If you’re anything like me, you spiral down the deep, dark hole of WebMD every time you experience even the mildest of medical symptoms. But sometimes, a gut feeling actually turns out to be correct. So, Redditor musikcookie asked, “Doctors of Reddit: What was the wildest self-diagnosis a patient was actually right about?” Here’s what people said.
1.“I had a patient who came into the Emergency Department with vague mild abdominal pain whose friend recently died of colon cancer. She was convinced she must have it, too. I told her cancer wasn’t contagious like that, but I ordered a CT scan because she was so insistent on reassuring her. She had a huge colon mass. It was a very bizarre case.”
2.“I had a little cough in junior high that just wouldn’t go away. My grandmother was convinced it was whooping cough. I felt fine… It was just an annoying cough. She made me go to the doctor and told the doctor that she thought I had whooping cough…”
“…The doctor informed her that it hadn’t been in our area in over 10 years so she doubted that was the case. My grandma forced her to test me for it anyway. Turned out I was positive and considered patient zero. The whole school basically ended up getting it, and we had to shut down for two weeks until it went away.”
3.“A woman in her 40s came in and told me she was having seizures. I asked how she knew, and she said her right hand would periodically stiffen. There was no loss of consciousness or other symptoms associated with classic seizures, but I ordered tests anyway. Turns out, she had been having multiple focal seizures.”
4.“I’m a phone triage RN for a family practice. I had a female in her early 60s who we talked to often. She called one time in a near panic attack, convinced she had terminal cancer. She was a very nice lady, but she suffered from high anxiety. She was really not in terrible health otherwise…”
“She wasn’t even feeling unwell and had the vaguest set of symptoms. She scheduled her same day with her PCP, who ordered a CT of her abdomen to hopefully help alleviate her concerns… Nope. Metastatic pancreatic cancer. She was dead within six weeks. I’ll never forget taking her initial call and trying to calm her down.”
5.“When I was in labor with my second child, after 15 hours of hard labor and three hours of pushing (with an epidural, but I’d been having contractions every six minutes for four weeks around the clock, but nothing was progressing). I remember looking at my husband and saying, ‘I know why women die in childbirth’ right before I passed out…”
“…I woke up in the OR as they were doing my C-section. My doctor was on the way to the hospital, and they called her to tell her what I said and what happened. She said she screamed at them to get me into surgery ASAP because it was an absolute emergency. I was right. My body was going into shock and shutting down. Had they waited 15 minutes for her to get to the hospital, neither my kid nor I would have made it. He’s turning 11 next week and has a nine-year-old little brother.”
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6.“I was right about having a pituitary microadenoma that causes Cushing’s disease. I asked multiple doctors to help me with various symptoms, including a neurologist, and it was missed for years. Finally, a wonderful endocrinologist agreed to test my cortisol, which was sky high…”
“…I’m now 18 months out of surgery, and I’ve lost 110 lbs, no longer diabetic, blood pressure is great, no more kidney stones (I had eight), hair has grown back, glaucoma is gone, etc. Many doctors just wanted to diagnose obesity instead of seeing it as a symptom of something else.”
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7.“I diagnosed my husband’s brain tumor, leading to emergency surgery. After a month in and out of the ER, his personality changed; he couldn’t stay awake, was diagnosed with a B12 deficiency, dehydration, frequent vomiting, and his vision looked ‘weird.’ Still, he could never explain it (it turns out his peripheral vision was gone), and a swollen optic nerve — probably just high BP from ophthalmology…”
“…After a weekend where I could barely wake him up, he went back to the ER, where he waited four hours in the waiting room. I asked him if anyone had done a CT or MRI of his brain (I assumed they had), but they had not. I told him to insist on a CT because I had a wild sneaking suspicion. Two hours after being called back, he was in an ambulance on his way to a different hospital with a neuro ICU to get scheduled for emergency brain surgery. Massive tumor with dangerous obstructive hydrocephalus.”
8.“My dad was a paramedic back in the day. Decades later, he suddenly had mom call 911, he swore he needed to get to the hospital. Then he walked out to the ambulance and told the paramedics he was having a heart attack and they had to go right now. He got in the ambulance himself and seemed fine — and coded on the 10-minute ride to the ER. He lived 15 more years because the paramedics believed him when he said he was going to die.”
9.“I work as a medical lab tech. We had a patient who came in insisting that her neighbor was poisoning her. Everyone dismissed her, assuming she had some kind of paranoid psychosis. She remained in the ER on a psych eval. I ran all the standard labs on her, and they were normal, but this patient would not budge…”
“…She was admitted to psych on a hold. At this point, one hospitalist decided ‘why not’ and ordered labs to test for several heavy metals and ethylene glycol. Her ethylene glycol level was 32. THIRTY-TWO. I don’t know if she was legit being poisoned by her neighbor or if it was self-induced, but damn, that patient taught me a vital lesson that day.”
10.“My aunt and uncle had a Border Collie that would bury his nose in my uncle’s back when he was sitting on the couch or recliner. He would walk up, sniff, and keep sniffing until my uncle would shoo him away. A bit later, he would come back, sniff again and just stare at my uncle…”
“…A few weeks later, my aunt was watching one of the local news channels, and they featured a dog that could smell Parkinson’s, and she jokingly told my uncle about it. He mentioned their dog constantly sniffing one spot and one spot only on his back, so he went to a high school friend who was a dermatology doctor. He said it didn’t look right and did a biopsy on it. Sure enough, he had skin cancer, but they caught it early, and all he ended up with was a scar on his back.”
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11.“I’m a nurse, but just had a patient who came in for a colonoscopy due to constipation and pain with bowel movements. He told me before the test, he felt like there was something ‘catching’ on the left side of his abdomen when he pooped…”
“He thought, ‘Maybe I have a big polyp there.’ Sure enough, he had a 2.5 centimeter polyp that we removed from that exact area. I’ll never get to find out if that catching sensation ever went away for him, but I thought it was interesting that he was right.”
12.“Patient here. I told my family GP (who I’d seen since I was a kid and who worked with and saw both my parents as patients for years) that I thought I had reactive hypoglycemia. He scoffed. ‘You don’t have that. Why would you think you have that?’ I told him my symptoms…”
“…He was doubtful but told the nurse to get me a Coke and made me chug it. Sent me to roam around the hospital for a bit, then get bloodwork and return. I returned, and his first words were, ‘This is so aggravating.’ ‘Does…that mean I have it?’ Yup…”
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13.“I was having on-and-off pain in my lower abdomen in a super specific place. Certain things exacerbated it (digestion, sex, exercise), and when I went to my PCP, I told her, ‘I can circle for you with a sharpie where it hurts…”
“…My doctor brushed it off since it was intermittent, noting it was probably a muscle pull or IBS, but after a bit of pushing on my part, I ordered imaging. The radiologist immediately pulled me for a follow-up with a surgeon because I had a golf ball-sized cyst on my ovary (right under the circle I had drawn) indicative of advanced endometriosis. I made sure to tell my PCP at my next follow-up…”
14.“I knew my partner had leukemia about a week before I could convince him to go to the doctor. He was bleeding and bruising really easily and had petechiae. I wanted to go to urgent care where I knew the CBC was done quickly onsite, but he instead wanted to wait to go to his primary…”
“….I took him to his primary and had a bag packed for the hospital in the trunk. The doctor told him it was likely a B12 deficiency but that he’d do bloodwork to put my mind at ease. I asked if the CBC was done onsite or not, and he said it was sent out.
I asked if he planned to rush the CBC. He got furious and said, ‘There is nothing the CBC could show that would change my treatment plan.’ Then he told my partner he needed to stop me from googling. We got a call that night from the lab that his WBCs were dangerously high and platelets were dangerously low, and I had to take him to the ER immediately. I did, and he was diagnosed with acute leukemia.”
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15.“One of my dearest friends from middle school was suffering from absolutely devastating medical issues. She went from being bright and thriving in university to dropping out before graduating because her health declined. She lost the job that paid her a fantastic amount… basically, her entire life fell apart. She was telling me about the new weird thing happening with her…”
“..She had some strange anemia that was found to be the result of abnormally low ferritin in her blood, which is what enables your red blood cells to carry iron. That was when something clicked in my brain: horrible digestive issues, peculiar anemia, chronic infections in her spleen that required a splenectomy, sunburn to a blistering point in less than a half-hour, a diagnosed allergy to sulfa drugs, horrible reactions to carbamazepine, retinol gave her a suppurating skin rash. I’m a premed dropout, and one of the first classes I took on my path to premed was an undergrad course on rare conditions and diseases. One of the ones we discussed in our inherited disorders class segment was porphyria.
There’s an easy way to tell if someone has porphyria: have them pee into a clear plastic or glass cup and expose it to direct sunlight. In hours to days, the urine of people with porphyria will turn from clear or yellow to a wine red or purple. So I asked her if she trusted me enough to do something weird and told her to get a clear plastic disposable cup from her kitchen, pee in it, and put it on her windowsill where nobody could see it. And if anything about it changes, please tell me. Approximately four hours later, she called me on the phone screaming that her ‘piss turned purple-red like a goddamn vampire,’ and I told her she needed to go to the doctor and get tested for porphyria. She got the results two weeks later, and I was correct.”
16.“My husband and I had been following up again and again with the pediatrician for some mild but never-ending symptoms our son was experiencing: random vomiting, exhaustion, mild fever that came and went, then finally leg pain and limping…”
“…I thought he was overreacting to think cancer, but his doctor finally ordered us to the children’s hospital. Their ER admitted us to the oncology ward after a day of different tests. It took a week to determine that it was acute lymphoblastic leukemia as opposed to another cancer. Took our little five-year-old almost three years to ring the bell. We’ve been off treatment for four months, and it’s been surreal.”
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17.“I got mono at 16. It didn’t go away. I was getting recurrences twice a year where my lymph nodes would swell, and I would get sick just like the first time, my blood tests showing glaring red positives for mono markers. I got my tonsils out in my 20’s, and the mono seemed to subside. Two years later, I got all the same symptoms.”
“Swollen lymph nodes, fatigue, all the rest. I went to the urgent care. The PA took one look at the bumps under my arms and prescribed me antibiotic cream for ingrown hair. I told him about the mono — he rolled his eyes and told me they were infected ingrown hairs. I insisted on a blood test, even if I had to pay out of pocket. Blood tests came back, and not only was I positive for mono, the markers were 19 TIMES the normal numbers for a positive case.”
18.“I correctly old my doctor that I had dengue fever. I had just returned from Puerto Rico and had all of the symptoms except for bleeding. The doctor dismissed my suggestion and told me that I had the flu. After a few days, he relented and had me get a blood test. And it was dengue fever!”
19.“Halfway through my cancer treatment, I told them it was back. No one but my mom listened to me. After two months of non-stop telling them they had done a scan, it turns out that yes, I had cancer again, and it was getting close to being terminal. The student doctor learned to listen that day.”
20.“My friend diagnosed herself with HIV. She had swelling around her neck, and the doctors weren’t finding anything. She Googles her symptoms, calls me, and says she thinks she is HIV-positive. I spend the call trying to calm her down and telling her to get tested, but that probably isn’t it. Her doctor also told her there was no way, but she insisted on getting tested. Yep, she was right.”
Whether you’re a doctor or you were the patient, what is a shocking medical self-diagnosis that ended up being correct? Tell us in the comments or in this anonymous form.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
