Be Your Own Advocate

The last two months have been crazy. I am at the new job at the hotel, which I love and we had final exams. The week before the exams my partner ended up in the hospital and eventually had surgery. Now we're at the long ever exhausting healing part of the surgery, however it appears there were two issues going on at once and they haven't yet identified the second one.

Financial nightmare, btw.

Since I haven't been able to post (or do much of anything) the last few weeks now that I can I figured I would share the lesson I've learned in medical care.

BE YOUR OWN ADVOCATE.

We went into the hospital April 15th pretty sure that we already knew what was wrong. All her symptoms said gall bladder failure. The doctors told us that it wasn't her gall bladder because there was nothing on the ultrasound. It had to be something else. They sent us home and told us to wait for a visit with her primary care physician.

Two weeks and four hospital visits, three doctors visits and multiple specialists later and the doctors finally agreed with us and removed her gall bladder. It was failing the entire time but they didn't run the right scan until we insisted on it. Her mother, sister and I told the doctors exactly what scan they needed to run to prove what we already knew.

Through years of working with Autism I have seen a lot of evidence as to why someone must advocate for themselves, but never to this extent. We were actually told by one doctor that it was just gas and that the extreme pain she was feeling must be in her head.

Do not let a doctor's opinion be your last call if your instincts are telling you otherwise.

(Oh, and somewhere in that few weeks I got an acceptance letter on a poem I wrote which will be published in an annual journal this winter. More on that later.)