Wow - all this good news on Mudcat today! Congratulations, Bob - another success story!

It is a worry that it took so much persistence on your part to get the right diagnosis. It is very true what others have said that listening to your body is very important, and that it often takes a lot of persistence and nagging to get doctors to reach the right diagnosis and treatment. Unfortunately, all too often, they reach for the most obvious one (to them), without looking any further, particularly with older patients. It often seems that they don't take us so seriously as we get older.

I suspect the medical world doesn't take any of us seriously enough actually. On both occasions when I was in labour with my children, I could tell that things were moving along to the next stage, but would the nurses listen to me? My doctor was 20 minutes away, but they wouldn't call him until THEY thought they needed to, so he arrived after the event. You would think that after that, they might believe me the second time around (same hospital, same situation), but no, they knew best ('Oh no dear, you've got a way to go yet!') and the doctor swanned in after the event yet again. GRRR! Everything went perfectly well without him, but it did strike me at the time how hard it is as a patient to be listened to and be allowed to have any kind of input when the 'experts' are in charge. I think a lot of them regard the idea of 'listen to your body' as a load of new-age claptrap, which it isn't.