When Every Doctor Treats a Piece of You
I dread specialist appointments because they so often feel like a waste of time — or worse, humiliating.
Not because I don’t want answers — I do. But they almost never help in the way I need. They don’t see the big picture — because they can’t.
When I walk into a new office, I bring a long list of symptoms and interconnected issues: fatigue, muscle problems, pain, GI issues. A few lab values are off, but not "alarming." I know what this looks like to them — too many symptoms, too much to fit in the allotted 20 minutes. I can almost see it in their faces: "Is this a hypochondriac? Can I even help this patient? Or is this just someone too complex to be worth the time?"
Most of the time, my concerns are brushed off — not because they aren’t real, but because they either fall outside that doctor's specialty or aren’t considered severe enough to warrant action.
- Low WBC and IgG subclass? Not low enough to trigger concern.
- Recurring infections? Not severe enough for antibiotics so not a concern.
- Muscle pain and weakness? “That’s not really in our domain.”
Maybe I look too healthy. Maybe I speak too clearly — or not clearly enough. Maybe my lab results are always close to normal — the kind that don’t set off alarms, just quiet dismissals.
Even so, I am still the one living in this body. I’m the one managing the symptoms, forming hypotheses, testing interventions, tracking patterns, and doing the work — even when no one else is willing to step back and consider the whole picture.
That’s the real reason these appointments fail: because complex, multi-system illness doesn’t divide cleanly into specialist-sized silos. It requires whole system pattern recognition. It requires context. It requires someone who stays with the problem long enough to make sense of it.
That someone is me. And if you also live with unexplained chronic illness, then you already know: no one is coming to solve this for you either. But that doesn't mean it can't be solved — just that the work, difficult as it is, starts with us.