My friend's dad had to go to the emergency room, and after a brief examination, the doctor told him that nothing was wrong with him. Her father insisted that something was wrong and wouldn't leave until they did some tests. He had a brain aneurysm and passed away as security led him out of the building.
A sizable malpractice settlement was granted to her family. Story Credit: Reddit/broganisms
When I was 22, my sister and my boyfriend at the time brought me to the emergency room, where I was informed that I was acting out because I had taken some kind of illicit substance. They only believed me after they pulled my ex and my sister aside.
They reluctantly ordered a CT scan for me the following day, and sure enough, I had a brain tumor. Story Credit: Reddit/Kimba_Rae_11
I fell down a flight of stairs at work once. On the way down, I ripped open my forearm and started bleeding profusely. Adrenaline was the only thing that kept me going while my girlfriend, who worked as a nurse at a different hospital, drove me to the ER. I wrapped a paper towel around my arm. By the time we got there, it was bloody, and all the security officers and nurses thought I was an addict who had burst a vein. I finally fainted after all the excitement wound down. I woke up in a wheelchair in an exam room with no idea what was happening. I only remember seeing my girlfriend yelling at the workers.
She claims that half of the thought I was faking it, so I didn't have to wait in line, and the other half thought I was on some substances. I knew there was no way I would bleed out, but I still panicked when I saw the meat in my arm. The staff just watched as I fainted again and hit my head on the floor. They still didn't do anything. My girlfriend had to drag me into a wheelchair even though she's half my size. That place is terrible. Story Credit: Reddit/killdill91
When I went into labor with my first child, the hospital staff acted like I had no clue what was happening. They argued with me that I wasn't actually in labor. They probably thought I was making it up since I was more than two months early and could handle the pain well. I insisted that I needed to push as they made me stand at the counter to fill out paperwork.
After practically begging them, they finally put me in a bed to check if I had "started dilating." As soon as I lay down, I began to give birth to my son. I was furious at how the staff had treated me. I still am. Story Credit: Reddit
My mother suffered from a stroke when she was only 32 years old. Since she was so young, the doctors took more than 24 hours to diagnose her correctly. They insisted that illicit substances caused her symptoms.
They refused to believe anything else, even though my dad kept telling them she had no history of substance abuse. My mother is now permanently disabled because they took so long to treat her properly. Story Credit: Reddit/dammit_sammy
Puberty turned my life into a complete nightmare at the age of 10. I had irregular, two-week-long periods, paralyzing menstrual cramps, pain in that area when I wasn't on my period, and I was even growing facial hair. For six years, the doctors claimed that this was all due to the fact that I was overweight.
However, I was overweight because I was mistreated and starved for days on end. So, when I did get food, I would binge eat.v When I turned 17 years old, I was finally diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) by a gynecologist. Story Credit: Reddit
My great-grandmother passed away in the hospital parking lot because the medical staff claimed, "Women don't have heart attacks." I still can’t believe what happened. Never allow anyone to accuse you of not knowing your own body.
Story Credit: Reddit/Azriellwest
I began getting heart palpitations and arrhythmia at 12 years old whenever I overexerted myself. The cardiologist claimed I was faking it to get out of soccer practice and doing chores. My heart was utterly unreliable throughout the day by the time I turned 15. I would sometimes lose my sight and faint during an attack. The cardiologist stood by his statement that I was faking and claimed that "children don't have heart conditions." My heart finally stopped at 16 years old. Fortunately, I was already with the school nurse since I had an episode earlier that day. When I woke up in the hospital, they told me I had a heart deformation that would need surgery.
My mother was livid and blamed it all on the cardiologist. She screamed at him in his office as she ripped his degrees off the wall and threw them at him in anger. The only reason she didn't take him to court was to prevent assault charges against her. A simple echocardiography proved that my deformation caused the electricity that kept my heart pumping to go in circles. For four years, I have had heart attack simulations. We couldn't afford to go to another cardiologist since that was the only one my mother's insurance covered. Story Credit: Reddit/vertigo7__
I started having cramps in my side in February 2016. When I went to the ER, they told me I had a small ovarian cyst. I've had those before, so it was no problem. My period started in March 2016 and didn't stop until June. I visited different doctors and emergency rooms between March and May. I underwent several ultrasounds. They told me that I was too young to have the five or six cysts on my ovaries removed. They said, "You're only 23. If we remove the cysts, it might cause damage to your ovaries, or we would have to remove them if a complication arises.
What if you want children someday?" As if that wasn't bad enough, what happened next shocked me. After I insisted on the surgery, they said, "We don't feel like calling a surgeon on a Saturday." It got to the point where I had to leave work early at least once a week or even call off from work. I took many strong pain pills and carried a portable heating pad with me everywhere. I finally found a doctor willing to perform surgery in May 2016. As he opened me up during surgery, he exclaimed, "Holy cow!" Then he stitched me back up. He informed me that I needed major surgery since my left ovary had "eaten" the cysts and was in the process of attaching itself to my colon and an artery in my leg. I ended up losing my ovary. However, I threw a party for it before my big surgery called, "See You Later Ovulater." It was a big hit. Story Credit: Reddit/ginabeena
My brother began getting really lethargic and tired when he was 11. He missed a lot of school because of it, and he hated missing school. My mom often took him to the doctor, and they insisted that it was the flu, puberty, or mono. It wasn't getting better, though. My mom brought him to the hospital again after a few weeks. She yelled at the doctors that something was seriously wrong with her son and that they needed to do their job and find out what was wrong. They told us to go home after performing tests on him. They called us in the middle of the night and informed us that the tests had come back and that my brother needed to go to the hospital immediately. We found out that my brother had leukemia.
I can't imagine how a parent must feel getting a call in the early morning telling you to get your child to the hospital but not knowing why. He went through a year of treatment and got re-diagnosed on his birthday. He had a bone marrow transplant a few months later and was able to return home soon after. The transplant had a few complications that caused him to experience some stiffness and put him in dangerous situations. It has been eight years since the transplant, and he is now cancer free. The boy loves to play the "cancer card," but he deserves it. My thoughts and prayers go out to people going through a situation like this. Story Credit: Reddit/AngerPancake
A doctor didn’t believe me when I had a kidney stone that was too big to pass. He only changed his mind after another doctor checked me and started freaking out because I was getting super sick from the stuck stone.
The first doctor ended up getting fired from the hospital, and my parents sued him. Story Credit: Reddit
I had a stroke last year at the age of 32. I didn’t have any symptoms, but when I had an MRI for an unrelated issue, they sent me directly to the ER. When the ER doc looked at me, he rolled his eyes and said, “You’re not having a stroke!” I told him I was sent by his colleagues and didn’t just walk into the ER on a whim. I just had an MRI that clearly showed a recent stroke.
I guess he thought it was OK to say that because I was young (and female!) and didn’t show any typical signs. He made me feel like I needed to defend myself and that I was wrong to be there—especially since I skipped everyone waiting and was sent directly into a bed. But come on, dude, really? Story Credit: Reddit
I woke up with nausea and stabbing pain in my back. I knew what it was because I have had a long history of kidney stones. As the pain got worse, I called my fiancé to come home from work so we could go to the ER. We got there, and I was put in a room and asked for a urine sample—it was nothing but blood. That’s when I knew it was way worse than I thought. As I was trying to find a comfortable position (Spoiler! There isn’t one), the doctor came in and said, “Well, it’s a kidney stone, alright.” He told me to drink lots of fluids and gave me a prescription for acetaminophen with codeine. I left the ER in as much pain as I was when I got there. The prescription had enough pills for two days.
After 36 hours of excruciating pain, we went BACK to the ER. The pain was so strong that I couldn’t keep down medication or even water. I was taken back immediately and given hydromorphone and a CT scan. It showed that a 6 mm kidney stone was stuck high up near my kidney, causing it to swell and get infected. They scheduled me for laser lithotripsy that night. I get so mad when I think that I had to go through all of that pain and suffering because some idiot thought I was after pain meds—even though I told him that I’ve suffered through kidney stones on my own at home regularly, and this was a worse, different pain. Eff that guy. Story Credit: Reddit/PhoenixAshies
I was stuck in bed for about five hours with my head pressed into my shoulder. I wasn’t able to move my head at all. When my mom got home from work, she called an ambulance for me. They carried me out in a sitting position, and off to the hospital we went. When we got there, it took about a half hour trying to position me into a bed.
They ended up just giving up and leaving me sitting there awkwardly. It turned out that I had a pinched nerve, but the doctor pulled my mom out of the room and asked if I had a history of faking injuries in order to get pain meds. His reasoning was that I was pressing into the pain instead of leaning my head away from it. Story Credit: Reddit/PrehistoricPKMN
When I was in the fourth grade, I was not feeling well, but the school nurse sent me back to class because my fever was only 37.2 C (99 F). By the end of the school day, I made it home on the bus, but I had to be rushed to the emergency room because I couldn’t breathe. Apparently, I had a case of bronchitis that had turned into pneumonia, and my lungs were full of fluid.
I was out of school for two weeks, I think. Story Credit: Reddit/toodaloohi
When I was 16, I was in a really dark place mentally. I decided to confide to my doctor that I might be depressed and see what he would recommend. The dude straight up laughed in my face and said, “You’re not depressed; you’re just a teenager.” After that, I told my mom I wanted to change doctors.
It took another year and tons of self-destructive behavior before I had the courage to seek help again. Story Credit: Reddit/-eDgAR-
This incident still manages to raise my blood pressure even though it happened years ago. When I was about seven years old, I would often get this terrible stomach pain, which my pediatrician diagnosed as attention-seeking behavior. He even told my parents that they should punish me whenever I complained of stomach problems. Naturally, things only went further downhill from there. My parents, who love yelling, jumped at a new reason to scream at me on a nearly daily basis. When I went to college, I was finally diagnosed as having a hiatal hernia, just like my grandparents, father, and aunt.
When I was a kid, they even commented that I had the same symptoms they did. To my pediatrician, that meant that I was just mimicking their complaints. To top it all off, because my hiatal hernia had been left untreated for so long, I now have to worry about Barrett’s esophagus and esophageal cancer. Lucky me! Story Credit: Reddit/barbobaggins
I had a new hearing doctor who didn’t believe that I needed hypo-allergenic hearing aids and ended up giving me regular ones to “try them out”. But that only led to a world of pain. Within a few days, my left ear was sore. Both my doctor and the ear specialist thought that it was just a little bit of irritation and that it would clear up quickly on its own. Nope.
It ended up being a major middle- and inner-ear infection that ruptured my eardrum and leaked pus and blood all over my pillow. I had to endure a month of agony, a lot of medication, and a lot of specialists in the hospital. I was already very hard of hearing, but that whole disaster made me lose another 10 decibels permanently. Story Credit: Reddit/gen_angry
When I was nine, I would get stomach aches when I went to school. My doctor insisted that I was faking, but my mom insisted that he take it seriously. Finally, they gave me a barium X-ray and saw I had a stomach ulcer. I had to take Maalox and drink milk at every meal and snack. I even had to get special permission to get milk from the cafeteria during morning recess. I had a horrible and abusive teacher that ridiculed me for needing milk. While I never received any of her physical punishment, there were two other boys in my class who she hit on a regular basis. This would have been 1980, so it wasn’t normal for teachers to be pulling hair or knocking a kid’s face into a desk.
Anyway, my stomach aches did not get better, and the doctor accused me of some combination of faking, exaggerating, and non-compliance. We even had to save all of the empty Maalox bottles to prove to him that I was actually taking my daily doses. Today, we know that having me drink milk seven times a day was exacerbating things. Also, in retrospect, my mom never really understood how stressful it was being in that class. It wasn’t until the last few months of fourth grade, when they finally transferred me to another classroom, that I got well again. Sometime later, my mom told me that she thought I’d been exaggerating when I talked about how mean the teacher was. Because I’d left the honors class and moved down a level, my former teacher still ridiculed me pretty frequently when we crossed paths, but at least it didn’t tie my stomach up in knots. Story Credit: Reddit/AnkleFrunk
My mother had been very sick and tired for quite a while. She said it felt like a cold but 100 times worse. The doctor she saw multiple times basically kept blowing it off and saying that she just needed some rest. She kept getting worse and worse. One day, I was home with her. She was in bed sleeping, and I was watching TV in the living room. For some reason, she decided to walk into the living room and sit in the chair across from the couch.
She looked like a zombie, and when she sat down, she could barely hold her head up. That’s when I knew things had taken a turn for the worst, so I immediately called an ambulance. It turned out she had pneumonia, and one of her lungs was entirely full of fluid while the other was more than halfway full. She spent a few days in the hospital, and eventually, she fully recovered. I don’t know what made her decide to walk into the living room, but if she hadn’t done that, she likely would not have lived past that day. The whole ordeal could have been avoided if the doctor she saw would have just paid closer attention to what was going on. Story Credit: Reddit/HighLadySuroth
During basic training, going to sick calls meant you were a lazy jerk who was probably trying to get out of training. Even the doctors would give people the brush-off because they saw quite a few who were faking it. So, when I went in with bad back pain, the medic cleared me, brushed me off, and told me to go back to my company.
It turned out my kidney was severely infected. Story Credit: Reddit/Zqus
I only have a partial hearing in my left ear due to an idiot pediatrician. I was fifteen, and I had an ear infection. Between my dumb, always inebriated mom swearing up and down that everything I did was “for attention” and this idiot doctor who must have printed his diploma using MS Paint, I got no treatment. The doctor didn’t even look in my ear.
Later that night, it ruptured, sending blood and pus everywhere. The emergency room doctor said that I had the worst ear infection he’d ever seen. Story Credit: Reddit/OurLadyOfTheChickens
Several years ago, I walked into traffic in a sort of vague “ending my life would be nice” kind of way. When I told my psychologist about this, he rightly had me carted off to the ER to be admitted into inpatient care. They shuffled me from room to room and eventually stuck me in with a teenage girl who appeared to be having severe pregnancy complications. In the hall, I could hear a woman screaming and vomiting violently. We sat there for hours before the doctor came.
By this point, I was completely numb. She asked me if I had any plans for self-harm, and I said, “I’m not really the planning type”. After more questions, she finally said, “Well, you look fine to me,” and sent me home. I took the bus to my apartment and lay face down on my couch for several hours. Story Credit: Reddit
My mom’s first cardiologist told her she was too young to have a heart attack and proceeded to screw around for a month before finally scheduling a heart stress test for her. She ended up having a heart attack on the treadmill during the test and was rushed into emergency surgery.
She’s fine now, but I’d really like to slug that doctor. Story Credit: Reddit/OurLadyOfTheChickens
I had an asthma attack when I was in middle school, and the nurse didn’t believe me. She told me to get up and go back to class. I took five steps out the door and passed out.
I woke up in a hospital with tubes being jammed in my nose and a mask over my face. From then on, never was a claim about asthma not taken seriously in that school district. Story Credit: Reddit
I discovered the hard way that hot tubs and I just don’t get along. I realized this after my husband, and I left a party where we had spent some time in a hot tub. When we got to our hotel room, I suddenly became horribly sick and over the next few hours, I just kept feeling worse and worse. I finally told my husband that I really needed to go to the hospital. I was sobbing and nearly unintelligible. He wanted to drive me there, but I was too far gone and had him call an ambulance. The paramedics were convinced I was on something and kept asking what I had taken. I managed to slur out, “Nothing. I had like two drinks six hours ago and spent a long time in a hot tub, but I drank a lot of water”. They got me to the hospital and eventually into a bed. My nurse was immediately convinced that I was a lying, high, substance-seeker.
It was awful. He was genuinely rude, short, and outright mean to me. I mean, I know this is a big problem in ERs, but my god, dude, not everyone is a junkie. I spent over an hour in nothing but a flimsy hospital gown on the bed, begging for a blanket. The nurse yelled at me for accidentally crimping the IV line, and he also forced me to get out of bed and walk myself and my IV pole to the bathroom to give a urine sample. I was crying and writhing in discomfort, and he just sneered, “What IS IT?” The nurse started acting civilly toward me after my pee test finally came back totally clean. I got a huge infusion of liquids, electrolytes, and anti-nausea meds. We figured out later that I became severely dehydrated because I’m chronically low on magnesium and potassium. So, yeah, thanks for drawing out my suffering and making me feel so much worse, dude. Story Credit: Reddit/lmapidly
One time, my dad had a severe headache that kept him from going to work. He was a tradesman in a factory and NEVER missed work. Ever. And that’s saying something because he was even electrocuted at work once. Electricity went in one finger and blew out the side of another, but he went back to work after they bandaged him up. We didn’t even know anything about the electrocution until the end of his shift. So the fact that he was missing work for a headache was a big deal. My mom made him go to the hospital, but all they did was tell him that it was stress and he needed to work less.
The next day he went to our family doctor, who told him the same thing. When he collapsed on the bathroom floor, my mom called an ambulance and insisted they take him out of town. It turned out that he had suffered from two brain aneurysms—one of which had ruptured, but he survived! Years later, he went to the same hospital thinking he had kidney stones, but he actually had an aortic aneurysm. The hospital in our little town is really just a first-aid station, so they aren’t equipped to handle serious cases like his. They tried to airlift him to a different hospital, but the aneurysm ruptured, and he passed. Story Credit: Reddit/lisserella
When I was 14, I kept bleeding from my anus and would throw up everything I ate and drank. The hospitals (yes, more than one) told me it was hemorrhoids. Well, this cycle went on for two years before I blacked out in the bathroom. I was living with my grandparents at the time, and they had to drive me to the hospital. When we arrived, I was unable to walk or talk.
It turns out my colon had detached, and my veins had collapsed. After six months in the ICU and two more months in the hospital, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. I got down to 40 kilograms (90 pounds) after being a pretty decent-sized girl my whole life. I’m 30 now, and I don’t have my colon, but I have been diagnosed with PTSD. Story Credit: Reddit/toadflakes88
I went to emergency one Friday night with horrendous stomach cramps. I knew something was horribly wrong, but the nurse on duty made it painfully clear that he couldn’t care less about me. He was sighing, rolling his eyes, and treating me as if I was exaggerating. He finally stormed off when he was unable to take blood from me because I was shaking so uncontrollably. I can’t imagine that they are trained to roughly grab a patient’s arm and hold it down by the wrist while tightening the tourniquet with one hand. I couldn’t physically stay still. I really couldn’t! He ripped the tourniquet off and slammed all the blood-taking equipment back on his trolley, and marched out.
I was frightened, alone, and only 18. He left me on the bed, shaking and crying and occasionally vomiting into a rapidly overfilling cardboard bowl. When the next nurse came on duty and saw the state of me, she did a couple of simple tests, which took all three minutes, and then she gave me some morphine. Apparently, my appendix had burst. I was able to have immediate surgery to remove the bits of the appendix and spent a week on strong antibiotics. The second nurse was so kind and sweet. She even waited with me until my parents arrived. Story Credit: Reddit/kingjoffreysmum
I once had a bad infection in a wisdom tooth that needed removal. The pain was so unbearable that one day I went to the ER, where a doctor prescribed me codeine and antibiotics. However, things didn’t go as planned because I used to have a drinking problem of sorts and may have experimented with a pill or two in the past. While I was at the ER, another doctor recognized me from those days.
He came over, looked in my mouth, said he couldn’t see any abscesses, and cut me off from both the pain meds and the antibiotic.
Not only did I have to endure intense pain, but my gums had also turned blackish green by the time I was able to see the oral surgeon. Screw that doctor. Story Credit: Reddit/PM_ME_UR_HOT_SELF