Dismissed

I tell my doctor that I am still experiencing symptoms.
I tell her I have had a sore throat for a week. I ask her if I can get a strep test.
She will forget about this 5 minutes later and I will have to remind her of this at the end of my appointment as she is getting ready to leave the exam room, with her hand already on the door knob.
She grabs a tongue depressor and her light and tells me to open wide.
I do and her next words to me are "Well that's not very wide. I'll have the tech come in and swab you."
She checks my blood pressure and tells me that it is high.
She doesn't address this issue any further.
I tell her that I have had 5 really bad panic/anxiety attacks since my last visit 6 weeks ago.
That is 5 attacks in 6 weeks.
I tell her it's hard to fall asleep because I keep "popping".
As soon as I feel drowsy, my chest constricts, then it feels like my heart is trying to jump start itself.
It makes my whole body jerk or pop. It also kick starts my adrenaline.
"That's normal" she tells me.
It's NOT normal for me though.
"Does anything help alleviate these symptoms?" she asks.
Yes, I tell her. I found this meditation practice that has you place both hands upon your heart and press down slowly and breath deeply 5 times.
"And that works?" she asks incredulously.
She wants to know if I feel this restlessness in my legs at night time.
No, I tell her. This is not Restless Leg Syndrome.
I tell her my feet can hardly sit still during the day, that it feels like I have too much caffeine in my system, that my foot is constantly tapping or moving back and forth as if all of the excess energy my body is producing is being funneled into that one spot in my body.
I tell her I can hear the blood rushing through my head and that I hear my heartbeat in both ears.
She doesn't check my ears.
She says panic attacks can be a normal thing too.
But they're NOT normal for me.
She asks if I've ever tried any kind of anti-anxiety medication.
I tell her no. I'm not interested in taking anti-anxiety medication.
I want to know WHY I am having these attacks, that I want to find the cause of them.
"Sometimes people just have anxiety," she tells me.

I'm not sure what I expected her to do or say or what testing I wanted her to order.
But I wanted more than I got from her.
I felt dismissed.
It felt like she poo-pooed everything I said.
It felt like she just wanted to push anti-anxiety meds on me.
It felt like she kept correcting me.
It felt like she wasn't listening to me.
I didn't feel comfort or empathy or sympathy from her.
It felt like she wanted to be anywhere else but in that room with me.
She made me feel like a hypochondriac.

I wanted answers. I wanted her to work with me. For her and I together to trouble shoot these symptoms and come to a common goal of either eliminating them without the quick answer of anxiety meds. and/or at the very least to diagnose the cause of them.

Maybe I was expecting too much.
Maybe I need to find a Naprapath doctor, or one who practices functional medicine.
Maybe I need to do Yoga.
Maybe I need to find more information on different types of meditation.
Maybe I need to stop complaining.
Because in all honesty, if I complain to her about anxiety and she offers me medicine for anxiety and I refuse that course of treatment, what IS she supposed to do with me?

Last night I bought a bottle of wine and drank two glasses.
I slept through the night without any kind of popping or anxiety.
I'm aware that it would be real easy to medicate myself in this way,
7 days a week, but I don't want to go that route.
Having lived with a drinking man for 28 years I know what that can do to a body and a marriage.

I'm thinking that I will try to find another doctor. Not right now. But for my next yearly physical maybe it would be a good idea to find another doctor, one that listens better. I don't know.

My throat is still sore, my ears feel full of fluid and today I am coughing.
As Charlie Brown used to say...
                                                                                              

Thanks for reading,
Love, Lolly