Why you'll probably be misdiagnosed in your lifetime
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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You're listening to Shortwave. From NPR. Hey short wavers, Emily Kwong, back in the host chair for a day. I missed you all. Hi. So med school, it's all about learning the answers. So you can one day diagnose your patients. But what happens if the medical mystery is you?
I kind of felt this hard lump uh beneath my skin on the right side of my neck just tucked up under my jaw. This is
Diana Sejas. As a med student in the early two thousands, she noticed this hard lump on her neck was growing.
until at some point it got big enough that it was there all the time and I started to just Be very aware of it.
She was surrounded by doctors, and her personal care team wasn't worried. They told her this was probably a swollen lymph node. But Diana wasn't so sure. In her classes, she was learning about the characteristics of abnormalities, including tumors, and she thought this lump had
a lot of red flags. It was hard, fixed in place, meaning I couldn't really move it around very well. Um, and it just kept kind of growing slowly over time. So she sought out more opinions, but each time it just was always oh don't worry about it or it's nothing or Um, it's just a lymph node, it's just an infection, or most of the time they're like, It's just anxiety or just anxious 'cause medical students get everything. Until years later she got the lumps scanned. And I remember while I was in the scanner looking at the tech through the window that where they can kind of see into the room. And just based on the face that he was making, I was like, Oh, I know something's going on. Diana
had not even made it up the stairs from that appointment. When her doctor called and said, Yeah, this is a tumor. By that point, it had infiltrated her lymph nodes and was wrapped around an artery. And in surgery, her doctor realized it was leaking.
So usually when that happens, he'll just kind of put a stitch in it and close it up and it's fine. He went to put a stitch in the artery and he said that the artery fell apart. So The wall was just destroyed. Um, and so of course I started bleeding. Um, there was uh what I understand a lot of activity uh in the OR at the time. You don't want to see that happen at all, um, especially for that major blood uh vessel to rupture in such a way. Diana learned all of this later. At the time she was under anesthesia, and when she woke up I was incredibly angry and I couldn't figure out why, uh, because everybody was being so nice to me.
What personal story introduces the diagnosis crisis in this episode?
And things feel felt very cloudy. But some point I remember being in the room in the bed by myself. And I looked down at my lap and I was like, ooh, why is my grandmother's arm in my lap? That doesn't make sense. My grandma is still in North Carolina. I'm here and I was in New Orleans at the time. Why is my grandmother's arm in my lap? Diana was hallucinating
because she was having a stroke. She lost feeling in her left arm and still experiences side effects to this day, all because of a tumor that was diagnosed far too late. So, today on the show, the diagnosis crisis: how diagnostic error affects patients, and what the doctors who are the best at diagnosis do differently. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
This week on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, we talked with Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Hernand Diaz about how he's used the same fountain pen for the last 30 years. What would happen if you lost it? Do you guys know those dick pens with four colors? I grew up with that. Don't miss our full conversation and the rest of our games. Listen to the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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let's listen to Josh Reddick's new walk-up song.
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