Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
Jul
21
Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
“Do You Have Vaginal Polyps? It’s A Vaginal Polyp!”
“Do you have vaginal polyps? It’s a vaginal polyp.” -L&D nurse upon visual examination of a preterm mother who reported feeling something in the birth canal, mere moments before the baby “crowned” frank breech. The polyp was a penis.
There are 33 comments to this post.
I hope everything turned out ok. The good thing about this misdiagnosis is it may have saved the mother from an unnecessary c-section.
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Babs Reply:
July 24th, 2010 at 10:36 pm (Quote)
Hooray! It got posted!
I forgot to add my response to this with the submission. It was: “I didn’t have vaginal polyps four hours ago”.
To be clear, the nurse *didn’t* examine me physically. Just visually. As in, “spread ‘em and I’ll go get my reading glasses”.
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Sarah Dorrance-Minch had this to say,
Jul 21, 2010 @ 4:07 pm (Quote)
I’ve had vaginal polyps popped for me a couple of times in routine pelvic exams.
Boy, it’s a good thing the nurse didn’t try to do any “polyp” popping that time.
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Alyson Miers had this to say,
Jul 21, 2010 @ 4:13 pm (Quote)
Translating Nurse to English:
“I have no business being in this room with you! Let me go find a midwife who’s attended a breech vaginal birth!”
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Holy crap. Hopefully she didn’t pinch the poor kid’s weenie!
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B'earthAngel Reply:
July 21st, 2010 at 6:00 pm (Quote)
LMBO Very funny reply Lauretta!
I can’t believe some of these posts, many defy common sense to the extreme!
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The Deranged Housewife had this to say,
Jul 21, 2010 @ 6:56 pm (Quote)
Obviously the ultrasound machine was broken that day … ? Good grief.
Yes, I am rather concerned for that poor kid’s weenie, too. 
Good one, Lauretta!
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Ummm, how would his penis make it down there?? My son was frank breech, too, and when the midwives would check me they could feel his butt.
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Elizabeth Reply:
July 22nd, 2010 at 9:08 am (Quote)
I’m not exactly sure but I’ve heard of a lot of breech babies coming testicles first.
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Sarah Dorrance-Minch Reply:
July 22nd, 2010 at 12:40 pm (Quote)
The only time Ina May Gaskin ever cut a generous episiotomy was when she was assisting at a breech birth, and the baby presented balls first.
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I’ve never had a vaginal polyp (to my knowledge) so I don’t know how big they get, but I’ve seen newborn baby boys, and it seems to me that would be a dang BIG polyp, at least in comparison to the ones I get on my underarm. Am I wrong?
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Jane Reply:
July 22nd, 2010 at 8:27 am (Quote)
But you’re talking logic, and the nurse was talking through her hat. She had already concluded the mother was unreliable and that nothing was wrong, therefore mentally she discounted anything that didn’t fit her pre-conceived observer bias.
The fact that it was odd the mother abruptly developed a vaginal polyp large enough for her to feel it while she was lying in bed, not moving, and complaining (one presumes) of preterm labor contractions would have created cognitive dissonance in the nurse, who was taking it as a given fact that the mother’s self-reporting was unreliable.
Believing the mother meant more work for this nurse, both nursing work and mental work as she re-adjusted her expectations to take in the facts, and therefore in the heat of the moment she denied the facts before her face in order to work with the conclusions she’d already reached.
This is a common enough problem that Jerome Groopman documented it in “How Doctors Think” because it has resulted in patient deaths when the first physician made an incorrect diagnosis and every physician afterward failed to question that diagnosis and forced the facts to fit the diagnosis, often blaming the patient for noncompliance or weird combinations of symptoms that “are a little unusual for this condition but not impossible.”
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ElElRi Reply:
July 24th, 2010 at 11:49 am (Quote)
Exactly what I was thinking! Cognitive dissonance.
My unborn son and I could’ve been killed because of exactly this sort of scenario.. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia when I actually had an infection. Even a steadily elevated white count, increasingly terribly fatigue and I began falling asleep in the shower, heart palpitations, a never-ending migraine, stomach discomfort (existed pre-pregnancy), ever-increasingly swollen lymph nodes that hurt, and joint pain didn’t sway them that it wasn’t one of those “overly sensitive nerves” conditions that was then compounded by pregnancy and one doctor told me I was just anxious and should get out of the house more – after that my family told me maybe I need medication (for anxiety!)..
Then when it was finally discovered, I was mis-medicated due to pregnancy (amoxicillin) and finally ended up in the ER on IV antibiotics.. And no one ever apologized. They just said “Wow, that was weird!”
My “fibromyalgia” magically vanished once the infection completely went away.
I bet this nurse just said “Wow, that was weird!”
I hope baby and mom were okay.
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Babs Reply:
July 24th, 2010 at 10:39 pm (Quote)
Thank you for this!! This is EXACTLY what I thought but didn’t have any words to express. Double points for the fact that they’d been fighting with me for over an hour about whether or not my reports of contractions were even true, since their monitor wasn’t picking up any activity. They’d put the sensor on too high… for a 40 week fundal height, even though I’d told them I was not 40 weeks (I was 34).
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beccaisadoula had this to say,
Jul 22, 2010 @ 7:31 am (Quote)
Lady, if you don’t know a polyp from a penis get away from me and my son!
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Sarah Dorrance-Minch Reply:
July 22nd, 2010 at 12:41 pm (Quote)
Would this be a good opportunity to start making pitying comments about this nurse’s sex life?
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Liz Chalmers had this to say,
Jul 22, 2010 @ 8:38 am (Quote)
I have just a little sympathy with the nurse in the situation. I guess she never had the training to say a soft “Aaaaah” when encountering something unexpected. When I was training to be a midwife, my preceptors taught me that method to avoid blurting out silly or alarming stuff.
(Makes me VERY nervous now when I hear anyone medical say “Aaaaaah”.)
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Hooray! It got posted!
I forgot to add my response to this with the submission. It was: “I didn’t have vaginal polyps four hours ago”.
To be clear, the nurse *didn’t* examine me physically. Just visually. As in, “spread ‘em and I’ll go get my reading glasses”.
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Jane Reply:
July 25th, 2010 at 5:12 am (Quote)
Wow–did you report her afterward for the substandard care?
Was your baby all right?
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Babs Reply:
July 25th, 2010 at 1:28 pm (Quote)
My son died later on that night due to circumstances unrelated to his birth. Reporting isn’t as straightforward with a loss… you get painted with the, “poor you, just a grieving mother looking for someone to blame” brush. While I did make some contacts about substandard care throughout that entire night, no one listened. As far as they were concerned I was “overcome with grief” (which is true) and to them that meant that everything I said was going to be somehow twisted and warped.
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Jane Reply:
July 25th, 2010 at 2:15 pm (Quote)
I’m so sorry for your loss. 
When I filed a complaint about my friend’s treatment after she lost her baby, nothing was done for us either. It’s the culture of collusion at some hospitals, where they band together to protect each other because they know one another, and if the patients are treated like garbage, they don’t care.
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Add Your Comment.
I thought nurses weren’t allowed to make a medical diagnosis…?
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