Suzi wakes up with a nagging pain on the lower left side of her stomach. It’s not bad enough to double her over. It’s just there, every single day, refusing to go away on its own like these things are supposed to.
She figures it’ll pass. It doesn’t.
So she does the responsible thing and books an appointment with her primary care office, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when your body starts sending you passive-aggressive pains throughout the day.
She gets a Nurse Practitioner. Five minutes, a poke on the stomach, and a verdict: probably nothing. Maybe something she ate.
So basically, no diagnosis or cause of pain. She leaves with advice and no actual answers, which is a real waste of a copay.
Weeks pass. The pain gets worse, because apparently “probably nothing” was never actually a diagnosis. Now she’s in the ER, watching a nurse draw blood and wondering when exactly discomfort became an emergency.
Kidneys, fine. Liver, fine. Here’s a pain pill. Follow up with your PCP.
Again.
She goes home in the exact same condition she arrived in, except now there’s a hospital copay attached to the mystery pain.
Two months in, and Suzi isn’t just tired of the pain. She’s tired of saying the same sentences out loud every time someone new walks in the room. Where it hurts, how long, what makes it worse. She’s said it so many times she barely hears herself say it anymore.
Then, of all places, it happens on a work call.
Suzi does remote revenue cycle billing, and one of her clients is an internal medicine physician. Somewhere between reviewing claims and talking numbers, Suzi mentions that her stomach has been hurting constantly for almost two months.
The physician isn’t examining her. The practice isn’t even located in the same state, yet she’s the first person who actually listens to Suzi’s symptoms, which by this point feels like a novelty act.
“Has anyone checked you for ulcers?”
Nobody had. Not once. Two months, one ER visit, and an entire NP appointment, and the answer showed up over a Zoom call about CPT codes.
Suzi books another PCP appointment. This time, she asks for an actual physician because she’s officially done gambling on random diagnoses.
They order testing. It comes back: gastric ulcers.
There it is. An actual answer. It had probably been there all along.
She starts medication that she’ll likely take for the rest of her life. Dietary changes. The pain eases. Suzi, for her part, does not become a wellness influencer about it, but she does become deeply suspicious of every future “let’s just monitor it.”
Because here’s what nobody warns you about: getting the right diagnosis doesn’t automatically restore your faith in the system that took two months to find it. Relief and resentment can absolutely share a waiting room.
Healthcare loves talking about burnout. Physician burnout, nurse burnout, caregiver burnout, pick a job title; there’s a burnout article for it.
Nobody talks about patient burnout. The kind that has nothing to do with the illness and everything to do with the process of getting anyone to take it seriously.
It isn’t depression. It isn’t anxiety. It definitely isn’t “noncompliance,” which sometimes feels like medical speak for “We got tired of explaining ourselves too.”
It’s repeating your own symptoms so many times that you start sounding bored by your own pain. It’s walking into appointment number four, already assuming it’ll go nowhere, because three, two, and one have taught you exactly what to expect.
And the punchline, if you can call it that: it took Suzi working inside the healthcare system, on the business side of it, to get an actual diagnosis. Not the ER. Not her PCP’s office. A work Zoom call.
Make of that what you will.
Maybe your version of this isn’t ulcers. Maybe it’s migraines nobody takes seriously until you’re in tears in a parking lot. Maybe it’s an autoimmune flare that took four specialists and a good cry to get named. The specifics change. The exhaustion of being your own case manager does not.
Healthcare tells you to advocate for yourself. Fine. But nobody tells you what to do once you’re too worn down to keep doing it.
That’s patient burnout. It took someone finally listening to Suzi to get the correct diagnosis, and honestly, it never should have taken that long.
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