Teenager Diagnoses Own Illness

[carla]

For eight years, Jessica Terry suffered from stomach pain so horrible, it brought her to her knees. The pain, along with diarrhea, vomiting and fever, made her so sick, she lost weight and often had to miss school.
Her doctors, no matter how hard they tried, couldn't figure out the cause of Jessica's abdominal distress.
Then one day in January, Terry, 18, figured it out on her own.
In her Advanced Placement high school science class, she was looking under the microscope at slides of her own intestinal tissue -- slides her pathologist had said were completely normal -- and spotted an area of inflamed tissue called a granuloma, a clear indication that she had Crohn's disease.
"It's weird I had to solve my own medical problem," Terry told CNN affiliate KOMO in Seattle, Washington. "There were just no answers anywhere. ... I was always sick."
Terry, who graduated from Eastside Catholic School in Sammamish, Washington, this month, is now being treated for Crohn's, says her science teacher, MaryMargaret Welch.
"She was pretty excited about finding the granuloma," Welch said. "She said, 'Ms. Welch! Ms. Welch! Come over here. I think I've got something!' "
Welch, who has taught the Biomedical Problems class at Eastside for 17 years, immediately went on the Internet to see whether Terry had indeed spotted a granuloma.
"I said, 'Jeez, it certainly looks like one to me,' " Welch remembered. "I snapped a picture of it on the microscope and e-mailed it to the pathologist. Within 24 hours, he sent back an e-mail saying yes, this is a granuloma."


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[weredIgo]

Hi,
I love this story. Do you think they ever insinuated any of her complaints were in HER HEAD. Do any of you really think the people at these labs are stupid. Well I don't. I think that is the name of the GAME these days. The whole system is corrupt. This is why I'm about dead, but with every test "everything is fine". HORSE S--T. Boy do I WISH we could find what is wrong like she did and put it in their faces. I'm not a suing kind of person, but the satisfaction I would get, wow. There are rewards and perks for drs that keep costs down. I also think it can affect their livelyhood if they try to buck the system. This is how they make it right in their own heads, cause I don't know how they sleep at night. It's all about money with the insur. co. and big pharm. but how they control the labs, I haven't figured out yet. There must be big money incentives for them too. You know if they gave us the discounts the insur. co. gets. we could pay for everything ourselves. We would not need their over priced insur. This mystery will never be solved until someone in the know(legit) takes pitty on us and helps us out ANONYMOUSLY. There has to be a way to do that. I don't know why it hasn't already. I really envy the girl in this story.

C