They're not all bad.
I was sent to A&E by an out of hours GP about 5 years ago with a suspected heart attack. They took it seriously and did all the proper testing. It wasn't a heart attack. I was kept in hospital overnight, as they wanted to check if it was a blood clot on the lung. It wasn't that either.
The consultant who gave me the good news agreed with me that I was probably just having a particularly bad day with my ME pain and asthma combining to give the symptoms I had. I'd actually called the doctor in the first place because I thought I had a chest infection causing the breathing problems and pain.
When I was a bit embarrassed about causing all that testing for nothing, the consultant was quite firm that I should always err on the side of caution and get it checked if I was having chest or left shoulder/arm pain. He didn't roll his eyes. He was kind and helpful.
It could have been quite a positive exprience if it hadn't been for the the ambulance people taking me to hospital nearly killing me with something that dropped my blood pressure so dangerously low I passed out and woke 5 minutes later with 2 very worried people about to shock my heart which had presumbly stopped (they'd cut my t-shirt open to bare my chest ready for it).
And the crash afterwards, of course.
Crikey that must have been scary Trish! Especially what happened in the ambulance, but having asthma, breathing difficulties & pain, being sent there on GP instructions & having a major life threatening episode in the ambulance which would have been reported to the Drs, is much more likely to get one taken seriously. Thank goodness they were.
But I was talking about someone, especially a young woman, with no other dx than ME/CFS (ie nothing that the average doc would take seriously - like asthma), turning up to A&E of their own accord 'off the street', without any breathing difficulties or chest or left arm pain, but after having had pain in the collar bone & jaw & having been sick the wk before, & now who's arm felt numb (which is what the guy in the article reported) I think tingly fingers were also mentioned….
I'm pretty sure that scenario would be very likely to get a different response to the one you experienced.
I do acknowledge that there is the odd enlightened doc out there but, as the consultant said - "you should always get it checked if you have chest or left arm pain"... but the article's point is that heart attacks are often missed because they
don't present in that way, & the doc
only referring to those symptoms rather proves the article's point I think.
I often get pain in my collarbone, often get numbness & tingling fingers in my left arm, and fairly often am extremely sick. No doctor has ever even raised an eyebrow over any of it, they have however rolled their eyes & dismissed it as MUS/anxiety without bothering to run any tests at all.
It's obviously not a heart attack as it's been going on for many yrs! but they weren't to know that at the beginning.
Not ME/CFS related, other than we do seem to get peculiar new symptoms sometimes, so maybe we should be aware that even heart attacks can be misdiagnosed. Especially ones that aren't "text book" examples.
