vincentclark dot com

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Today was a bad day, a very bad day. I think that the doctors of my life have finally pushed me to the edge. I find myself with one of two choices.

The first, go over the edge. This show has to end sometime, ever act gets pulled. I have no doubt in my mind that I cannot live my life like this. This is not a pain that I want controlled by mind numbing pain killers.

After my last nerve injection my doctor extended my leave by a week, then told me that I should talk to the long term disability service and then doubled my pain medication. Nothing says, “I give up” quite like that.

I have put up with a lot of crap from doctors in my life. I wonder what I would have been like if the doctors did not mess up as they did. I first went to the medical clinic at Chico State with a lump in my testicle since mid August 1997. Despite not having sex for close to a year I was treated for Chlamydia for three and a half weeks. Two types of oral antibiotics and three injections of very powerful antibiotics, but this STD I knew I didn’t have didn’t go away. I think this is because it wasn’t an STD. Though the not having sex should have been the first sign, the second sign is the lump was near but not on the epididymis.

After weeks in pain, I was referred to a urologist. If the pain was not so severe there is no way I would have gone to one. Only a year prior during an examination by a urologist certain things occurred that prompted me to file a police report for sexual abuse against the doctor. The officer that took the report as well as several advocates wanted to see this guy fry. Unfortunately the detective didn’t even interview the doctor and told me that if you go to a urologist you have to expect things like that to happen. I know very clearly where the line is, and I know it was crossed.

After abandoning my speech scholarship, dropping out of school, and splitting up with my fiance I was finally getting my life back together. I knew that if it weren’t for the pain I would have rather died that go to see the urologist. It took me almost a month of scoping out a nurse practitioners and doctors to find one that I trusted enough to tell them about my testicular pain. I never really blamed the nurse practitioner for not uncovering the obvious tumor as much as I did the people that trained him and the complete lack of education about testicular cancer. Chico State had a full site on breast cancer. The in depth information on a cancer that would not affect the female population for another 20 – 40 years dwarfed the single page that dealt with the most common type of cancer among college males.

I thought about suing the school and was approached by a couple lawyers, but I knew where that money to pay me off would come from. Classes such as ballroom dance would be cut and the ability to have lectures such as She-mo Perez and Ice-Tea would be lost. I could not do that to my classmates, so I did the next best thing, I raised awareness. I openly talked about my experience. When I gave a presentation or speech I can tell that this was my way of correcting the injustice, not by taking money away from the school.

The doctor that discovered the cancer was a surgeon. I was 22 and things were happening very fast. I was 500 miles away from my family doctors and decisions had to be made quickly. The doctor advocated the second surgery and the option to have chemo was never entertained until the second tumor was found. I lost the ability to conceive a child naturally and eleven years later I am still feeling the after effects of an unskilled surgeon gutting my insides. I probably could have got a settlement from his malpractice insurance, but there was no way I was going to sue the man that save my life.

The string of misdiagnosis and neglect from insurance companies and lazy doctors did not end there. After having chronic back pain a degenerative disk was found and my vertebrae was beginning to herniate. The neurologist said that surgery would help it, but that is a last ditch no where to turn measure. I knew how sensitive the nerves in that area are and it wasn’t a risk I was willing to take just yet.

The doctor gave me some muscle relaxers, physical therapy, and told me to see him again in three months. As a cost cutting measure I was not approved to follow up with the neurologist that ordered the MRI that spoted the bulging disk, but I was referred to pain management. I have always has this mystery problem with my neck the doctors could never figure out. Doing the type of exercises PT required caused great pain in my neck. The doctor then ordered a lumbar injection. The following days after the injection were a nightmare. Jen had to take me to the emergency room it was so severe.

As it turns out, the doctor order the injection without first view an MRI and apparently gave the injection in the wrong location. This most likely had nothing to do with my pain, but the fact that the doctor did that made me skeptical about pain management.

When the pain in my side went critical at the start of the year Jen certain things had happened that made Jen urge me to use her insurance. At first, as with any courting, it looked like Kaiser had their practice down, and they were going to find out what was wrong with me.

The referred me to a fertility specialist that thought it might be cancer so an oncologist had to rule it out. I was then sent to the pain clinic. There the ambitious doctor proposed a series of nerve blocks for a differential, however, as time went on I began to suspect that 6 weeks between appointments and nerve blocks is not how a differential should be done.

I could write more of the same, but I am not going to. Twenty four hours after my nerve block I have been in critical pain, I spent all day on the couch, moving was torture. Jen tried all day to get a hold of my doctor, who was out of the office. The pharmacist doctor finally returned her call at 4:30. This was after I spent an hour trying to get a hold of my GP or someone in his office. The advice nurse gave her useual advice, go to the emergency room. I told her that I would go if it was life treating, but I am not going to put myself through hell to get a quick injection and sent on my way.

Today I was pushed to the edge, and I admit, jumping crossed my mind like a marquee. Unfortunately, that is not my style. Tomorrow, I am going to start to push back. I know when I get better, there will be a lot these doctors and this system needs to answer for. This isn’t a cost issue, but laziness of doctors that do not want to be burdened with googling RLND to see what kind of surgery their patient had, the very surgery they figured caused the pain in the first place.

I am angry. I know I am not the only one. That makes me even more angry.