It’s no secret that the internet, and specifically WebMD, is the scourge of healthcare professionals everywhere. People go to the doctor armed with their own diagnoses and freaking out, because the internet delights in delivering worst-case scenarios.
Sometimes, though, those self-diagnoses turn out to be accurate – even when, as in these 18 scenarios, they’re more than a little surprising.
18. Sometimes you just know.
My sister had a lump behind her ear that was causing her pain and was growing.
My mom used to be a nurse and she thought it didn’t look right, it wasn’t just a cyst so she kept monitoring it and started to become worried that it might be cancerous.
For a whole year my mom went back and forth with doctors asking them to take her seriously and one doctor finally agreed to go in and biopsy it. Lo and behold my sister had stage 1 cancer, and it was a rare form at that.
17. Doctors should respect nurses all the time.
Not a nurse, but my mother worked at a children’s hospital, in X-ray. Her second born, not me, was vomiting and having symptoms as soon as he was born. She believed it was pyloric stenosis. A fairly rare case where the sphincter in the stomach closes up, preventing eating.
The first doctor dismissed my mother, thinking she was being normal mother paranoid. My annoyed mother brought her to a second doctor. The second doctor called in his med students and said. “This is a baby with very, very early onset pyloric stenosis. You will not see it often this early. The mother just recognized it.”
16. Why is this so unbelievable?
Not a doc or nurse but a patient. I was having a kidney stone and my BF at the time took me to the ER. The nurse kept asking me what I did to myself (because I was practically screaming in pain). Through tears I managed to get out “it’s a kidney stone”.
I then sat in the waiting room practically passing out until my BF somewhat yelled at the ER staff. They came over to get me and I couldn’t even walk, the nurse said “well are you coming back”. My BF said get her a f*cking wheelchair.
6 hours and a round of morphine later I passed the stone. The nurse said “oh look at that it WAS a kidney stone”. Like seriously wtf.
15. Experience counts for a lot.
I had a spontaneous pneumothorax (collapsed lung) that came out of nowhere when I was 17. Had to go to the hospital and get a tube hooked up to my thoracic cavity to reinflate my lung.
A week later I was in statistics class and I felt my other lung collapse. I immediately knew what it was. Kind of a weird but very distinct feeling of pain and shortness of breath.
Cut to me in the school nurses office trying to explain that I had a spontaneous pneumothorax and I need to go to the hospital. Yeah…she didn’t believe me at first.
14. I want to give this lady a high five.
not a doc or a nurse but back in the early 80s my mum (30 at the time) could not convince several docs that she had breast cancer. It was different to just a lump or pain. They all responded with “you’re too young”. Finally got one doc to write a referral to a specialist so she would shut up about it. She had breast cancer. Was told she may need a mastectomy but after going in they were able to remove enough without having to go that far.
She went back to the original doc and had a go at him and said if she ever heard his name come up for malpractice in the future she would make a statement against him (she was in medical industry). Told him to NEVER tell a woman she was too young for breast cancer.
13. Just totally eerie.
I’ve told this story before.
I had a 65 year old female patient with a history of well controlled hypertension and diabetes. Otherwise healthy. She woke up in the morning and told her daughter that she would die that day.
She had breakfast.
She demanded that the daughter take her to a lawyer to make a living will in order to make sure that she would be DNR when she died. The daughter humored her.
She then had lunch at a restaurant.
At 4pm she collapsed. She came to the ER where I saw her. The daughter presented the living will to me.
She died at 5pm comfortably
12. Not so funny.
Obligatory not a doctor, but my own self diagnosis that took 3 doctors to believe me.
A stray cat came into our garage and had kittens, and I was the one taking care of them and they wound up scratching the ever loving shit out of my arms. Wound up with some bumps on my arms, being extremely sore and tired, and my armpits were swollen to the point I couldn’t put my arms down without pain.
Went to the family doctor, told him I thought I had Cat Scratch Disease, he asked me to bend over and touch my toes (for god knows why) and then told me I was just out of shape (I was in the best shape of my life at this point) and he sent me on my way. He didn’t check any of my other symptoms.
Went to the ER immediately after because I couldn’t move my arms much and I knew I had Cat Scratch, and told the nurse there what happened and she didn’t seem to believe me either, huffed and puffed and finally let me see a doctor.
Doctor comes in, I say nothing. He asks what’s wrong and I tell him all of my symptoms, and he looks down and sees the cuts and bumps on my arms and asks what they are. I told him they were kitten scratches, and he goes, “Yeah you have Cat Scratch Disease.” I laughed and told him what happened, but he was pissed because apparently it can be fatal if left untreated.
11. I had them when I was 10.
Not the doctor but I went in because I had shingles. Told them upfront I thought it was shingles. The doctor kind of chuckles and she says, “Well, you are far too young to have shingles. It’s impossible.”
So I lifted my shirt and showed her my side where it was and I instantly saw her eyes widen as she goes, “Oh my, that is definitely shingles…”
The doctor and nurses were a little sheepish and apologetic but they did a great job helping me get better. I was the youngest case they’d ever seen (early 20s at the time)
10. Not a very smart tumor.
I read about a woman who had a voice in her head that kept telling her that she had a brain tumor.
She eventually got tested and it turned out that she did have a tumor and it was causing the auditory hallucinations.
9. Go with your gut.
My husband took our child to the doctor because he wasn’t breathing normally. Kid was happy, running around and playing. The doctor prescribed some puffers and told us to be on our way, but my husband wasn’t satisfied.
I eventually asked the doctor to check his 02 sat and he was in the low 80’s, ended up having full blown pneumonia and on iv antibiotics for three days and 100% oxygen that night.
The doctor said we would have ended up calling an ambulance that night if we didn’t bring him in. Trust your gut when you’re a parent.
8. Be your best advocate.
My mom went to the doctors complaint about a pain in her lower back by her kidney. The doctor did a quick check up and told her it was nothing that she was probably just sleeping wrong.
My mom mentioned cancer and the doctor said that it wasn’t very likely because people with kidney cancer dont usually feel anything. She was adamant that something was wrong so she went to another doctor that told her the same thing but said he would run some tests to show her that it wasn’t cancer.
When the results came back from the test, it turned out she did in fact have cancer on one of her kidneys and because she caught at such an early stage, they were able to remove it before it spread.
7. I guess someone should have listened.
Long time ago a patient of mine in the mental health unit had a delusion that he had a bleed in his brain.
Kept on it for a month.
One night he actually did have a massive spontaneous intracerebral bleed.
Poor guy died after that.
6. That sounds horrible.
Patient in a care home was complaining of eye pain and facial tightness. She told me it was shingles.
I reported it to the physician and supported that it did look like shingles. Doctor did not believe me or the patient. Poor lady suffered for several days until the night staff sent to the hospital. Guess what? Ocular Shingles.
5. Are they still married, though.
My dad is a neurosurgeon and my mom thought I was having absence seizures (I basically zone out and forget what happened from the past ten minutes or so) and my dad said I was just ignoring my mom, my mom took me to go get a EEG and turns out I have seizures pretty strong ones.
EEGs can take up to two to three hours long and mine was fifteen minutes.
We walked to my dads hospital and my mom walked in flaunting the papers saying “I knew it!! I’m smarter than the neurosurgeon!!” Haha 😂
4. That’s just irresponsible.
I had an abscessed tooth that the infection had become so severe that I lost vision in my right eye.
Went to the ER and they told me it was pink eye.
I tried explaining that over a couple days I literally felt the infection move from my tooth, through my nose and into my eye.
They said that doesn’t happen and sent me home with eye drops.
3 days later I had a face that was swollen twice the size it should have been, they removed the tooth and put me on antibiotics.
3. I’ve always thought you know.
My mom is a nurse supervisor at a nursing home.
Multiple times, patients have walked up to her and said goodbye, that they’re going to die that night.
Even though these residents have been perfectly mobile and “with it” they have always been right.
2. You know your body best.
A man came in, saying he had an aggressive cancer on his back.
He also told us that he’d run no tests, so we were skeptic, tbh.
When we ran the test, though, we saw he was right. Seriously.
1. Parents know best.
Our son was coughing, typical kiddo crud but we noticed once or twice that he gasped a little too hard at the end. Knowing we were probably being ridiculous overly cautious parents, we took him in to the ER (its was almost midnight and nothing else was open).
The head of pediatrics was working that night and she could not have been nicer. She agreed we were probably overreacting but ordered a chest xray to be safe.
Turns out our kid was well on his way to pneumonia and she said that we caught it so early, the symptoms hadn’t caught up yet. She prescribed the meds and breathing treatments. Sure enough, a few hours later it hit our kid full force and thank god we were already treating him.
I’m still not going on WebMD unless it’s absolutely dire.
Are you a doctor or a nurse with a similar story? Tell it to us in the comments!
