It doesn’t seem to matter that it’s the year 2023. Some people still treat women like they don’t know what they’re talking about, even when it comes to their own body, experiences, and medical history. A viral TikTok stars a mom who encountered some extreme (but not unusual) medical gaslighting from more than one doctor when she sought relief from “extreme pain” at the local hospital's emergency room.
Amanda Buschelman shares snippets of her life on TikTok under the handle @amandabman.
Recently she took to the app to share the wild details of a medical event that lasted far longer than it should have because ER doctors didn’t believe her.
“In today’s episode of, ‘Doctors Should Believe Women,'” Amanda shares, “I went to the doctor three weeks ago with extreme right side abdominal pain, and my doctor sent me to the emergency room with suspected appendicitis.”
At the ER, the doctor thought he knew where Amanda’s pain was coming from.
She says the ER doc insisted she had an ovarian cyst that was causing her pain.
“I don’t have any ovaries and I haven’t had any for 10 years,” she explains to the doctor. But he didn’t believe she knew her own medical history.
“Maybe you just had your uterus removed,” the doctor replies.
“No, no. I was there the day they did it,” Amanda tells him. “They definitely took both my ovaries that day 10 years ago, so what you’re saying, it’s not that.”
The doctor didn’t listen, Amanda said, and continued to dismiss her pain.
He sends her home, telling her that her pain wasn’t a big deal. When Amanda gets home and read the charting from her ER visit, the doctor listed her as “anxious presenting.”
She was sent home with no plan or concern, so Amanda followed up with her primary care doctor again, who insisted she go back to the ER.
So, Amanda went back to the emergency room and saw a different ER doctor.
During her second visit, seeing a second male ER doctor, she is again diagnosed with an ovarian cyst — even though she had a full hysterectomy. She has no ovaries to have a cyst on.
Amanda insists to the doctor again that it could not be an ovarian cyst, so the doctor decides to look up her medical history. And yep, there it was: She has no ovaries.
Finally, the doctor believed it wasn't a cyst, instead telling her it’s a tumor.
Amanda is, again, sent home and told to contact her OB/GYN, who immediately scheduled her for surgery.
“Guess what,” she says. “I had appendicitis the WHOLE TIME and I had my appendix taken out along with that little tumor that isn’t an ovary.”
In a follow-up video, Amanda shared more details about what happened after her tumor was removed.
Calling her medical ordeal “Ovarygate 2023,” Amanda explains that the growth she had wasn’t actually a tumor. Instead, it was endometriosis that “made its way in there” and caused “all kinds of problems.”
Amanda recalls a conversation she had with her OB/GYN, who said that sometimes doctors miss things, and that “the thing that confounds me is that where the tumor was is not where ovaries are.”
Understandably shocked, Amanda says this makes her original story of being dismissed "worse."
Not only did she have two doctors dismiss her pain as an ovarian cyst (which is still painful), but the “cyst” or “tumor” they saw wasn’t where ovaries would typically be.
Yikes.
