GP mum-of-two branded a ‘hypochondriac’ before dying of kidney cancer slammed ex-colleagues in posthumous blog post
Dr Steen, who died in February this year, said her medical friends failed to examine her properly
A DYING GP hit out at ex-colleagues, claiming they missed her rare form of kidney cancer.
Mum-of-two Dr Lisa Steen, 43, also accused them of dismissing her as a “hypochondriac.”
She wrote a damning blog weeks before she died which has now been published.
In it she explains how it was two years before she finally got a diagnosis in July 2014 by which time the cancer had spread to her bones.
Dr Steen, of Cambridge, who died in February this year, wrote: “I am angry at being left in the medically unexplained wilderness.
“And I did not like the way my colleagues looked at me, when they believed me to have health anxiety.”
She said she had complained to her own GP several times and undergone tests after first feeling ill in 2012.
Dr Steen, a GP for drug and alcohol service Inclusion, was diagnosed with health anxiety and took time off work.
But after losing weight, she underwent a routine ultrasound which revealed a mass in her body.
In her blog, published on the British Medical Journal’s website, she begs fellow GPs to treat ill colleagues like patients, and not doctors.
She said: “It was so humiliating, feeling like a goldfish with no voice.
“Watching doctors’ faces glaze over at the multitude of symptoms.”
She added: “They (colleagues) were reluctant to lay their hands on and examine a fellow medic.
“I was too embarrassed about my ‘psychiatric’ condition, too confused by not having the whole answer ready.
“If any one of the doctors I saw had gone another mile, they would’ve stumbled upon it (the cancer).”
Her husband, Raymond Brown, added: “They didn’t seem to be taking her too seriously.
“She was being looked at as a hypochondriac.”