Considering all the medical things I deal with and how many recurring doctor appointments I have, I’ve been pretty lucky with having good doctors who listen to me and don’t make assumptions. This isn’t always the case and I’ve had some doctors who aren’t as helpful or won’t believe either my symptoms or my lab results, but I usually can avoid those doctors after they act that way.
In the past, I wasted time trying to get doctors to believe me when things aren’t what they expect. For example, I have low cholesterol, low blood sugar, and normal blood pressure. But because there are assumptions about people who are a certain weight or size, I have had doctors wonder if the results were correct. Or if I’m seeing a new doctor, they look at my past test results and think that they must not be accurate anymore so they make me do all the same things again to prove to them that I am healthy. Things have gotten better over the years, but there are still some doctors who believe that weight is the reason behind any ailment and won’t budge or look into what the cause could potentially be.
I’m always nervous when I’m meeting a new doctor or seeing someone I haven’t seen before. For example, when I went to urgent care recently, everyone there was new to me and they don’t know my history. I know that I will always have to do some of the basic vitals when I go to urgent care, but sometimes because of the situation, they aren’t normal results for me.
When I was in urgent care last month, part of the intake was to do my blood pressure and heart rate. I know that my blood pressure reading can be weird sometimes. It has come back impossibly high, not just high like what a living person could have but high where I should be dead. Those results are obviously not accurate, and I’ve learned things I need to be mindful of when I get my blood pressure taken. One of the biggest things I need to do is make sure my feet are on the ground. I usually can’t touch the ground with my feet when I’m sitting back the way they want me to be, so I need something for my feet otherwise I know the results won’t be right. And when I was in urgent care, I tried to tell the nurse that so I could get my blood pressure taken correctly. They didn’t have anything I could use, but my results weren’t high so I figured that was the end of that.
Then a week later, I got something in the mail saying I had a doctor’s appointment I didn’t schedule. I called my insurance and found out that it was for me to go to the blood pressure clinic again because of dangerously high blood pressure in urgent care. That didn’t make sense to me since it was in the normal range, so I looked at my online records and realized that there was a typo in my vitals so it looked a lot higher than it was. I asked if I could get that appointment removed because of that error, but they couldn’t do it unless I spoke to a doctor.
So I had another phone appointment this week to discuss what happened. I’m so glad that even though this was a doctor I didn’t know, he listened to what I said and found other things that seemed off about my vitals from that appointment. He said that my blood pressure should have been taken at another time since I was in pain and my heart rate was very high. There were signs that I wouldn’t have normal blood pressure, even if my feet were on the ground, so I shouldn’t have been referred to the blood pressure clinic. I don’t think he really cared that there was a typo in my records because the other information showed him that I was ok. And there is a history of recent blood pressure reads where it is normal so having just one high one with all the other information shouldn’t have triggered the referral.
I was totally prepared to explain a lot about why this seemed wrong, and I was lucky that this doctor already found things that didn’t seem right and I didn’t have to make that much of an effort to get the appointment removed. He did say that I should get my blood pressure done at my next in-person appointment, which I always have to do so it will be done soon enough. And of course, if it comes back high then, I might have to go back to the blood pressure clinic.
It’s nice when I really don’t have to put in as much work as expected to have a doctor hear me. This should be how it always is and I’m fortunate that it’s like this most of the time. It’s only the rare time now that I have to stand up for myself more and I’m glad that it’s become less and less frequent.
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