A patient with a kidney stone called my girlfriend’s office and insisted on getting an appointment without delay.
A patient with a kidney stone called my girlfriend’s office and insisted on getting an appointment without delay. She suffered from severe abdominal pain, and could not hold it anymore.
She had already seen a family practitioner, but he simply concluded that it was the kidney stone, and that she should take some Ibuprofen. But when she described her pain to my girlfriend and showed the location, Freya knew right away that this was definitely NOT the kidney stone.
Then, the patient said something interesting:
“It’s really painful, doctor, I even asked my dad to drive really slowly because of the pain.”
My girlfriend immediately asked a surprising and very non-medical question:
“Did it hurt more when the road was bumpy ?”
It did. Bumps made the pain much more intensive.
Subsequently my girlfriend applied pressure on a specific point on the right-hand side of the patient’s abdomen and then quickly released the pressure, and the patient’s reaction — she screamed — was exactly what Freya had expected. The problem was not urological.
“You have acute appendicitis. You will need urgent surgery today.”
The patient, reminiscent of her GP’s diagnosis, did not believe it at first and even refused surgery, but the pain was growing ever so worse, and she was getting a fever as well. So she agreed to be examined by a general surgeon in the hospital — just in case.
Not much later, a double-check by the surgeon and an emergency ultrasound confirmed the diagnosis. And her appendix was removed on the same day.
Due to the extreme sloppiness of her GP, the patient could have died from her condition if she would have believed him and chosen the Ibuprofen pill, but she asked for a second opinion instead.
And was saved by the bumps.
SOURCES: Annals of Surgery, vol. 197, No. 5 (1983), pp. 495–506.
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