I Told Three Doctors About My 'Mysterious Bruise'. They Ignored Me Until I Couldn't Move

You know your body better than anyone – but what happens when no one listens? Welcome to Ms Diagnosed: a HuffPost UK series uncovering the reality of medical gaslighting. With new stats showing that 8 in 10 of women have felt unheard by medical professionals, we’re sharing the stories of seven whose lives were nearly lost to the gap between their symptoms and a system that refused to listen. As the UK introduces Jess’s Rule – a new mandate for GPs to ‘rethink’ after a third visit – we’re exploring why the medical system is still failing women and how we can start to fix it.

“Hmmm, I think I can hear pleurisy,” said the consultant. “I can hear a little crackle on your chest.”

I couldn’t understand it.

It was November 2024. My GP had triaged me to the hospitalsame-day emergency department – and I was terrified. I had an agonising, fist-sized pain deep underneath my right ribs that was stopping me from moving or sleeping. I had a large area of skin, around the same place, that was completely numb; and I had an electrical tingling in my right hand.

I’d begged the consultant to do something – anything – about the pain. I told her about my other symptom, a mysterious rash I’d had a few weeks ago that I had a sneaking suspicion was important.

When she told me it was pleurisy – inflamed lining of the lungs – I didn’t know what to think. I thought that was something from the Middle Ages.

She told me there was no cure for pleurisy; that it would go ‘in time’. I was prescribed Oramorph, a strong painkiller, and sent home.

But pleurisy didn’t explain the numbness; the tingling in my fingers; the rash. I was still scared – and it turned out I had every right to be.

I didn’t have pleurisy. I had Lyme disease – the effects of which I’m still living with now – as well as multiple gallstones.

Had I not been repeatedly misdiagnosed, I almost certainly wouldn’t still be living with the excruciating impact of Lyme disease today.

It all started with the rash, which appeared around August 2024. “Oh my God, what have you fallen on?!”, asked my husband one night. I had no idea what he was talking about. “You’ve got a massive bruise on your back, under your shoulder blade,” he said.

It was bizarre. It wasn’t hot, itchy, bumpy or painful. There was no central ‘bite’ point. It just looked like a big, lozenge-shaped bruise.

I went to see a pharmacist at Boots. She had no idea what it was, but she sold me a hydrocortisone cream and told me to go to my doctor if it hadn’t gone in around 10 days.

It didn’t go, so I duly made an appointment with a nurse at my GP practice.

By this point, the rash was darker. The nurse got the GP, and they studied it together. They rubbed it, scratched it, took some pictures; and in the end, prescribed me another steroid cream. They said the same thing; come back in 10 days if it still hasn’t gone.

At the end of October 2024 my husband and I were at a concert and I couldn’t get comfortable in the theatre seats. The rash had almost gone; but that night, I had the beginnings of the deep, white-hot, fist-sized pain under my ribs, in the same place as the lozenge-shaped rash.

It’s a pain I still have today.

That night, we stayed in a hotel; and the pain was excruciating. I couldn’t sleep at all. “There’s something really wrong inside me,’ I told my husband. “I need to see a doctor again”. So the next day, we drove home via A&E.

I told the A&E doctors I was in dire pain, and then added: “I know this is probably unconnected, but I had a rash there, back in August. The pictures are in my notes”.

They told me it could be either radiculopathy (a pinched nerve in the spinal column), or costochondritis (inflammation in the ribs).

They didn’t do any blood tests. They sent me off with a painkiller, told me the pain would go in its own time, and that was it.

But the pain didn’t go. It took over my life; I couldn’t think about anything else. It was intolerable. By this point, I’d noticed the numbness on the surface of my skin, too; from my spine round to my side.

So after a few days, I went back to my GP surgery. That’s when I was triaged to the same-day emergency department; and told I had pleurisy.

Those days after I was diagnosed with pleurisy and given Oramorph are a bit of a blur. I was exhausted by the pain and woozy from Oramorph. I couldn’t focus or work; my brain was a mess.

I do remember, though, that the numbness on my skin kept spreading further and further around my body. In the end, it grew from my spine to my belly button; and it terrified me.

In mid-November, I went to my GP again. “I’m in dire pain,” I begged. “The numbness has crept round to the front of my body. I’ve still got the tingling in my hand. I had that rash.” And by this point, if anyone touched the surface of my skin around my ribs, it felt like I was being sliced with a scalpel.

I was sent back to the same-day emergency department; and at long last, I was admitted to hospital.

It took five days for me to get my official diagnosis. They started with general blood tests which showed nothing, and on day four I finally saw a neurologist.

He suspected Lyme disease, and prescribed antibiotics immediately.

He also ordered a lumbar puncture. This found antibodies in my cerebrospinal fluid which the body produces to fight Lyme disease bacteria, Borrelia burgdorferi.

At last, I was diagnosed with Lyme disease, but it was likely the delay that meant that it had spread to my brain. 

I’d laid my symptoms out so clearly every time I’d spoken to a health professional, and no one connected the dots until then.

To top it all off, on Christmas Eve that year, an ultrasound scan found that my gallbladder is full of gallstones.

I’m now on six different types of medication to manage my symptoms. I’ve finally started working with a Pain Management clinic, but I felt like I was on a waiting list for a very long time; and the pain still knocks me sideways. I also struggle with mobility issues and  ‘intention tremors’: when I go to pick something up, my hand involuntarily opens and then I drop whatever I was holding.

The prognosis from my neurologist was that he hoped I’d have a reasonably good recovery; but that it would be ‘slowly…slowly…slowly’. I wonder, would it have been so slow if the Lyme disease had been caught sooner?

I still feel like a test case. I’ve had diarrhoea every single day since mid-summer – an enormous evacuation of liquid with every passing of my motions – and nobody can tell me whether it’s the Lyme, the gallstones or something else. I feel like no one’s taking responsibility for it and, in the meantime, I’m hugely dehydrated, extremely tired and very, very frightened. 

Lyme disease has cost me my job, and I’m not the woman I knew. Now, I just want to be useful – if anyone’s doing research on Lyme disease, I want to help – because I need this all to have been for something.

I don’t want to knock our healthcare system. I know how stretched it is. But I didn’t feel heard. I felt rushed through A&E, and bullshitted with the three misdiagnoses. If I’d just had antibiotics earlier, I might not be talking about Lyme disease at all now.

But I am. So if you know, in your gut, that something’s not right and you don’t feel you’re being heard; keep pushing. It might be nothing; but it could be something.

My ‘something’ has robbed me of my life. And I don’t want that to happen to anyone else.

To find more information or to seek support, visit Lyme Disease UK.