Is this condition honestly considered anxiety/attention seeking/dramatic by healthcare workers?

I have just been prescribed an antipsychotic to help with the symptoms of PTSD.
so now I have none epilepsy seizures, fibromyalgia, PTSD and I am on an antipsychotic.

if I need to go to A and E again that will make it so much fun. The last time I was in a had a seizure and the triage nurse shouted out don’t ring the alarm it’s not real epilepsy!!!!!!

Link for those as ignorant of this condition as I was.

There will always be some HCPs with this sort of view. Women with conditions like FND, CFS, POTS - anything which can't be seen on a scan - have faced awful discrimination, not to mention those diagnosed with a personality disorder which is frequently undiagnosed autism.

This is so awful. I’m sorry this happened.

when the surgery offers me a nurse appointment my heart sinks.

I agree. Experienced ex nurse here. That's shocking (no pun intended 😂).

Some healthcare professionals are just arseholes (and I say that as a nurse of 25 yrs!).
I often see people in the job who seem to be completely lacking in any empathy and almost appear pissed off that patients are 'bothering' them. I had no idea what this condition was but I had a quick Google (which I often resort to at work!!LOL) but even if I didnt know you cant exactly fake a fast heart rate.

TBH even if you had anxiety and panic attacks its not like people choose to experience those. I mean there def is attention seeking seeking behaviour from some people but there is also alot of people who are ignored or judged wrongly.

A GP practice nurse wrote off my elderly dad, who had a number of health conditions, recently had cancer, was CEV as having long covid and to go home, keep warm and drink lots of water. He couldn’t even get a GP appointment. He died a week later of pneumonia. We considered making a complaint but decided against it in the end- because of the effects of us.

This.
And no they don't

I regularly had 10hr plus episodes at 180-200
Bpm A&E teams were always really kind and good with me. I also got told off for trying to ignore it when i couldnt release it with valsalval and not coming in sooner a few times.

However....
I have had multiple coworkers telling me about fucking meditation apps their anxious mums found helpful blah blah etc. when I was being hospitalised up to 3 x pw while on medication awaiting ANOTHER surgery and I had to suppress a scream before saying "oh really thats nice"
What they really meant was cant you just stop this and get some work done.

No one but no one is going into hospital at 4am on a Wednesday and taking up to 24mg of adenosine (awful awful stuff) for fun.

An awful pain I had for 2 and a half years was repeatedly dismissed as anxiety simply because I am a woman in my 40s. I had to absolutely insist for tests and luckily my GP and gynaecologist are absolutely brilliant, in the end my gynaecologist didn’t like something by comparing two scans and sent me for a more detailed exam. which discovered a cancer (nowhere near anything gynaecological). Which has taught me to hold my ground and keep speaking up when something is not right.

Some conditions are, I’ve never know AVNRT to be considered like that though.
You can literally see it on an ECG.
I suspect the nurse didn’t understand what it was.

My 76 year old dad is a very stoic and pretty healthy man. A couple of years ago he started to get episodes of chest pain and seriously accelerated heart rate. He was so concerened he went to A&E a couple of times and was told it was a panic attack and was srent home

He was then so ill he was blue lighted to hosputal with severe chest psin and had an emergency op to put in a stent to deal with the undiagnosed angina he had suffered for a couple of years.

I’d been admitted to hospital after nearly dying a few hours before and when I was being put in to the cubicle the nurse commented on my weight. I had oedema and the bed was one that weighed me and she couldn’t understand why the reading was high and I felt very judged

The best nurses were in icu and had come to the uk to work.

I was told that my migraines were anxiety and "all in my head" because no medication works. I can't take most medication because of other health conditions.

They did argue it's because my MRI scan is normal - I've got 2 brain conditions one of which they neglected to inform me about. Almost everyone with either condition complains about migraines

I had nurses get annoyed with me when I had been given too much fentanyl after surgery and I couldn’t move/talk for hours. I could hear them though. They kept coming round huffing and puffing as they wanted to discharge me and I was a zombie. When I finally came round from this episode they told me I had been there 12 hours too long and being a bit dramatic. I had no idea I’d had too much Fentanyl until I asked them to explain why I had been unable to move or talk for 12 hours? I also had go to back 3 days later after being in urinary retention and they didn’t believe me until I demanded they scan my bladder and it had 300ml stuck in it

Acquaintance of mines fiance was going to the doctors for 3 years with her migraines. Kept getting told it's anxiety induced. She kept going back, because the migraines were really bad. Eventually she started passing out. Long story short, she had a brain tumour. It was killing her, they had to remove it, but by then it had grown so big that the operation was very dangerous. They had to try anyway, but sadly she died on the table, leaving her fiancé and 6 year old son.

Women's health issues are very often passed off as just "anxiety". It's criminal at this point.

I’m sorry you’ve had this experience OP. I would contact PALS (or the equivalent in this your trust) and talk it through with them. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know who it was, they’ll have a record of who was on shift and a paper trail (or computer trail!) of who was nursing which patients. These comments need addressing.

For transparency, I’m a nurse. I love my job and genuinely believe that the vast majority of patients do not turn up ‘attention seeking’, for the very small handful that do they also deserve care and compassion too, there is a reason they are turning up at A&E’s door.

I hope you come across more kindness than negativity moving forward with your care. Please address this issue so the rotten apples can be reprimanded.

FFS. No, nobody in healthcare who actually knows what AVNRT is thinks it is a glorified panic attack. That speaks more to the lack of knowledge of the nurses saying that.
Sorry you had to hear this bullshit.

DOI - Doctor and congenital cardiac disaster patient

I've got Fibromyalgia & ME/CFS, I could go to the doctors with my leg hanging off & they would say it's either or both of them causing it. I started with pain & numbness in my feet that travelled up both legs, I can't feel anything below my knees & am numb right up the inside of both thighs, my balance is terrible & I have falls, the doctor refused to do any tests & told me "it's part of my condition". It took me 9 months to get someone to even do a blood test, I'd had to go private to see a neurologist who told me he was 99% sure I had MS, after blood tests & MRI scans it turned out my Vitamin B12 levels were unreadable, thanks to the lack of care the nerve damage is permanent, I'm now housebound & badly disabled even though I have B12 injections every week.

I'm being treated for cancer at the moment and the shite I've heard from nurses is jaw dropping. Really inaccurate stuff, I'm actually quite shocked,. It's not just the occasional bad apple either.
I shouldn't be surprised really, I have a grown up child with asthma, I've lost count of the A&E visits with him as a child, wheezing away and some nurse saying O2 is 100% it can't be asthma, being stuck I'm a corner for hours, until a doctor deigns to listen to son's chest and suddenly it's all hands on deck.
Won't even go into my symptoms which have been brushed off for months actually being stage 4 cancer.

There are terrible people in every profession, unfortunately some terrible people at their jobs in health like to put a lot of stuff down to anxiety, I have had issues with this. Ignore them, or complain but don’t let it stop you from getting the treatment you need in the future, as I felt nervous of oh what if they say it’s anxiety again type thing.

Had a nurse try and have me assessed under the mental capacity act for being worried about DS, and said I overexaggerated his symptoms.

He had meningitis, and we spent 2 weeks in hospital and 2 weeks with home transfusions.

Honestly OP there are some shite nurses but they're not all like that. Definitely complain and please dont let it put you off seeking medical care in the future.

Last weekend I called 111 because I was getting pain around the area where I had had surgery 3 weeks earlier. I made it clear that I was probably just being a baby, and that I just wanted to know if I could safely ignore the pain. (I have dealt with chronic illness long enough that I have become an expert in gaslighting myself into believing that most things are a figment of my imagination.)

Anyway, I was admitted for some tests, and at midnight I was discharged after being told it was "probably nothing".
I spent the night trying to convince myself that I was imagining the pain...only to be called by the hospital the next morning. Nobody had bothered to look at my test results before discharging me, and my white blood count and inflammatory markers were raised. A scan showed that I had an abscess around the place where I had had surgery!

My son couldn't breathe due to an infection, pneumonia, and asthma once. And I mean literally couldn't breathe, he kept passing out. A&E thought he was having anxiety, told him to name 3 things in the room whilst he physically could not breathe. The nurses are all attention-seeking fucking morons who will have blood on their hands if they don't shape up. Another time, he was having an allergic reaction to a medication and they thought he was 'putting it on'. His eyes were literally rolling to the back of his head like something out of the Exorcist or something.

Fuck that nurse, it’s hell. I was in a&e a dozen times when I was pregnant and they kept having to give me adenosine (hell) to reset my heart. Panic attack my arse, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about and I’d be worried about her capabilities

When my baby was diagnosed with SVT the triage nurse thought I had anxiety and was just making it up. She soon has to apologise

I'm happy with the service overall I've received from the NHS (always feel weird seeing Americans talk about how they have to factor health insurance into their lives), however unfortunately I do have to agree with this.

Quite a few times I've had this, absolutely horrible when you are feeling vulnerable . I almost refused to get seen sometimes as the service was so bad.

Oddly enough the clinics which "should" be stressful like the STD ones normally have really nice people there so I don't have a phobia of opening my legs, it's the other ones which can potentially be awful.

For the record I don't need someone to be exceptionally "nice" to me...I had a few scans and the consultants didn't say a word and just peered at them. Happy with that.

Also HCPs talking down to me, cystitis = "you should wash and keep the area clean", "scolding" me for things. This is when I was feeling vulnerable. I'm not verbally aggressive and I don't have a record of just turning up for attention!

You do you OP, do your research, take care of your health, put yourself first, get the treatments and scans you need.