Diagnosis: systemic mastocytosis

There’s a new Diagnosis article from the New York Times Sunday magazine about a woman with severe low blood pressure and low clotting. It turns out that “she … had these symptoms off and on for years” and that her doctors could only think to blame “stress,” so they prescribed the antidepressants that triggered her attacks. She now treats her symptoms with a simple antihistamine.

This sounds awfully familiar to me. Growing up it was always “stress” that was causing me severe indigestion and discomfort. Whether it was constipation or diarrhea, bloating, gas, cramps, aches or anything else, my mother and the pediatrician always said “stress.” How many times when I was 10 fucking years old could I explain to them that I was not “stressed” and I had nothing to be stressed about?

Years later an actual doctor gave me an actual diagnosis of an actual disease – Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis. She might have been the only doctor who ever believed me that “stress” was not my problem. Now whenever I go to the endocrinologist or the family physician on my HMO and try to tell them that I am treating my Hashimoto’s and still experiencing crappy quality of life symptoms (fatigue, tiredness in the evening, sweating, weight gain), I’m back to hearing about “stress.”

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