From all the appointments that I have been to, all the different hospitals, all the varying specialities, there is one thing that I have noticed: doctors tend to contradict each other.

In this past week I have been to a neurologist and a diagnostics team, both at Children’s hospital in St. Louis, both off the same wing of the hospital, and both telling me different things.

You see, the neurologists who saw me last Friday determined my headaches, nausea, dizziness, and steadily increasing blurred vision are from migraines, which in a way is a very probable explanation. They prescribed me some medication to help alleviate the pain and put a stop to these symptoms telling me they would work in two days, three or four days tops. Frustrated that they dismissed any of these symptoms as maybe being correlated with the cyst recently found, especially with the worsening vision, but pleased that they at least began some type of plan of action, I left their office, hopeful that maybe my symptoms would in fact disappear.

Five days later I found myself in yet another examination room, with no change in any of my problems, hearing a completely different story. According to the man in charge of the diagnostics team, this medicine could take 10 days to properly begin to work, and the symptoms regarding my blurred vision, constant headaches, dizziness, and nausea do not have anything to do with the cyst, but rather just the cause of a minor stress headache

I am seriously beginning to wonder whether all medical schools are on the same page or not. On the other hand, this man from the diagnostics center was quite assuring he will eventually find the source of my abdominal pain, he is just not precisely sure when. He seems to believe that the pain near my ribs could be a result of slipped rib syndrome, or the inability of the cartilage to properly attach to my muscle, a diagnosis that was primarily prescribed and ruled out by the general surgeon who performed my gall bladder surgery.

At this point in time I am willing to try almost anything to see if it works, if only I could obtain some type of answer. Knowing what tests to conduct is the key to figuring out this mess, but quite frankly the test to confirm slipped rib syndrome is not very reliable; and not only did my general surgeon rule out the separation of cartilage and rib, the orthopedic surgeon I saw confirmed that it was not this as well.

So with multiple doctors claiming multiple things about the same subject, who am I to believe? Who am I to trust knows the most? When they all say different things, it becomes hard to determine where the truth really lies. Amongst all this confusion though one thing has become clear to me, don’t always assume the professionals always have the answer, I’m finding out everyday that sometimes they are just as much in the dark as you and I are. Somebody just needs to turn on the light.