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Not a day goes by when I don’t hear a story like Maggie’s.

Maggie’s 17-year-old daughter was sick; she’d been vomiting for two days and was unable to keep any food down. Having raised a few children and ridden this rodeo many times, her illness presented like a bad stomach virus. (A number of her daughter’s friends were also sick.) On the third evening, her daughter started complaining of bad pain in the center of her belly, at which point Maggie started getting worried, mostly about dehydration. She called the pediatrician.

“This is day three, and you haven’t brought her in yet?” said the female pediatrician. As she put it, “If her daughter could make it through the night, she needed to take her to the office or urgent care first thing in the morning.” The doctor’s tone was disapproving and judgmental.

After hearing the doctor’s comment, Maggie gathered her daughter and headed to urgent care. The doctor there told her that the teen needed to be evaluated for appendicitis—STAT- and so off they went to the emergency room. But after six hours in the hospital, the lab work showed that imaging was not necessary; she should follow up with the pediatrician in the office. That night, she and her daughter returned home at 3 am, which (as an aside) completed a 22-hour day of professional and parenting work for Maggie.

The next day Maggie cancelled her plans and got her daughter to the pediatrician as instructed. The doctor there conducted some tests, but was not alarmed and sent........

© Psychology Today