A GP who died from a rare form of kidney cancer has warned of the difficulties doctors face in getting treatment for themselves, in an emotional blog published posthumously.
Dr Lisa Steen described her anger at colleagues for failing to go the extra mile to help identify the disease and for dismissing her as a hypochondriac, in the essay published on BMJ.com.
The 43-year-old mother-of-two from Cambridge wrote of spending “two years wandering in the wilderness of the medically unexplained” before finally being diagnosed in July 2014, by which time the cancer had spread to her bones. She died in February.
She wrote: “I do not know how long I’ll live. It probably won’t be for many weeks. But right now I am glad to be alive. I am grateful for the expensive drug which is holding back the cancer.
“I am angry at being left in the medically unexplained wilderness and I did not like the way my colleagues looked at me, when they believed me to have health anxiety.”
Steen said hers was a cautionary tale for all health professionals who get ill, and for doctors treating other health professionals.
Affected by myriad symptoms, she eventually attended her GP in August 2012. Various tests failed to lead to a diagnosis and her condition was put down to health anxiety.
Steen, who was a GP for the drug and alcohol service Inclusion, wrote of her frustration at trying to describe her symptoms to doctors, and trying to diagnose herself.
She tried to explain that the symptoms might be connected to a benign carotid body tumour she had had when she was younger.
Her attempts to get investigatory tests and treatment were thwarted, she said, because of a “fear of looking even more ‘anxious’ or suffering from ‘health anxiety’, aka a hypochondriac”.
Eventually, embarrassed by being off work with no diagnosis, she returned to work. “I still knew there was something wrong, but it seemed fruitless going to see specialists. It was so humiliating, feeling like a goldfish with no voice. Watching doctors’ faces glaze over at the multitude of symptoms. Trying to fit it all in with work and looking after my family.”
After two years and prompted by weight loss, a routine ultrasound revealed a mass.
Steen wrote: “If any one of the doctors I saw had gone another mile, they would’ve stumbled upon it.”
But, she said: “they were reluctant to lay their hands on and examine a fellow medic”. And on her part, she said: “I was too embarrassed about my ‘psychiatric’ condition, too confused by not having the whole answer ready.”
She added: “My story is a cautionary tale to all of us health professionals when we get ill. Illness is somehow not the done thing. It upsets our ‘them/us’ belief system, which helps us cope with the horror of what we see.
“Mine is a cautionary tale to those treating health professionals, and those of us who are unwell – doctors do get ill, they don’t always know what is wrong with themselves. Give them a class A service because it is actually harder getting treated as a doctor than a layperson.”
Her husband, Raymond Brown, told the Telegraph: “They didn’t seem to be taking her too seriously, particularly because she had been diagnosed with health anxiety, she was being looked at as a hypochondriac.”
He added: “She just wants doctors to be aware when they are treating doctors to give them really good treatment and they have to be aware they are a patient and they don’t know everything. They need to be treated like a patient, not like a doctor.”
GP labelled hypochondriac criticises colleagues after dying from cancer
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