USA moment
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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I was shitting blood, turned grey, and fainted in public. I did go the hospital. They literally said "idk" and sent me home with a 4000$ bill. It kept happening.
Went to a specialist that also resulted in a literal "idk", and they wouldn't clear a colonoscopy because I am "too young" and "don't have a family history." I was begging them to figure it out because this was a fucking nightmare. Nope. At least the bill was 400$ this time around.
It kept happening for over a year at random. Actually terrifying.
FINALLY, I put myself on a diet of oatmeal and water for a month and slowly introduced new foods every week. I was curious to know if maybe certain foods triggered it?
Turns out: yes. I triggered a reaction using one of my favorite foods/ingredients. No idea why, but I had developed some kind of severe intolerance to it. And I had to figure it out myself.
What was the allergy, out of curiosity?
I'm figuring out my own allergies. Atm on a GFCF diet. Seems to be working somewhat.
Green onion.
Just green onion? I tried allium exclusion for a while. So green onions give you allergies, but like, garlic doesn't?
I'm very sorry that you went through that. I know it sucks with the American healthcare $ystem, but you are always allowed to seek a second opinion and any provider that is opposed to that is a bad provider and you shouldn't see them again anyways.
One thing to keep in mind about the ER though, is that they're there to rule out anything that is going to kill you quickly, and if you didn't lose enough blood to drop your hemoglobin count (a measure of how many red blood cells you have), it is perfectly within the standard of care for them to discharge you and tell you to follow up with your primary care physician or a specialist. The ER has a lot of resources, but not enough resources to fully diagnose every possible problem. They can make sure you're not on death's doorstep, and stabilize you if you are, but beyond that, they're pretty strapped for resources and staffing which make it hard to fully work up every mystery diagnosis.
If I'm going to be charged 4000$, I want a fucking diagnosis.
Unfortunately, a solid diagnosis can be really hard to find and there are a lot of diseases and conditions that require more testing than can be completed in the ER. Part of why the ER is expensive is because the tests they do get come back almost immediately, but they very rarely order the tests that take a long time anyways. Expediency and staffing are the main contributors to the cost of emergency care.
With the example of your case, how would the ER get you the diagnosis of a food intolerance without spending weeks on an elimination diet? There are some allergies that can be tested for, but that testing involves injecting a sample of the offending agent under the skin and watching to see if it causes irritation.... but allergies and food intolerances are not the same thing and the only way to test for food intolerances is an elimination diet. For the allergy testing, the ER doesn't have the samples to do the subcutaneous injections. It's really only allergy specialists that have those available.
how would the ER get you the diagnosis of a food intolerance without spending weeks on an elimination diet?
They sent me out without literally any clue as to what it was. My body felt like a ticking tine bomb, and I was terrified it would happen again. And it did. Several times. I had no idea it was an intolerance until nearly a year later. My weight kept yoyo-ing and I lost almost 30lbs in 2 months. I was terrified of my own body.
No medical professional told me about the elimination diet or even that it could have been food-related. I got desperate enough to try it on my own after my sister was talking some shit about "cleansing toxins" and mentioned it. I looked it up and did it on my own accord.
I get that ER is for emergencies, sure, but I left with zero answers and didn't have access to another specialist, as they're at least an hour and half drive away from my town. And VERY full. Not everyone has access to a second opinion.
This is true and the healthcare access problem is more than just cost. If you're an hour and a half away from any specialists, then the ER you went to likely doesn't have access to set up those referrals. I have worked in both metropolitan and rural medical systems, and the biggest problems in rural healthcare are almost always access-based. If a hospital/ER is not in the same medical group as a specialist, they can't put in emergency referrals to that specialist, and I have worked in rural hospitals that don't even always have imaging services available. There's an MRI on a trailer that gets brought around to the various hospitals in the group meaning that each hospital has one day a week or one day every other week where an MRI is available. The other option a small, rural ER has is to call EMS to transfer you to another hospital with more resources, but if your insurance doesn't like the reason they give, you end up on the hook for that 90 minute ambulance ride. Small community hospitals are really between a rock and a hard place when it comes to connecting patients with resources while trying to avoid unnecessary expenses.
The best advice I have for anyone in a rural area with poor healthcare access is to establish care with a family physician for primary care because, most of the time, the primary care physician is the one that actually gets to the bottom of things or coordinates the referrals for specialists. If you have a standing relationship with a physician, it's a lot easier to make an appointment and they have a baseline to work from as opposed to starting from scratch like an ER physician has to.
Maybe bro just eats a fuckton of beets
Semi-Funny story. I had never eaten beets before, but I started eating those beet and sea salt chips (so good!), and I freaked the fuck out when I peed red that next morning.
I have hella good healthcare through my job, and so I made an appointment with my primary care doc right away, and he was like "Any changes to your diet?"
Felt bad about wasting his time, but Jesus, I was not expecting that amount of red in the bowl!
Don't feel bad about that! There are no stupid questions when it comes to your health and it's important to ask someone who can give you accurate answers (and there's no one better to ask than your own physician that you have a relationship with).
Ask anyone in primary patient care - people make that exact same appointment because of beets regularly. Beets are absolutely delicious, but boy can they be a little mindfuck for a moment if you aren't expecting the side effect!
As someone who temporarily switched from carrots to beets due to an allergy, golden beets are a solution to avoid giving people you cook for a good scare
That's dangerous, that could be sexual transmitted disease 💬🤔or kidney diseases
Let's not rule out bladder cancer.
Painless hematuria (blood in the urine without pain when peeing) is one of the first (and frequently only) signs of bladder cancer. Especially if it's frank blood (meaning that you can see it without a microscope).
Can relate, my dad sees 'going to the doctor' as a personal weakness and thus rarely goes.
I see it as financial weakness and thus rarely go.
Many if not most men are like this. It's usually their wives or another woman in their lives that drags them in when something is about to fall off. It's another way in which husbands leave 71% of a household’s ‘mental load’ on their wives, down to their own well being.
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That’s a whole part of my cynical conservative upbringing that I have to consciously work against.
You can’t do the obvious thing you’re SUPPOSED to do. What are you, some kind of sucker and/or [gay slur]?
probably a man living in USA
Guaranteed, anyone with access to real healthcare would've had that checked out immediately.
Yeah we all know older european men aren't stubborn about anything and would go to the doctor at the first sign of anything
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Mr. Rockefeller over here seeing doctors
I'm currently pissing blood on the regular and I have free healthcare, so I think this is more of a "dumb dude" thing than an "American with an overdraft" thing.
I will go to the doc eventually, but I need more. I can't be turning up there with one thing to report. I need stabbing pains, memory loss, night terrors and maybe some jaundice before I pick up the phone.
I know I can't die early, because I'm not getting off that easy. So I'm safe for the time being 👍🙃
Painless gross haematuria is one of the most common first signs of bladder cancer. A very treatable cancer for most people. Peeing blood for no reason can be bad. It can also be beats.
Holy fuck just go to the doctor so at least they can do simple blood work and make sure it's nothing obvious. I pissed blood once, turns out along with the leg pain my kidneys were about to shut down. Go to the fucking doctor
Can confirm, dude is indeed dumb ;-)
If symptoms linked to kidney failure isn't enough to send you to the doctor...
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Look at Constantine over here, cursed to live.
Can you really piss blood?
Plenty of reasons. Twice i woke up with my pijama pants full of blood, like, full. No scar, no wound, nothing, just blood. I never knew where it came from (as all places from where it could have come were with blood) but I assume it was urinated. It was a side effect of an antidepressant I was taking that start happening two years after beginning the treatment. I had to change the antidepressant and it never happened again
Yeah I'm pretty sure that's a key sign of kidney failure. It can happen rarely in cases of some crazy workouts, but if this dude is saying all the time then it's probably something worse.
It can happen rarely in cases of some crazy workouts
If anyone's curious about why:
Muscles break down during workouts. They release myoglobin, which is a large protein. The kidneys can usually filter it in small quantities.
If you go too hard and give yourself rhabdomyolysis, your body releases a large quantity of myoglobin and it overloads the kidneys. Large proteins begin passing through the nephrons en masse and damaging them because they're too big.
Now your kidneys are unable to filter properly because the nephrons cannot contract to prevent excess fluids or particles from going into your urine.
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Also could be a UTI or STI(s). Or he eats beets all the time and isn't particularly bright. Could be anything, spin the wheel of medical disasters!
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Yeah, bladder cancer.
Not only bladder cancer but a whole bunch of things. I used to run home from work and I would always pee right beforehand so I wouldn't risk having to find some sort of place to pee, but then I started peeing blood every couple of weeks when my mileage went up to around the 10 mile mark. Apparently hematuria can happen from basically having a totally empty bladder chafe itself raw if you run long enough lol. I quit peeing before leaving work after my doctor recommended giving that a shot and it cleared up
Piss is blood, in a sense. It's the bits of your blood that get sieved out and rejected by your kidneys.
Normally those are the only bits supposed to be getting out. But if the filter is busted (kidney trouble) or if the walls of the storage tank it sits in after filtering become damaged (bladder trouble), you can end up pissing actual, unfiltered blood.
Alternatively, you ate something recently with a strong red pigment that can survive digestion, enter the bloodstream, get strained out by the kidneys, and collect in your piss in high enough concentration to turn it red. Beets are a pretty famous culprit.
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