The Most Infuriating Thing About the American Healthcare System

This past Saturday on June 27th, I began to have pain stabbing me in my left breast. Now, I've had two kids naturally so I have fairly high pain tolerance, but this pain brought me in a doubled-over position, crying, and nauseated. I had never experienced pain like this before especially somewhere like my breast. I was talking to my mom who is an LPN and it was recommended that I go to my local hospital, which I was going to just write off the pain and ignore it because that's just how I am. I live with chronic pain in most of my body so I wasn't going to do anything but maybe lay down. However, the pain didn't stop, it turned into this horrific burning like my breast was on fire. I couldn't really breathe cause it hurt like nothing I'd ever felt. I decided it was best I go to the hospital since the pain wouldn't go away and it started with me just sitting down.

Normally in this instance, I would've gone to my state's top hospital, but I live 40 minutes from it now and because I thought nothing of the pain even still, I didn't want to be too far from some errands we had to run afterward. I went to the hospital about 20 or so minutes from me, coincidentally the same one I work for, and go through the normal triage and getting a room in a wing we call the Annex. The annex is a hall where the not-so-life-threatening cases go. The threes and fours in medical talk. They're usually quick in and out visits from what I saw while working in the emergency room. The doctor comes in with a female chaperone, the doctor was male so most hospitals do this to prevent lawsuits and harassment charges, and he does the breast exam that I was expecting. What I didn't expect was that he would find a lump, smaller, but still there, and still causing me pain. He wanted to do a mammogram from the emergency room but my hospital does not let doctors do them in the ER. Now, this is a key point, the doctor set me up an appointment and gave me a work order, this is important, to give to outpatient imaging the following Monday, June 29th.

As the weekend progresses, my pain and symptoms get worse, but not unbearably so. I go to outpatient on Monday at my scheduled time and sit in the waiting room for about an hour. When I'm finally called back, they tell me they're not going to do what the work order said. I'm not going to get the mammogram despite the fact I have both a family history of breast problems and a lump was found in my chest. They instead opt to do an ultrasound which is not what the doctor ordered for me to have done. Now for anyone that isn't familiar with medical things, an ultrasound can only go so far down, and most of the time deep tissue things are not picked up on it especially if you have a lot of fatty tissue from larger breasts or even your stomach if you're getting one for pregnancy. I would like to also mention that I am on Depo Provera birth control, this is known to cause breast pain because of the hormone shifts, but no lumps.

The ultrasound tech comes back from talking to the doctor, for what was only five minutes, which is not an exaggeration because I was watching the clock in boredom. They told me that because I was only 22yrs old and I was on birth control, that's all that was causing my pain. No mention of the lump, no breast exam done by the doctor, nothing. They only did a top layer ultrasound. In fact, I didn't even see the doctor. I was sent on my way with absolutely 0 answers to the pain that was still in my chest actually made worse by the ultrasound. Their patient quality control called me that same day and wanted to check up on me, so I told them exactly what happened and that although the ER was amazing in helping me and took everything seriously, the outpatient wrote me off. She took all my information, even said that what they did was wrong and should have followed the work order, so she reported them and told me to be sure to call my doctor.

Thankfully, I already had an appointment on June 30th, the next day, so I went to it and guess what? My normal doctor found several lumps in my chest, not good news no, but it does make me feel better knowing that the ER doctor wasn't wrong and that something was wrong with my chest. I've been referred to the James Brown Cancer Center and will be going as soon as an appointment opens up for me.

Now, this is the most frustrating part, because I appeared as a young woman they did not take me seriously in outpatient. They defied a work order and decided that I was just hormonal from birth control and that nothing was actually wrong. Whether the issues in my breast turned out to be Fibrocystic Breast Disease or Breast Cancer, the mammogram that was originally ordered could have found in and helped me know sooner. Especially if it's cancer. This is what is wrong with healthcare, just because you're young, nothing can be wrong.