Three Specialists Missed It

I'm in Hawaii on vacation this week.

Almost exactly a year ago, I was here under very different circumstances.

We'd just finished five weeks in the continental USA - me competing on the pro circuit, Amy competing at the Amateur Olympia. Hawaii was a last-minute decision to extend our time away. A well earned chance to rest & recharge before heading back home.

Instead, all three of us caught COVID, almost certainly at the Olympia, and took it to Hawaii with us.

It took about 3 days to pass, and then something else started…

Pain in my shoulder unlike anything I've experienced.

I couldn't lie down - the moment I was horizontal it became unbearable, so I slept sitting up, two or three hours a night if I was lucky. Heart rate through the roof. Blood pressure, body temperature, all of it.

And no idea what was happening to me.

It got worse over the next week until we flew home.

What followed was weeks of investigation. My physio thought it was a tear and referred me on. The sports doctor ordered scans. Ultrasound, then an MRI. The MRI showed nothing torn, but it did show changes in my bone marrow, which led the sports doctor to suspect blood cancer. So then came the blood tests with my GP, and the waiting, and the thinking that accompanies waiting for results like that.

Negative.

So now we had three specialists, two scans, a round of blood work, and no answer at all. Just a shoulder that didn't work and an excruciating pain that wouldn't stop.

Then I got the opinion of a shoulder specialist, who asked me one question nobody had asked.

"Have you had any sort of viral infection in the last few weeks?"

And there it was: brachial neuritis. The virus I'd picked up at the Olympia had travelled into the nerves of my shoulder and attacked them. And it would continue attacking them until it killed them, or my body killed the virus.

It was the one piece of the puzzle that was missing, and the piece that made everything else fit together and make sense.

Here's what I keep coming back to...

Every single investigation had been aimed at my shoulder. That's where the pain was. That's where the problem obviously was. So that's where everyone looked - with better and better equipment, producing more and more detail, and getting no closer.

The answer wasn't in the shoulder at all. It was in something that had happened weeks earlier, in a completely different part of my body, that looked entirely unrelated.

No amount of additional scanning would ever have found it.

And I see the same pattern constantly.

The business with a sales problem that's actually a product problem.

The relationship with a resentment problem that's actually a communication problem.

The person with a discipline problem that’s actually a limiting beliefs problem.

You can examine the obvious place in forensic detail and find nothing because the cause isn't there.

So if you've been looking at a problem for a long time without getting anywhere, stop looking harder.

Ask what else was going on.

Because sometimes in order to get a better answer you need to ask a better question.

If you know someone who would benefit from reading this, please forward it to them. It may change the trajectory of their life for the better, and the catalyst could be you.