Doctor called me a hypochondriac

[starwise]

honest replies wanted here but please be kind as I’m feeling rather vulnerable at the moment

Background - I have 5 children, we live very rurally, doctors and hospitals are quite some distance away from our home and to add to that one of my children almost died from sepsis which also took the life of their classmate due to sepsis. They both had the same infection. I have had sepsis twice, one of those times I was on my last possible antibiotic as all previously didn’t work. We cannot afford to move currently, but we are in the process of looking at options.

Because of our situation, I have an oxygen & heart rate monitor, blood pressure monitor, thermometer. If my children feel unwell, I check them over and get a general idea of how they are doing. It’s quite reassuring. It’s also helpful letting GP or NHS 24 know the stats so they can get a better picture. Normally, medical staff are relieved to have this information as it can be hard to get a picture of someone’s health without this and hard to gauge if it’s safe to travel to them or get an ambulance.

My child became unwell, I checked their stats and they seemed okay. The following day they deteriorated and so I called the doctors. A new GP joined the practice and called me back. They expressed concern that I had these monitors at home and asked how often I check my children’s vitals. I explained only when they are unwell and what has that got to do with anything? They asked me to go in with them, so I did and the conversation was more about me and my mental health than my child who was feeling really unwell by this point. They then said it sounds like I have health anxiety and possible signs of hypochondria and said there was help available! I was so pissed….i just wanted my kid checked over. I understand I am more cautious because of our rural location and previous dices with serious infections, but I thought his words were horrific and not fair.

Turns out child had a chest infection and spent a few days in hospital needing oxygen and antibiotics, but now I’m feeling like maybe they are right and should I really call doctors with concerns and wait until their illness is obvious? Should I stop monitoring?

We ended up with another bad bug after this which made us all really really poorly and my husband was wondering why I wasn’t checking everyone over like normal and saying we should call the GP but I am now questioning myself. I don’t want them to think I am a hypochondriac. It’s really knocked my self confidence in my abilities.

Am I a hypochondriac?

I do know if I didn’t monitor my child, we would have never spotted her serious deterioration with Sepsis as she just looked like she had a tummy bug, but her stats were showing serious signs of infection. Sepsis kills…am I really health anxious?

Please, be kind, I am feeling really quite hurt and vulnerable. My normal GP assured me I’m doing everything right, but that new GPs words have stuck 🙁

If he thought I was panicking, he was wrong. Being able to check my child at home when they are poorly actually makes me feel more relaxed, informed, proactive and able to aid my doctor in knowing the situation at home and what their statistics are. If I was panicking, I wouldn’t be waiting on a doctors appointment that’s for sure!

Some doctors are so very full of themselves and unfortunately that over confidence does sometimes cause things to be missed (trust me, we know) but luckily our normal doctors are amazing and have always praised us on our attentiveness with our kids.

Hrtft but a couple of things I'm wondering op are firstly the quality of the machines you have in your home. I'm not saying they're problematic to have - lots of others on this thread have the same, I guess it just wouldn't have occurred to me to have similar because I'd want to know I'm getting hospital grade readings and that I'm using it properly and I'm not medically trained in any capacity. So if my child seems unwell enough that I'm calling out of hours I'm expecting him to be seen and monitored there. But then again, I don't live as rurally as you do so that may be much more accessible for me to do that. So I'm thinking that in itself is fine provided its reasonably good equipment and you're using it correctly and appropriately which it sounds like you are?

I also would question someone who isn't medically trained doing these checks regularly on children at home. Not because they're doing anything wrong necessarily, but because health anxiety is a very real thing and covid especially made it harder for a lot of people to manage. So if you were struggling with that, it would be absolutely necessary that he as your gp picked up on that and offered you the relevant support. So I don't think he's done anything wrong here either except maybe the use of the term hypochondriac rather than 'health anxiety' . He's done his job by looking out for the mental health of a mother of 5 who is isolated and who has had traumatic incidents in her past regarding serious health crises. I think he sounds well tuned in and personally I wouldn't have taken anything he said to heart, but maybe- maybe there's a little bit of both here? Maybe you are a little more on the anxious side (and for very good reason) regarding health, and also your child was legitimately ill and needing care. Both things can be true at once and I'd say that it sounds to me like he was astute enough to recognise that. So many people criticise gps for not providing enough support re:mental health or being slow to pick up on mental health concerns. I think it's good he's got that on his radar because I think if I went through what you went through- I'd be very anxious about any future health problems. It's completely natural. But if it's affecting your overall enjoyment of parenting/ life etc then it's worth considering his point. Eg if that's the only reason why you're considering moving house.

I wouldn't make a complaint, I'd take his comments as made in good faith and in concern for your wellbeing (you're the cog that keeps things turning for your children at the end of the day) and I'd reflect on his comments. If I felt they were incorrect then I wouldn't worry about it and take it with a pinch of salt but if I thought it was correct then I'd probably try to take some steps to address that.

I think you're doing the exact right thing op and I do similar.

I don't have a thermometer anymore because I don't need one - I can tell by touch if one of them has a fever anyway (when they were babies/toddlers I did use one as the exact number is a bit more important when they're small).

If they're ill then I'll keep a check on their BP and oxygen in addition to 'normal' checks. They're just a useful extra tool to help you decide if a GP visit is needed.

The GP sounds similar to one in my surgery - arrogant, an inflated self-perception of his own importance and intelligence and sneeringly dismissive of his actual patients.

Just ignore and keep doing as you are.

Thank you for confirming this, yes having spent quite a bit of my childhood in the US I say stats to refer to health statistics, not just oxygen saturation

I also run a high heart rate in normal health, so for a normal person this would be a concern, but knowing my norm means my doctors don’t panic. Anything over 120 is abnormal for me. Where as my husbands average resting heart rate is 50-55!

Come on then @marshmallowburn, tell me.

If you were on a medication that could cause rare, life-threatening blood pressure spikes, would you rush off in a pricey taxi to A&E (or demand an ambulance) every time you had a bad headache, wasting already-stretched NHS time and resources? Or would you spend £20 on a BP meter that could tell you whether you need to be concerned, and likely end up never having to bother emergency services and A&E?

If you had hypertension and your doctor wanted regular readings after a medication change, would you be pestering community pharmacists or GP surgery staff to measure your BP twice a day, or would you take some responsibility and provide the readings yourself?

If you had asthma and there was a global pandemic of respiratory disease, would you keep a peak flow meter at home, so you could provide the information your asthma nurse needs at the annual check over the phone, without having to go into a building full of sick people? Or so you could check your respiratory function if you got infected, and provide that info over the phone if the doctors were concerned about how your underlying condition was being affected by your infection? Or would you just expect the NHS to pick up all the pieces for you?

If you had COPD and suspected you were having an exacerbation, do you think it would be useful, or not useful, to know whether your O2 sats are lower than your usual sats, when measured with the same equipment?

If you had diabetes, do you think it would be useful to know which of the foods you regularly eat are spiking your blood sugars, or how your fasting blood glucose is responding to a new treatment? Or would you just blithely follow one-size-fits-all advice, and assume that everything's fine and you can just swerve the sweeties and otherwise ignore your diabetes between annual blood tests?

Everybody's circumstances are different. Some people's circumstances mean that it's useful to have some basic health measurement kit around. Not to be frantically poking and prodding themselves every five minutes to invent health crises, but to take some fucking responsibility for their own health (and maybe even save their lives).

They are medical grade, I work for a company that sells them for a living to the NHS, private hospitals, medics and private households. They are collaborated regularly to ensure they are accurate and in trained to used them on a professional capacity (and demonstrate them) however they are designed to have instructions which are easy enough for non-medically trained people to use them.

My children can literally use them, it’s really not difficult to follow the instructions.

Struggling to keep up with these comments, so going to stop as the typos are insane - but thank you all.

Little one is on the mend and sent home to be monitored if anything changes xxxxx

We never had any of this stuff when I was a child (maybe a thermometer?) and certainly not now I'm a middle- aged adult. Regular, healthy people do NOT need constant checking and testing (and most of my friends and family are doctors or nurses, and would agree). The doctor in this instance may have been a bit blunt, but fundamentally they're correct.

Just for anyone else reading - it is very unusual for home equipment to be suitable for children. I am a GP and the only equipment I have at home is a thermometer and a peak flow meter for my asthmatic husband - I guess I could check heart rate and respiratory rate too if I wanted. Home BP monitors can be useful for adults but really wouldn’t recommend for kids - firstly the cuff is almost certainly the wrong size and also changes in BP are very late and so normal BP could well be falsely reassuring. The sats probes that are commonly available are also usually the wrong size for kids and hence inaccurate and potentially falsely reassuring.

Op,your posts are conflicted, you said you only monitor when the kids are unwell. Then at least twice said you do regular monitoring , it can’t be both,,

I don't think anybody's suggested or advocated constant checking and testing for healthy people, have they? They've pointed out that these things can be useful if you've got a specific use case for them. (And FWIW, many apparently healthy people have hypertension for years or decades before happening to be offered a blood pressure check, sustaining damage the whole time, when they could've been doing something about the problem much earlier.)

Having equipment to check temperature, sats, pulse and BP for a little child who's poorly, in a situation where emergency care will be slow to arrive and therefore dangerous situations need to be identified early — and maybe even using them once or twice when healthy, to get a baseline and get the kid used to them — isn't the same thing as a healthy person neurotically hooking themselves up to testing equipment three times a day.

To you, a thermometer is normal because that's what was around when you were young. To earlier generations, having medical equipment in the house so you could get a specific temperature reading from a poorly child might've seemed like over-medicalising.

You are so right. I think it’s that high dependence on the NHS that has it on its knees. Kids and adults getting checked at out of hours or at GPs when simple monitoring at home could reassure doctors they are okay. Our normal GP encourages it.

Also, everyone - SEPSIS is really hard to detect as we rightly know, people can deteriorate REALLY quickly and the symptoms are not always very clear cut, even for doctors. It’s a life threatening condition.

Read the symptoms:
https://www.sepsis.org/sepsis-basics/symptoms/

In real life I know no one who has all these monitoring devices. I don't even have a thermometer now my dc are older.

I have only ever checked my dc’s temperatures when they are unwell. I have never used my bp machine or sats monitor to give my dcs the once over when they are unwell nor do I check their respiratory rate or pulse. A parent should trust their instincts when their child is unwell , it is reason enough to seek medical advice. A set of observations taken at home are no substitute for assessment and advice from a health care professional.

You can buy paed BP monitors.

The BP monitors give a more accurate heart-rate than the oxygen monitors.

My gp has asked me to record my bp and call the result into the surgery in the past when I had a telephone consultation.

When my I take my dad to his cardiologist I have to do 2 BP/heartrate readings a day for the week beforehand to give to him.

Thanks for pointing that out- I was confounding two different things.
Munchausen implies deliberate exaggeration amongst other things. I thought it was extreme health anxiety for others.
I only half-listened to this podcast https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p0fhzh45?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
Still current terminology though.

@starwise the answer to sepsis being hard to recognise and differentiate is to use a specific tool that creates reliable observations (such as the NEWS-2) and to adopt the practice that 'It's sepsis until we know it isn't'. Then unwell patients with atypical presentations don't get missed.

I once looked after a patient who was critically unwell but the only outward issue they had was a blister. It was an infection that lead to severe sepsis. Because the blister wasn't obviously placed, it was a little while before it was realised that it was the cause. But the patient got the right treatment because the team didn't focus on the cause, they focused on the observations that were telling them they had a very sick patient.

As I’m on HRT my G.P practice asks me for my blood pressure reading yearly. They even suggest that if I haven’t got a machine then perhaps I could borrow one from a friend etc. I’ve now purchased my own machine.

I’m sure youve received lots of advice on her from browsing the comments. I don’t think you are being unreasonable. I do think it’s a little insensitive of the doctor though, especially as we are going through a time where so much is undiagnosed.

I live in a city and have never thought about having equipment at home as GPS are close by (although waiting times are ridiculous for a telephone appointment alone!) so I really don’t blame you for putting matters into your own hands - or at least the parts you can control.

especially as we are going through a time where so much is undiagnosed

What do you mean by this?

I think she meant that the OP has seen several family members go untreated for serious illness.

@kittensinthekitchen I am referring to the NHS backlog which has meant thousands of people are waiting longer for treatment and potential diagnosis.

Im not sure about you but growing up we had a more preventative medical service where we had regular check ups through the NHS via our local GP. Now I get turned away for check ups from my GP and have to go private - so issues are less likely to be picked up.

Whilst there is an increase in health anxiety. It’s so much harder to get reassurance without waiting 5+ hours at A&E these days.

https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-workforce/pressures/nhs-backlog-data-analysis