Dr. Harmon set my symptom list aside and said I needed therapy, not a scan. So I laid the imaging report from the hospital across town on top of my list, the one with a finding in bold on page two that any first-year would have caught, and asked him to read it before I filed it with the medical board.
Because I had stopped just asking and started building a record. Eleven months of tracked symptoms, dated. And in August, when he would not send me, I had gone somewhere else and paid for the scan myself, and the scan found exactly what I had been telling him was there all along.
For a year the only thing I had lacked was the proof a doctor could not wave off, and the moment a hospital across town put the finding in bold on page two, the patient who wants a diagnosis for attention became a patient who had been right, in writing, the whole time.
His nurse stopped writing. The woman in the next room could hear everything through the door, and so, I suspect, could the nurse who had watched him dismiss me for a year.
I did not argue and I did not raise my voice. I said, this is the imaging from the other hospital. The finding is on page two, in bold. I tracked these symptoms for eleven months and you set the list aside every time. I would like you to read it now, because a copy is going to the medical board either way, and I would rather it went with a referral than without one.
The report was the report. There is no managing away a finding in bold that another physician has already signed.
The specialist I should have seen a year earlier saw me within the week. The condition was real, it was treatable, and catching it even at eleven months late still made all the difference, though it should never have taken a second hospital and a threat of the board to get there.
I did file the complaint, calmly and factually, with the dates and the two reports side by side, because the next patient he calls attention-seeking deserves better than a year of pain.
And I am being treated now, properly, by someone who read page two the first time. A year of being managed instead of treated ended not with me crying in my car, but with one bolded finding laid on top of my list, and it turned out the patient wanting attention was just the only one who finally went and got the scan.
This touches on a hard subject. If you have been dismissed about your own health, you are allowed to seek a second opinion, and the records are yours to request.