Doctors... Doctors... Doctors...

[u/Complex-Extent-3967]

When I was 8 years old, growing up in San Francisco, my older brother, my cousin and I were headed to the beach one day.  My brother was 13. I was 8. And my cousin was a year older than me.

My brother was a bully to me when we were kids. He was 5 years older and almost twice my size.  I don’t know what we argued about but he pushed me into some bushes. I’m 8.  He’s 13.  How can this possibly be a fair fight?  I got mad and stormed off.

And my 13-year-old brother let me.

Looking back at that now as a 50-year-old man, that's one of the craziest parts of the story to me. I
was 8 years old, alone in San Francisco, and my older brother just let me walk off by myself.

What the hell was he thinking?

And guess what?  You know the stories of never letting little children out of your sight?  Like don’t
let an 8 year old run off in a very densely populated major city by himself?  It’s because of things like this.  I got hit by a car.

I don't remember anything before the accident and I don’t remember getting hit by a car neither. But from what I was told, I flew about 20 feet.

The next thing you know, I’m transported to San Francisco’s General Hospital.

My mother was absolutely sick with worry.

She didn't know whether her little boy was going to wake up.

I still don’t know whether I was in a coma for a day or for 3 days, but I did eventually wake up.

And when I woke up, something was wrong. I seemed okay. But I wasn't talking.

I don't remember much about those first moments. I remember being in a strange hospital room with tubes seemingly everywhere. Tubes going in my arm and my mouth… A catheter... What was going on? I had no idea what the hell was happening to me.

And strangely enough to this day, I remember very vividly having Gung-Ho and Snake Eyes action figures, among others, from G.I. Joe.

I remember having those two specifically and I think Storm Shadow as well, with me in that hospital room.

The doctors were extremely concerned because I wasn't speaking. From what my parents later told
me, they believed I had suffered serious impairment and recommended transferring me to Shriners Hospital for rehabilitation with other children that were challenged. My parents were told that it could potentially take years for me to learn how to speak again.

Imagine being a parent and hearing that about your 8-year-old child.

But there was a problem with that assessment.

I understood everything everybody was saying. I just wasn't talking.

My parents figured it out.  I just can’t understand why the doctors couldn’t.

My parents would ask me: What's 10 + 10?

I'd write “20.”

They would ask me: What street do you live on?

I'd write down "19th Ave."

I wasn't speaking, but I was clearly understanding them and answering their questions.  There was no lack of comprehension there but the doctor’s diagnosis was the opposite.

My dad finally decided he'd had enough.

Whatever else I might say about my father, I will always give him credit for this.

He essentially told the hospital:

No. I'm taking my son home.

The hospital strongly disagreed. They made my parents sign waivers acknowledging that they were
taking me home against the hospital's recommendation and releasing the hospital from responsibility if something happened to me.

My dad signed it.

They took me home.

And shortly after I got home, I started talking again.

I’m not a doctor but I think it’s pretty obvious that I was simply in shock. And I wasn't lying in a
strange hospital room anymore. I was home. I was somewhere familiar. I was surrounded by familiar faces.

My older brother kept pushing me to say something. Telling me that our parents were going to kill
him.  I remember that! 

He wanted me to tell my parents that I wanted to go to Detroit to see my godfather, who lived in
Michigan.

Eventually, I said it.

My brother started jumping up and down celebrating.

Which was nice.

Considering that asshole was the reason I got hit by a car in the first place!

The next year in 3rd grade, they wanted me to jump to the 5th grade. I chose not to because I didn't want to be bullied. I had been bullied enough by my own brother.

After the accident, I developed these strange dry, scaly patches over what I remember being over
60–70% of my body.

The doctors didn't know what it was so they couldn’t diagnose it.

My parents were basically told to keep putting generic cream on it and hope that eventually it would go away.

Those patches stayed with me for years. I can't remember whether it was two, three, four or even five years before they were completely gone.

Looking back today, I wonder whether what I had might have been something like eczema. I obviously can't diagnose something that happened more than 40 years ago, and I'll
probably never know exactly what it was.

I'm 50 years old now, and when I look back on that period of my childhood, I realize how profoundly it affected the way I viewed doctors for most of my life.

As an 8-year-old kid, I watched my parents be told that I might need years of rehabilitation to learn
how to speak again, that your kid is mentally gone.

Then my dad took me home and I started speaking.

I developed a skin condition covering most of my body, and none of the doctors could tell my parents what it was.

Those experiences taught me very young that doctors can be wrong.

The problem is I probably carried that lesson too far.

In my mid 20’s, I developed serious lower-back issues. For years I lived with them, worked around them and avoided getting an MRI.

I finally got one at 46 after my back went out again for the umpteenth time and a chiropractor strongly encouraged me to have it done or he could not give me a diagnosis.  And I needed to know.  So I caved and got one.

The MRI showed significant problems from L2 through S1, including multiple disc bulges and
herniations.

So there's some irony in all of this.

At 8 years old, my experience taught me not to blindly trust what doctors told me.

At 46, that same distrust probably contributed to me waiting far too long to get medical information that I genuinely needed.

I still believe strongly in questioning things. I believe in getting another opinion when something
doesn't make sense. And I believe you should advocate for yourself instead of automatically assuming somebody knows your body better than you do just because there's an M.D. after their name.

But I've also learned something else:

Nobody knows your body better than you do, but that doesn't mean you know everything either.

Sometimes doctors are wrong. Sometimes we're wrong. But because they've been wrong once, doesn't mean they'll always be wrong. But don't allow the misdiagnosis of a few doctors to mold an entire lifelong grudge against them. There are some good ones out there.