I hope you’re not too fed up with hearing about my uterus. It’s a pretty big deal for me, and a pretty major surgery on the horizon… so I’ve got a lot of processing to do.
One lingering question isn’t so much about the health issue itself but about the mystery surrounding it. Why was my regular doctor not willing or able to make a definitive diagnosis when another doctor — faced with the same exact report from the ultrasound — did?
I’ve come up with a few possibilities.
For one thing, maybe the level of expertise is part of it. While I believe whole-heartedly that the nurse midwife who did my exam knows her stuff, maybe her area of expertise lies less in growths and more in other reproductive issues. She was the one who suggested that more testing would be needed to confirm the diagnosis.
She’s also the one who researched a bunch of assistance options for me. I wouldn’t have known about the teaching clinic without her help!
For another thing, I imagine it’s important for health professionals to cover all the bases. While a health condition may SEEM to be one thing, there are lots of conditions where the symptoms are similar and diagnosis can be tricky. So when the urgent care doctor suggested cancer as a possible cause for the growths, I think she was just going through all the potential culprits. I don’t think she was trying to scare me or upset me, just to inform me of all the possibilities.
A third possibility came from the chief resident I saw at the teaching clinic. He said that often, the language in radiology reports is deliberately ambiguous. In reviewing the report from my ultrasound, he pointed out that the radiologist said it was “statistically likely” that my growths are fibroids. Not definitely. There’s still that one in one thousand chance that the growths are something malignant, not benign. I think this is another case of covering all the bases — if the growths do turn out to be something other than fibroids, I can’t turn around and complain (or sue) because I was given a definite diagnosis that turned out to be wrong.
The mystery of it all was definitely a little frustrating, but I can understand why it was there. This is why it’s important to ask questions — so you can understand what’s going on and why.