A Montreal woman who was told by health-care professionals that she was too young for breast cancer but later diagnosed with it, has died from the disease. Valerie Buchanan was 32 when she died at the end of February.
“I keep asking myself why anyone, but selfishly, why her?” Chris Scheepers, Buchanan’s husband told CTVNews.ca in a telephone interview. “She was a beautiful person. She was extremely driven, talented and positive. What really breaks me is our son won’t know the truly remarkable woman she was.”
Throughout 2020, Buchanan sought answers for a lump in her chest but had said she was reassured by multiple health-care professionals in Ottawa and Montreal that it was a benign cyst without sending her for imaging to confirm.
After 13 months, Buchanan eventually went to a private clinic and was diagnosed with Stage 3 triple-negative breast cancer – a biologically aggressive subtype of breast cancer. Just a few months later, she learned it was Stage 4.
Any time my wife has been given the run around by doctors, I usually ask for her to schedule another appointment so I can be there, and I demand the doctors put notes, make something on the record that they SPECIFICALLY ARE DENYING TESTING and the reason behind it before I will leave.
So far it’s worked every time to get them to just do the goddamn test, take the fucking scan, or do some simple blood work.
Doctors like that are more afraid of malpractice suits than they are of killing a patient over negligence.
The first time it happened was because she had cholecystitis and the doctor was insisting she was too young to have any issues with it, but I was older and had already had my gallbladder removed over it several years before. So I knew the signs, I knew the feeling, and I had doctors from the same hospital ignore my symptoms. Once the demand for notes to be recorded, suddenly everyone is all for doing a simple scan and what do you know, her gallbladder is filled with sludge and stones, neither of which should be there, and it’s swelling. A week later it was out, but they wanted to wait 6 months “to wait and see if you’re still having discomfort”
To anyone who has never had gallstones, it’s like someone is taking a glowing hot knife and stabbing you from just above the stomach toward your spine. It’s “discomfort” the way giving birth is “mild pain”
Demand tests and demand records of test denials. Fear of lawsuits and losing licenses goes a lot further than “you’re a doctor who is supposed to help people get better” to some.
That can be effective in the US but would generally not work in Canada where malpractice suits are uncommon.
In Canada you may have better luck pursuing a complaint to the province’s licensing authority.
As a healthcare provider (HCP) I would generally try to dissuade patients from exaggerating or overstating. Most doctors and nurses have dealt with enough people that we have a good sense of when someone is exaggerating or even outright lying. Usually it is counterproductive and decreases the chance that your concern or complaint will be addressed appropriately.
I would advocate for centering the conversation on how symptoms have changed / affected your quality of life. A good HCP would make this part of the coversation but I know that not all of my colleagues do so, especially in light of corporate or governmental pressure to see as many patients in as fast as possible.
I feel/have _____ when I do _____ and I’m worried that it will continue, impairing my ability to _____ is a general approach.
As someone who heard several accounts from people with endometriosis, I get the feeling that a lot of healthcare professionals are severely overestimating their own ability to “have a good sense when someone is exagerating”. The stories these women tell are absolutely infuriating, and the diagnosis rate vs prevalence of the disease just as much. Clearly many doctors are simply dismissing complaints about period pain out of hand.
IDK, I know nothing about healthcare but shouldn’t complaints about pain be objectivized a little bit? Like can’t you just slap me in the face and ask which hurts more? Because I feel like doctors would often be surprised by the kind of pain some chronically ill people put up with without showing any external signs.
I’ve had a gynecologist tell his resident that it’s a good idea to train the patients on how to answer questions. It never crossed his mind to listen to women first.
As a healthcare worker with autoimmune disease and chronic pain, I hear where you’re coming from. The job would be a lot of easier if pain could be measured objectively. Everyone has a different tolerance for pain and chronic pain makes it all the more unpredictable.
The average time to diagnosis for endometriosis is 4 to 8 years. It’s a notoriously difficult diagnosis that often cant be made definitively without some form of invasive testing (which is taught in medical school). But, regardless of vocation, education cannot completely correct bias and there is lot of room for improvement in healthcare when it comes to women’s health.