Having experienced THREE situations in our family in the last year where the MDs refused to believe the patient: My father in law had heart surgery - he kept reporting pain and difficulty breathing about 2 weeks after the surgery - it took 6 months and the fear of lung cancer to have repeated surgery and find a calcified hematoma behind the heart and pressing his lung. My sister in law donated blood - she reported a great deal of pain and swelling, color changes in her hand. Now, a year and a half later she has suffered nerve damage, has pain from 4 - 7 in a scale of 10, which has caused a great deal of problems with husband and family (try to be pleasant when you're in pain and have no sleep). My niece had surgery for a tubal pregnancy - reported a great deal of pain afterwards - only after being Air -Evacuated due to heart arrythmias did they find a baseball sized hematoma in her abdominal muscle! (this just happened last weekend). The specialists said the lack of pain control was the cause of the heart problems. Once she was believed and her pain was managed appropriately, her heart problems disappeared. No wonder there is so much communication difficulty - patients are ignored, so they start believing their symptoms are "in their head" - nipple pain, breast pain, etc. OR they don't believe people will listen so they don't report it (I have had to BEG moms to TELL me if the assistance I am providing is helping or not). Some sit stoically and let the baby nurse even when I am SURE they are in pain. Others seem to think: Well, it's SUPPOSED to hurt, so I don't want to cause trouble. Just yesterday I helped a mom reposition her baby 5 times - when we got to the position that I thought looked the least painful for her - she looked at me, amazed that it didn't hurt. It was THEN she admitted the other positions HAD been hurting, but she didn't want to sound "stupid". It sure would have been easier if she had let me know each time it hurt - I would have helped her get the baby off quickly instead of observing for a while to get "hints" that it didn't "look" right! Jeanette Panchula, RN, IBCLC Vacaville, CA *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html