For four years, her pain was called fibromyalgia and depression. It was two autoimmune diseases, one of them narrowing her aorta to a few millimeters. Victoria Rundus, a pediatrician in middle Tennessee, spent those years feeling unheard and disbelieved, until one emergency physician put a stethoscope on her abdomen and heard what no one else had checked for.

⏱️ Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:29 Why she never believed the fibromyalgia diagnosis
1:33 The symptoms that did not add up
2:25 The ER doctor who heard what everyone missed
3:31 The symptom no expert can explain
4:10 Why she did not fit the textbook patient
5:57 Why one autoimmune diagnosis never rules out another
6:16 What a resident said about labeling women
7:54 Why the label makes patients stop reporting symptoms
9:37 Why patient support groups make her angry
11:11 The exam that took four years to happen
12:48 Why normal labs prove nothing here
14:03 The cane, the wheelchair, and the reopened aorta
15:03 Take home messages

About this episode:
Victoria Rundus is a board-certified pediatrician in middle Tennessee who spent roughly four years inside the diagnostic process she now writes about. Her symptoms started in late 2021 with back and neck pain and stiffness, then widened into malaise, tachycardia, dizziness, a burning sensation in her back, and colicky abdominal pain. She was labeled with fibromyalgia and depression first, later with ankylosing spondylitis, and only after a second emergency department visit, where a physician listened to her abdomen and heard a bruit, was she sent to Vanderbilt and diagnosed with Takayasu's arteritis, her descending aorta narrowed from about two centimeters down to a few millimeters. She traces her own distrust of the fibromyalgia label to a resident she remembers from medical school, who described it as something to hand a patient so she would stop coming back. She is careful to say fibromyalgia is a real condition and those patients deserve good care, and that the harm is what the label does next: it closes the door for the clinician and teaches the patient to write off new symptoms as the old disease acting up. She describes the patient support groups where people report strokes and kidney failure arriving years after their fibromyalgia diagnosis, and the physical exam skills she believes are quietly eroding. She explains why labs are unreliable here, since her inflammatory markers were normal at diagnosis, and why imaging is what actually finds the disease. She closes with the case for holding curiosity and humility level with medical knowledge, and with the novel she wrote while on medical leave.

🤝 Partner with me on the KevinMD platform:
With over three million monthly readers and half a million social media followers, I give you direct access to the doctors and patients who matter most. Let's work together to tell your story.

➡️ PARTNER WITH KEVINMD: https://kevinmd.com/influencer
➡️ SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST: https://www.kevinmd.com/podcast
➡️ RECOMMENDED BY KEVINMD: https://www.kevinmd.com/recommended

#DiagnosticBias #Fibromyalgia #AutoimmuneDisease