Medical Mystery

In the beginning when I started to feel ill and sought medical attention, I recall having been diagnosed with numerous illnesses.  Due to different blood tests, CT scan and other numerous tests that I do not recall at the moment led to multiple diagnosis.  I recall being diagnosed with cardiac disease, pulmonary disease, gastric disease, anemia, eczema, psoriasis, and possible liver and kidney disease to name a few.  I remember being visited by a number of specialists at my hospital room telling me about my new diagnosis and the treatment for me to get better.  Next thing I know, I still had pneumonia plus all the other illnesses. Now I was dying of multiple diseases and was in the brink of having multiple organ failure.  All of sudden, there was a shift in my diagnosis, my blood was now showing signs of cancer.  An oncologist came to visit with me and told me about the new possible diagnosis.  Since he could not determine an exact type of cancer because he did not specialize in lymphomas, he decided to send me out of town to another hospital.  All of this was too much for my brain to process. My head was still spinning with all the information. My mind was stuck on the word lymphoma, was that cancer or something else, I didn’t know what to think or what was going on.

In the new hospital, even more extensive numerous tests were run on me.  Suddenly out of nowhere the doctor comes in to ask me several very personal and weird questions. He asks me do you think you could have HIV? and I must have had a confused and puzzled look in my face because he then said, HIV is a possible cause for lymphomas.  I answered him, “No, that is most definitely not a possibility.” In my mind I was appalled that he asked that because I had never been sexually active. Up until that point I was still a virgin. He then proceeded to ask “Are you sexually active?” To which I replied “No” He then continued “Have you used needles for drug use?” I replied once again “No.” Then he asked the next question “Have you had a blood transfusion?” I responded once again “No.”  He then looks at me and says, “I know your mom is here so you might not want to answer truthfully but we need to know the truth, “is it okay if we order an HIV test,” “I said sure, I am telling you the truth.” He said “okay, we will perform an HIV test on you.”  The test results for the HIV test came back before the other test results. The doctor came back to my room and “said you are negative for HIV.”  He added “we needed to make sure because you are a college student and college students sometimes party and do not take care of themselves.”  

It took two rounds of hospital stays and a transfer to out-of-town hospital for me to finally get my actual cancer diagnosis.  It was not what I wanted to hear, but at least finally, I was not dying from multiple diseases. I was only dying from one very aggressive and scary one.  If only real life was like TV shows. Perhaps, if there was a real-life doctor like the TV show House, then he would have figured it out sooner, lol.  Unfortunately, getting a diagnosis is not as easy to get when your body is hiding the true nature of what is wrong with you.  

#Diagnosis