Yesterday, a female patient with a huge kidney stone called and urged to be seen by my girlfriend. She had been suffering from abdominal pain, and barely could hold it. She had already seen a family practitioner, but he concluded that it must have been the kidney stone. But it wasn’t.
When she entered the consultation room, she described and showed the location of the pain — my girlfriend knew right away that this was NOT the kidney stone.
Then, the patient said something interesting:
“It’s really painful, doctor, I even asked my dad to drive really slowly because of the pain.”
My girlfriend immediately asked a specific, and at the first sight a very non-medical question:
“Did it hurt more when the road was bumpy ?”
The patient explained that bumps were the very reason why her dad had to slow down. “Even one single bump made it really hurt !”
During a short and standard specific physical examination in which my girlfriend applied pressure on a specific point on the right-hand side of the patient’s abdomen, and then quickly released the pressure, the patient’s reaction (screaming) spoke volumes.
“You have acute appendicitis. You will need urgent surgery today.”
The patient first refused any kind of surgery on that day, but after Freya had explained that acute appendicitis can be lethal if not treated appropriately, the patient gave in.
After a double-check by a general surgeon, an emergency ultrasound confirmed the diagnosis. The surgeon consequently took over the patient and removed the appendix during surgery not much later. And the problem was solved.
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