Undiagnosis

Chapter 1- Past

Waiting rooms in different buildings for different things. They can be filled with nervousness, fright and fear, unknowingness, sadness, and the rarest of them all; joy.

It was me and my mother sitting in my pediatrician's waiting room that I had gone to since I was a baby, unknowing and filled with fear. What was wrong with me? I had developed a severe burning sensation whenever I urinated; dysuria in medical terms. It must have been one of the longest waits at the doctor ever. People who had just checked in were being pulled in left and right, leaving me and my mother to worry in silence.

After about thirty minutes, it was my turn. It was my turn to confuse my first doctor, who would only be the first out of many. He ordered a urinalysis, a urine test, and an ultrasound of my kidneys. My first ultrasound was weird, as was every other test following this one. The technology still amazes me to this day, the gel on the other hand, not so much.

The wait to get in the office was nothing compared to the time it took to get results back from the tests. It was a two to three-day wait, my first of many. I remember worrying and stressing out over the potential results even though I knew pretty close to nothing about what could be wrong until I started doing research. At that point, I was convinced that I either had an STD or an actual issue with my urinary system.

The wait was up. My doctor left a voicemail on both of my parent's phones. My ultrasound report came back normal, finding nothing wrong with my kidneys. But my urine test told a different story. I was tested for a UTI, which is unusual for males but is possible, it was negative. My other levels were normal except for my protein levels. They were more elevated than they should have been which would be a range from 0 to 20 mg/dL for a healthy person. I was told that I had a level in the hundreds, which if you do the math, is pretty far off from anything normal. This meant that my kidneys were not filtering my blood correctly and the protein was slipping through and into my urine.

Proteinuria can be caused by strenuous exercise, which if you knew me in middle school, couldn't have been possible due to my strenuous laziness. My doctor blamed it on the exercise I rarely ever partook in and decided to let it slide, but that was obviously a mistake.