It's happened to me before, and I wasn't happy about the previous time either. A few years back I had my wisdom teeth removed. I'd waited too long, into my thirties, to have it done, but they'd never caused a problem. In any event, that's no excuse for the oral surgeon to leave dozens of shards from my shattered wisdom teeth enclosed within the cavities where those teeth had once been. I didn't notice anything wrong until weeks later when the holes ruptured and started hurting and bleeding. After that I got the warm experience of watching, fully conscious, as a different oral surgeon scooped shard after shard out of my mouth until everything was the way that it should have been in the first place. But in the end there was no harm done, and it was all paid for by my insurance, so I decided not to sue anyone.

Things may be different this time. In March of 2003 I was diagnosed with renal cancer and my left kidney had been almost completely devoured by a malignant tumor. Fortunately it was caught in time (and might not have been caught at all, more on that later), and the tumor was encapsulated. That meant that surgery was all that was required to make me well again. No chemo, just a big honking scar to remind me that I am no longer young and invincible.

Then I went home to begin recovering from the surgery. At first things moved along as expected, but after about five months my recovery took a turn for the worse. The incision began hurting after some rehab exercises and kept getting worse. My energy levels sunk and I was convinced that the cancer had returned. A follow-up CAT scan showed no cancer and no hernia, but my health was still dragging. I complained to the surgeon who assured me that the healing would take time. Months went by, and I got no better. I kept complaining to the surgeon, my other doctors, and anyone who would listen, but everyone told me the same thing: "Be patient. It takes time to heal". But it was taking too long, and I had stopped improving. I knew that something was wrong inside but I couldn't convince anyone.

There's nothing that feels quite as bad as being betrayed, but when you get betrayed by the health care profession that feeling gets mixed together with a primal sense of desperation. You feel that your life is in danger and you want to do something but you're powerless to take any action at all. So you end up dealing with a lot of rage, depression, and a sick feeling that your doctors, like so many people today, are being overworked to the point of incompetence. It's not a good feeling at all. I knew that if the cancer was going to return that it was very likely to be fatal, and that I needed to be at optimal health to fight off the tumors and survive chemo. But the attitude of my doctors was that since my blood tests showed almost normal results, (with out of range results being explained away in ways that did nothing to ease my concerns) they concluded that there was nothing wrong with me and decided to ignore all of my complaints. This is one of the large problems with the medical profession, and many professions in general. Experts are very good at dealing with cases which have obvious signs and proven cures, but if your case doesn't fit one of the many models that they have been taught, you're only hope is to find that rare doctor who takes the time to try to understand all your symptoms and searches for the root cause. Another option, far harder, is to become your own doctor, and that is what I did. I knew little about medicine, but I felt that I didn't have a choice. A lifetime of suffering was simply not acceptable to me.

Over the course of the last year I made a number of diagnoses and concocted many theories regarding my condition. I tried to relate these to my doctors when I would see them but they were annoyingly at ease with brushing aside my ideas without following them up. My only option was to hit the supplement aisle of the health food store, which is the only place that a non-doctor can get anything resembling medicine. Surprisingly enough, to me at least, I found a number of supplements that worked. Soon after taking them my energy levels rebounded to a reasonable strength, I was able to sleep better, and I bolstered my weakened immune system. I had to take a lot of supplements, which I was reluctant to do because I hate to take pills of any kind, but I experienced such improvement that the benefits outweighed the costs, plus I felt that I would be back to normal soon. But that didn't happen. The supplements were just compensating for a more serious problem.

Since the cancer surgery my incision area had always hurt when I used my abdominal muscles. Sneezing was very painful, and I could never lie on my side for more than a short while without great discomfort. One night I had a breakthrough, while coughing I felt something snapping in the incision area. The next day it was tender and painful, but oddly enough I had gained flexibility, and in the following days I was able to use my abs with a lot less pain. I concluded that what had happened was that one of the sutures had broken. The surgeon had used thick, permanent sutures to hold my muscles together, and I had always felt that they had been sewn together incorrectly or too tightly, thus causing the problems that I'd had since the surgery, but everyone who I talked to told me that it had to have been scar tissue giving way and that all of my symptoms were typical of people with excess scar tissue following surgery. The trouble was that none of their explanations made any sense to me, despite coming from many decades of experience. Thus, I wanted the sutures out. I knew that they were causing problems, not just pain when I moved, but also chronic inflammation, which causes your blood cortisol levels to rise, and which in turn causes your energy levels to drop and your mood to darken. When I explained that theory to my doctors they just attributes all those things to stress and advised me to take it easy. Well, I was taking it easy, but I couldn't deny that I was getting stressed out. Stressed out, that is, by incompetent doctors who were ignoring my condition.

Once again my theories of how the sutures were causing problems didn't fit with established medical knowledge and thus were brushed aside or ignored. In the end I got a second and a third opinion from surgeons who all agreed that my problem was scar tissue and that more surgery would lead to more scar tissue and thus make things worse. More months went by and after a long series of rehabilitation as part of physical therapy my condition started to get a lot worse. The exercises had caused a flare-up in the incision area and everything started to go downhill. I had to take far more supplements than I was comfortable with just to maintain my energy and I got very demanding of my doctors. When I couldn't convince them I took matters into my own hands.

No, I didn't do the surgery myself. He he he. But I laid out a fair chunk of change for a surgeon with a very good reputation to cut me back open and to remove all the sutures. After cautioning me about making things worse he agreed to do the job and a few weeks ago I went under the knife once again. I am very pleased to announce that the operation has resulted in a great deal of relief for me. The surgeon did indeed find a broken suture, and noticed that the other sutures were still tight and the areas around them were inflamed. At last I was vindicated. Time will tell if the surgery has completely fixed the problem, but already I am feeling far less pain, far more flexibility, and much higher energy levels than I have all year long. I no longer need to take any supplements and for the first time all year I have good reason to be optimistic. However, it may take a few months for me to recover from all of the bullshit that I have been put through physically and mentally for the last year and a half. My faith in the medical profession will never recover, but then, losing one's faith is not necessarily a bad thing. You need to ask questions, otherwise you're bound to get stuck holding the short end of the stick. It's a nice feeling to be able to trust someone, but that is a risk that you can ill afford to take in many cases. A good rule is: the more valuable something is to you, the more questions you should ask.

As I remember back to two years ago when I first went to the doctor, complaining about a complete loss of energy, I continue to be thankful that I didn't trust her judgment. I'd gone from being able to ride my bike 200 miles a week to less than 10 in just over a year's time. Resting didn't seem to give me back my energy, and I continued to get worse. So my doctor ordered a blood test which came out completely normal. She concluded that I just needed rest. I demanded another test and she grudgingly agreed. Fortunately that test came back out of whack, but not because there was something wrong with me, it was because I had been eating a low-carb diet for a month, so it looked as if I had diabetes. That was enough to make the doctor refer me to a specialist who quickly confirmed that I was not diabetic. But he didn't kick me out of his office with a clean bill of health, which he could have easily done since if I was suffering from anything that it was outside his specialty. Instead he was genuinely concerned with my condition and actually believed that there was something wrong with me, unlike my doctor. The specialist ordered a number of tests including an ultrasound which revealed the tumor that had eaten my left kidney. After that everything moved quickly since the doctors all knew what to do when cancer is diagnosed. But the thought still plagues me that had I trusted my doctor's advice, and believed that the blood test showed that I was fine, that I would be dead today.

In my opinion the message is clear: faith is completely misguided bullshit. You need to keep asking questions until all the facts are in agreement. Don't trust anyone or anything blindly and don't defer to any expert, instead make the experts explain everything to your satisfaction. If they can't, don't believe them. But most importantly, don't trust in yourself. That is a trap too. You need to keep improving your ability to figure things out because one day your life will depend on you and you alone. Don't let your mental skills languish.