not a virus

I don't have a virus. I knew I didn't have a virus.

I was vomiting yesterday because I was in such extreme pain in my abdomen. I guess I didn't communicate that well to the doctor's office to get the response from the nurse on the phone of..."Oh yeah...there is a virus going around making people vomit. You will have diarreah next."

Me: "But I have been bleeding and nobody else here has a virus. I have no other symptoms of a virus."

I suppose I am being deemed as the hysterical woman who doesn't know what she has.

"Drink lots of fluids."

Me: "Are you sure none of this could be related to fibroids or my ovarian cyst?"

Nurse: "I get cysts every month and no they don't do this. Are you worried about your cyst honey? Maybe you could talk to the doctor about it."

So later the doctor calls to tell me that I have a virus.

Remembering the stories of some of my female friends and their gynecological adventures...it is not unheard of to be very sick before the onset of a bad period. Some women vomit...some even pass out.

This is just what a lot of women deal with on an on-going basis.

Women get used to having their physical problems dismissed by medical professionals and so they begin to dismiss them as well. Many women suffer needlessly because their symptoms are either attributed to unrelated causes or told that they are normal for the diagnosis and just to live with it.

I have had friends who were so anemic from blood loss that they were on the verge of collapse, but were told that this was normal for having uterine fibroids. I will not allow this to happen to me.

Lessons learned thus far:

1. Doctors don't know everything. You present symptoms. They diagnose ( make a best guess at what is wrong). It seems to me from my experience that doctors seldom go beyond stating the diagnosis such as "You have MS" or "You have fibroids" to tell you what the diagnosis means in everyday language. They do not tell you what to expect.

2. I knew what was wrong with me in almost every situation requiring a doctor's tests to confirm what I already knew. How did I know? See # 3 and #4.

3. Thank God for the Internet. As much as folks are warned to staying away from it for researching medical problems, it has been one of my greatest resources of information.

4. Talking to people who have had similar symptoms almost always yields the answer in the end.

5. There has to be some balance between what your intuition tells you, listening to other's stories, researching, expert opinion and diagnosis, and the science of testing procedures.

6. As far as your own health care, YOU are your own best advocate.

Yes you have to be careful to weed out irrelevant information. Yes you have to use common sense. Yes you have to have some trust in the medical community. But mostly you have to trust yourself to know when something just ain't right.

And my gut is screaming at me right now.