So sad

And I think it had a lot more to do with being a woman than with her being a doctor. I heard stories like this all the time — and remember, many moons ago, my HMO primary doctor disregarded EVERY SINGLE SYMPTOM I had for Lyme disease, and put me on Prozac instead.

So it kind of irks me when I get these weird neurological and cardiac symptoms that may or may not be related to 20+ years of untreated Lyme. No point to asking doctors anymore — they don’t know, and can’t really test. Because once the spirochete digs into your organs, it doesn’t show up on tests and they can only tell with an autopsy. Whee!

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.