suits, cause I'm still experiencing tons of issues a year later

Applies to young males, too! if you look able to work, doctors don't give a shit. Mine even gaslights me about the pain I am in

It’s always psychosomatic until it isn’t. (And by then, it’s so much worse than it would have been if it had been treated earlier.)

This article is so un-oniony that it isn't even a garlic

I had to wait until I had organ damage that could be verified by testing for my symptoms to be believe. They were trying to shove anxiety meds, antidepressants, and antipsychotics down my throat the whole way down, and these were the doctors that I was traveling a long way to see because I actually liked them.

There is no such thing as "healthcare" in the USA.

Have a candid enough conversation with your wife/sister/mother/female friend and if they've been alive long enough to need a doctor, they probably have stories that will back this up. My wife, my mother, and my mother in law do.

My wife brings it up routinely (and she's not at all the stereotypical feminist) when we discuss such things.

And then you ask for help to apply for disability, but they say that you're only too sick to work because you are not engaging in healthcare, so they make your treatment plan goal "Get back to work".

doctors are rich and powerful in the USA and still claim "we want single payer but we ~~won't do~~ can't do anything to make it happen."

Oh this one hurts.