A Country Doctor Writes:

77 year old Edward Tripp had been to the emergency room with chest pain last Friday night. It was relentless, aching, and involved the upper part of his left chest.

He had no cough, fever or shortness of breath. He was not sweaty or nauseous, and his blood work, EKG and chest X-ray were normal. He was distinctly tender over the part of his rib cage where bone and cartilage join each other a few inches from his breastbone. He had indeed done some heavy work with his arms in the days before, so the doctor made the assessment that his pain was caused by this apparent costochondritis.

Ed received a shot of pain medication at the hospital and was sent home with a prescription for hydrocodone. As the weekend went by, he started to feel worse and worse.

When I saw him Monday morning, he looked pale. He was short of breath and lightheaded. He had no appetite, and he had been sweating with the slightest exertion.

His blood pressure was low, even for him, a tall, sinewy vegetarian, and his pulse was 115. He did not have a fever, and his oxygen saturation was normal. On exam, there was no heart murmur and his lungs were clear, but his breath sounds seemed a little weaker on the left. His abdomen was diffusely tender, and he was still quite tender over each rib in the upper part of his left rib cage.

His EKG had some very nonspecific changes, which could conceivably go along with impaired blood flow to his left ventricle. Putting all this together, I recommended that we send him back to the hospital for reevaluation. I wondered about angina, a blood clot in his lungs or internal bleeding in his abdomen. His chest wall strain was clearly not the only thing going on.

At the hospital, they did another chest X-ray, which showed some minimal haziness in the left lung. His cardiac enzymes were normal, but he had an elevated D-dimer, so there was a possibility that he had a blood clot in his lung.

His CT angiogram ruled out a clot, but he had a dense infiltrate, by all indications a pneumonia, in his left upper lung, exactly underneath his sore ribs.

When the first chest X-ray was re-read with the second one and the CT as comparisons, the pneumonia was faintly visible.

We all tend to look for one diagnosis that explains everything that is going on with the patient, and we often tend to latch on to the first positive finding we make. But medicine is often more complicated than that, and sometimes we see diseases in early stages, when findings are too subtle to make a diagnosis.

I have come to feel a certain discomfort deep in my gut when an older patient has pain in or even near the chest that appears to have an orthopedic cause.

That feeling dates back to my first job, just out of residency, when an 80 year old woman with shoulder pain I had evaluated came back to the emergency room two hours later with an obvious myocardial infarction on her EKG.

Being the first one to evaluate a patient, you don’t have the advantage of elapsed time that the second examiner has. Such is primary and emergency care.

Every primary care physician has had this experience: We refer a patient to a cardiologist, pulmonologist or gastroenterologist and get a note back that says our patient’s symptoms are not cardiac, pulmonary or GI related – “Not my department”, in essence.

Medical specialties are organized by organ or organ system, and not by symptom. This really leaves primary care doctors in the default role of being specialists in diagnostics. I often say to patients with poorly localized symptoms: “Once we know what body part is causing your symptoms, we can get help from a specialist in that organ system, but until then, it’s up to you and me to figure it out”.

Some years ago I took too long to properly diagnose an older woman’s shortness of breath. It had developed gradually over a period of about a year. She had a smoking history and a mild chronic cough. She was also a diabetic with high blood pressure. I ordered a chest X-ray, pulmonary function tests and an echocardiogram before I realized I hadn’t checked her blood count. She turned out to have iron deficiency anemia from a chronic gastritis. That is a lesson I will never forget.

In the fifteen minutes we have with each patient, we sometimes zero in too quickly on the most obvious symptoms in front of us. This is perhaps even more likely if our support staff documents the medical history in the electronic medical record before we even enter the room. I constantly remind myself to take the time to listen carefully to the patient’s own story, and to simply observe before I begin examining.

A few weeks ago I saw a woman in her forties with a history of mild asthma and stable depression. She showed up as a “triage” at the front desk and was hoisted into our “trauma room”, gasping for air. She had been to a walk-in clinic a few days before and was prescribed an antibiotic for a bronchitis but had become progressively more short of breath since then.

“I don’t know if I’m having a panic attack or what”, she said between deep, rapid breaths. “My hands are getting all tingly and I have this constant pressure in my chest.”

Her oxygen saturation was normal and her peak flow was better than the old values we had in her record. Her lungs were perfectly clear. Her heart rate was in the 120’s and her EKG was normal.

Working quickly and speaking slowly, trying to get her to relax, I checked her legs for swelling and calf tenderness and checked her skin temperature. Her hands were ice cold and very pale.

“Yes, you are hyperventilating”, I said. “That’s why your hands are tingling. I’ll cut you a deal. Let’s give you some oxygen, so you’ll be able to breathe a little slower.”

She felt better and her respiratory rate settled down. With the pressure in her chest, she needed to be transported to the hospital for further testing to rule out a heart attack or a pulmonary embolus.

I finished up my note and handed it to the ambulance attendants. I remember typing in “distal pallor” as one of my exam findings. In the back of my mind I wondered if this was another case of severe anemia presenting with shortness of breath. At the walk-in clinic she might just have been pigeon-holed as having a chest infection, because it seemed the easiest diagnosis.

A call from the hospital the next day shed light on her symptoms: She had normal troponins and a negative D-dimer, but she was indeed profoundly anemic with a hemoglobin of 6, half of what would be normal for her, and her periods had been irregular and unusually heavy for the last year. She had also been taking a lot of ibuprofen, but her gastroscopy showed only some mild gastritis. So the cause for her shortness of breath, ultimately, was gynecological – not the first thing we usually think of with that symptom, although any kind of anemia should be in the differential diagnosis.

A simple bedside observation had suggested she might be anemic.

We do need to manage many common chronic diseases in our role as primary care providers, and this is something that is becoming more and more complex with time. But our role as frontline diagnosticians is possibly under-appreciated and under-emphasized. We need to continually hone our diagnostic skills in order to serve our patients. Even in cases where we refer patients out, to the Emergency Room or to specialists, we need to actively consider the diagnostic process beyond where our involvement or responsibility ends, so that we can become better and better diagnosticians ourselves.

We have all kinds of tools these days for looking up treatments for even the most esoteric diseases, and once we have a general idea of the diagnosis, we can easily look up the specific criteria. The challenge is to make that initial broad assessment that points toward the ultimate, specific diagnosis. That is a skill not easily taught in medical school, because it involves gauging multiple probabilities simultaneously and sifting through countless extraneous details in patients’ medical histories, lab tests and exam findings. Only hands-on experience teaches us to do that, but only if we cultivate an inquisitive mindset and a personal investment in the diagnostic process.

In all the quality literature I read, little mention is made of the value of accurate diagnosis; are we focusing too much on simple housekeeping parameters, measuring only what is easy to measure? Looking at malpractice statistics, failures and delays in diagnosis make up the majority of claims in primary care. That would suggest that what patients value and expect most is to be correctly diagnosed. Perhaps we need to redefine quality in health care to begin with accurate diagnosis of what our patients present to us with, before getting too far into the metrics of blood sugars, blood pressures, prescribing ACE inhibitors, aspirin and beta blockers.

“I invite you to follow me on my journey”, she said with a voice that sounded proud, calm and courageous.

Her brain MRI had shown a large, inoperable glioblastoma. Her cheeks were already puffy from the steroids the neurosurgeon had prescribed to counteract brain swelling and seizure risk.

“I am not afraid of my cancer”, she continued. “It is now part of who I am. I even gave him a name, and he follows me wherever I go. There is no point in wishing it wasn’t so.” She chuckled a little and added, “I talk to him sometimes, and say things like ’so, what are we going to do today?’ I can tell he is there when my right hand refuses to cooperate and I am unable to dial on my cordless phone, and when I feel spasms coming on that make me drop my teacup or whatever I am holding in my hand.”

She spoke with a grace and a dignity that made me feel privileged to be in her presence. I have followed, intimately, the course of many incurable diseases in dozens of patients over the last thirty years, and a handful of these patients have etched themselves into my memory with their serenity and otherworldly radiance of faith and purpose. This was the first time a patient spoke of her disease as a journey, and used the words “I invite you to follow me”.

I felt I was on such a journey when I travelled back to Sweden and shared my father’s last days and death from Alzheimer’s disease a few years ago. But there was something very unusual and humbling to hear a patient with a new terminal diagnosis open her private world to let me, a stranger and only her new doctor, inside.

I sometimes spend too much time and energy, or “jing” as my wife says, thinking, talking and writing about how health care should be organized and delivered. But then, every once in a while, a few words, a look, a sigh or an outstretched hand from a fellow human being cuts through all the distractions of my work and reminds me of my own purpose, my own journey as a physician, a fortunate apostle of the ancient masters.

I started medical school forty-two years ago this month. I am grateful to begin another new year in medicine.