http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2016/08/25/lisa-steen-the-wilderness-of-the-medically-unexplained/
excerpt:
excerpt:
This patient perspective essay was written by Lisa Steen. She has since died. We have permission to publish the piece from her husband, Raymond Brown.
I am a GP, formerly a trainee psychiatrist and now 43 years old. In July 2014, I was diagnosed as having kidney cancer with multiple bone metastases. The cancer was extremely rare, associated with a succinate dehydrogenase B (SDHB) mutation. This genetic condition was later also found to be the cause of my carotid body paraganglionoma which had appeared when I was 18 and was finally excised when I was 27.
I had felt unwell in terms of dizziness and visual symptoms since August 2012, and presented to my GP in September 2012, nearly two years before my diagnosis was made in July 2014. So I spent two years wandering in the wilderness of the medically unexplained.
In fact I had been feeling tired for several months even prior to this presentation in August 2012, and had felt like I was lacking concentration. I had been put on a series of antidepressants, each of which caused “side effects” which may have been symptoms of illness all along. Fluoxetine caused headaches, sertraline caused diarrhoea, and dosulepin caused visual disturbance—at least that’s what I thought at the time...