Blood in the urine? I am familiar with that symptom. you need to have urologist stick a scope up your pipe and take a look for bladder cancer. It is as unpleasant as it sounds. My HMO didn't do anything until i had completely stopped urinating and had so many clots that i went into labor.

I thought I was going to die and I wanted it over with. I know what labor is like and it is not something a man should know. i had contractions just like labor for three or four hours - i was in the same state, albeit without the proper opening.

A kidney stone is nothing.

Respect, honor and love to all mothers everywhere!

I hope you don't have it, but it is treatable and miserable until the catheter comes out.

i got mine from being a government guinea pig. i guess it was worth it, but i'm the only one left.

No problem since then. Blessings to you and keep in mind that unless you are talking to a urologist or oncologist, the medical professionals will know less about it that you do.

If it is bladder cancer I would suggest taking care of it before you go into labor. You really don't want to know what labor feels like.

I suppose a lot of doctors might be hacked off to know that way more people than they'd like to believe are beginning to think of the majority doctors as little more than hacks and even charlatans. I'm sure that opinion would sting, but having been dismissed and patted on the head and sent out the door with a fistful of free meds again and again and discouraged from learning more about my own body or even asking questions, I've grown profoundly skeptical of the abilities of doctors. Not to mention the attitudes are appalling.

Managed care is supposed to be the actual villain, but I'm not so sure I buy that anymore. My own mother lived through several years of being told to go home and have a beer and stop thinking about how she felt, that she was just feeling anxious, that she was too high-strung (in other words, neurotic) only to be diagnosed finally with Lou Gehrig's disease, which was, as one might imagine, a pretty horrifying way to die, slowly, over several years, as paralysis crept up from her feet to incapacitate her completely.

I've met with the same attitudes again and again, with asthma, B12 anemia, thyroid disease (not just low thyroid but the autoimmune disease that destroys one's thyroid gland over time and can cause a host of other ills,... YOU try living without a fully functioning thyroid gland and get back to me about that works for you). Every time, I've been told by actual doctors, "You LOOK fine," as if my appearance itself holds the actual key to a diagnosis. Because I'm fit, slender, active, because I don't carry myself as if I'm ill, and because I don't "fit the profile," as I've been told, I'm given a pat on the head and sent home, and, like my mother, told again and again to stop thinking. I've even had doctors try to convince me I couldn't possibly have Hashimoto's thyroiditis because I'm too slender, as if I don't know anything about my own health.

What's with that, really. What's with the attitude? And why in the world would I not want to know how my own body works and why it hurts when it hurts. Why in the world would I want to hand myself over to a total stranger and literally put my life into his or her hands in that way without participating in some way. It defies logic. It's my body. I shouldn't be made to feel guilty for feeling and being ill, and I shouldn't be made to feel guilty for wanting to know exactly what's wrong and how to fix it, or at least how to live with it in a way that I understand.

The most recent, mind boggling experience, a heart tumor, newly diagnosed, which left my own physician and a heart specialist at the same time, in the same room with me, scratching their heads and disavowing any understanding of what it might mean, whether it was life-threatening or dangerous, and when I began asking questions, my doctor had the damned gall to tell me to go home and stop thinking. "You think too much," she said. "You're asymptomatic, so go home and stop thinking so much." How she would have known whether I was symptomatic or not was a mystery to me as nobody'd bothered to ask if I was having any symptoms.

And truly by that time I'd resigned myself to feeling so utterly demoralized by my own health and the attitudes of doctors that I'd actually stopped telling any of them anything beyond the once in a blue moon, seasonal, "I have a pretty bad sore throat, maybe you can prescribe something." A month later? A heart attack. After visiting another heart specialist? Thankfully HE was appropriately appalled. Heart tumors. Yeah, they can kill you. But only if you think about them, I guess.... And doctors wonder why they get sued.

"Even doctors hate us. Most doctors would rather see a patient with suppurating genitals than a hypochondriac, and with good reason."

This quote had me laughing tonight and that second part is true. But Doctors don't hate their patients.

I am a physician, and hypochondriacs are difficult to deal with. However, no one can be diagnosed until after taking a thorough history and doing an exam and ordering the appropriate tests. Once the medical problems are ruled out I clearly and calmly explain to them that they need to see a psychiatrist or psychologist. While hypochondriacs can be treated by psychotherapy - it is nearly impossible to get a hypochondriac to try it. But once I suggest it they almost always find a new doctor and leave me alone.

Clearly, you have never been close to a true hypochondriac. The article is talking about something that is a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It's got nothing to do with good, common-sense persistence when dealing with the medical community and/or educating oneself during the diagnostic process.