@ardeecor That’s quite a compliment! You made me giggle! I didn’t go to medical school, but I was a premed biology major and later changed my mind. I worked in research at a university for a neuroanatomist for a few years. When I became a spine patient, the surgeons I consulted missed my correct diagnosis. I spent 2 years trying to get a surgeon to help me and I was looking up everything on my imaging reports online and watching a lot of videos of spine surgeons presenting cases at conferences so I learned a lot about what they were looking for and the differential diagnosis that could be something else. I was also looking for the next surgeon to consult and reading their papers. That lead me to my correct diagnosis that 5 surgeons missed because I looked up a term in that paper. From my education, I understood most of what I read in research papers and I looked up what I didn’t understand. I was also in physical therapy for my cervical issues and getting direct feedback and discussing it with my PT. I knew when surgeons were dismissing the clues in my symptoms because they didn’t understand why. I was dismissed by 5 surgeons. When I looked up that term, “funicular pain” I found other similar medical cases like mine described as “rare.”

Some of my understanding of medical issues is my science education, also art school and a 3 dimensional understanding of anatomy and caring for aging parents and advocating for their care. I have copies of my imaging and have been able to find the issues with spinal discs and bone spurs. When you scroll through an MRI you are looking at a series of slices of a 3 dimensional image.

It’s all of that and creative out of the box thinking always asking why something happens and its relationship to what I was doing and my body position at the time. I was tracking all of that on body diagrams and drawing my pain pattern. That was enough to scare a surgeon out of helping me because he thought I had an inflammatory problem causing the symptoms. The medical paper with the term was coauthored by a surgeon at Mayo. I knew he would understand that condition and with my request for an appointment, I included a copy of the case reports I found. At last, I found a surgeon who understood my case and I hired him. That’s why I share my story because it is so difficult to be a patient dismissed by medical specialists.

That might be more than you wanted to know. If I had gone into medicine, I probably would have been a surgeon. I forgot to mention the fellowship I received from the American Cancer Society when I was in high school. I studied along with resident doctors in the pathology labs at a hospital for a summer. That let me see actual diseases in organs which was very interesting and learn tissue processing with the electron microscope. That experience led to my lab assistant position later at the university.