If I’ve said it once…I’m not a doctor. So I actually have no idea what it takes to diagnosis person “x” with illness “y”. But after 10 doctor visits and 6 diagnostic procedures in the last 4 months (I know, it’s crazy math), I was beginning to feel like Ingrid Bergman in the 1944 movie Gaslight. You know, the one where the main character is being convinced that she is imagining things, and that she is insane. She sees the gaslights in her house randomly dim and brighten, with no explanation, and begins to doubt her grip on reality.

Out of 10 visits, only 2 doctors mentioned the phrase “rheumatoid arthritis” to me. When I finally made it to the rheumatologist, and he understood and validated my symptoms, I felt like I’d met a long-lost friend.

When I expressed a little frustration to my rheumatologist about how tortuous the path had been, he suggested that I give the other guys some slack. “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” he told me.

I get it. Everyone has a specialty. As my allergist advised when I was trying to figure out why I’d had a sore throat for months on end, “Make sure you see an ENT. The gastroenterologist will ignore your throat on his way to your stomach.”

With each of the doctors that I saw, as I tried to explain my all-over joint pain, chest pain, throat pain, and fatigue, rheumatoid arthritis was dismissed outright because I did not have hot, red, swollen joints. The exceptions were my orthopedic doctor, who mentioned it as a possibility, and my general practitioner who also said that it was a possibility, but didn’t really look like he believed it could be.

I give my family a lot of credit for not locking me in a padded room during this time period. The sense of frustration that I was experiencing was pretty high, and growing worse with each new report showing that I was “normal”.

I’ve heard it said that Rheumatoid Disease (RD) is an invisible illness, and I can certainly understand that. Especially in the early stages, when there is no hard evidence other than the patient’s testimony, it’s hard to see anything but a perfectly healthy individual complaining about some pretty crazy symptoms. How can one measure invisible pain? My husband says that he can see it in my eyes, but he knows me better than anyone.

Evidence suggests a conflict between how patients experience RD and how most doctors view it, from a diagnostic perspective, especially early on.

In my opinion, the following three statements represent a series of really unfortunate events:

• Some people don’t test positive for RD for years into their illness
• By the time joints are visibly affected, the disease has already progressed
• Early treatment is critical to protecting joints and other parts of the body affected by RD

Hello? How can I get early treatment for an illness that I have no concrete evidence for?

I wish I had the answer to this question. The Rheumatoid Patient Foundation succinctly says that early treatment is dependent on 2 things: an early diagnosis, and finding a doctor with an aggressive treatment philosophy.

The message that I keep telling myself is this – take yourself seriously. Keep pushing until you think you’ve found a reasonable answer.

Don’t let them Gaslight you!