Dying doctor whose cancer was written off as hypochondria
A DOCTOR whose cancer went undiagnosed for two years accused colleagues of failing her.
In a heart-rending blog, GP Lisa Steen said her symptoms were mistaken for ‘health anxiety’, so she was treated as a hypochondriac.
The married mother-of-two from Cambridge was diagnosed with a rare kidney cancer two years after originally seeking help. It had spread to her bones and she died in February aged 43 – almost four years after she first noticed symptoms.
Dr Steen’s blog about her battle for a correct diagnosis has now been published online by the British Medical Journal.
She described being left ‘wandering in the wilderness’ and said she felt humiliated by doctors who did not listen to her detailed account of her symptoms, despite her medical background.
‘I am angry at being left in the medically unexplained wilderness and I did not like
‘Left in the wilderness’
the way my colleagues looked at me, when they believed me to have health anxiety,’ she wrote. ‘If any one of the doctors I saw had gone another mile they would’ve stumbled upon it. I almost told them the answer … but they were unable to hear the answer from a patient.’
Dr Steen was a trainee psychiatrist at Fulbourn Hospital, Cambridgeshire, when she began suffering from dizziness, headaches, fatigue, memory problems and visual disturbances in 2012.
She was given antidepressants, sent for eye tests and referred to a neurologist, as she had previously had a benign tumour removed from her neck.
Their tests found nothing abnormal and her GP referred her to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed her with depression and health anxiety – which Dr Steen did not believe was correct.
She said her ward rounds became impossible as she was getting confused, struggling to remember words and felt she was ‘almost hallucinating’.
After being signed off work, she spent months looking into her illness, but ‘one could not be dogmatic in further requests for investigations for fear of looking even more “anxious” … aka a hypochondriac,’ she wrote.
Blood, heart and urine tests failed to reveal a cause. By early 2014 Dr Steen said she gave up efforts to discover what was making her ill, adding: ‘I still knew there was something wrong, but it seemed so fruitless going to see specialists. It was so humiliating, feeling like a goldfish with no voice. Watching doctors’ faces glaze over at the multitude of symptoms.’
Her journalist husband Raymond Brown, 56, said: ‘She was just so angry and frustrated … hitting a brick wall with every doctor she went to see.’ He added: ‘At one stage someone entered into her notes, “No amount of investigation will reassure this patient”.’
Dr Steen became unable to cope with her psychiatric training so she worked as a GP for a drug and alcohol service.
But an occupational health doctor sent her for tests after spotting her weight loss, and in June 2014 a radiologist found a 4in lump on her kidney – a cancerous tumour that had spread to her spine, ribs and pelvis. She had chemotherapy and surgery but died in February.
In her blog, begun two months before her death, she wrote: ‘My story is a cautionary tale to all health professionals … Illness is somehow not the done thing.
‘It upsets our “them/us” belief system, which helps us cope with the horror of what we see. “We do not get ill, [patients] are ill”. We are a lot more military than we realise.’