Christy Kirk was in her senior year of dental school when an entire side of her body went numb.
She was home alone and experiencing classic symptoms of a stroke – her eyes locked to one side, her speech slurred. She struggled to speak.
Her neighbor drove her from their apartment complex to the emergency room. By the time they reached the emergency room, her speech was back, but slow and stumbling.
Despite her symptoms, she passed a neurological exam. Doctors told her she was just having a panic attack.
But Kirk says through all her years of dental school – treating patients and being “very nervous” – she’d never experienced anything like this. She didn’t feel like she had been listened to.
In the ER, Christy Kirk was told her symptoms were anxiety. They weren’t – she had a hole in her heart that had gone undetected, leading to a stroke.
“I was a super calm person,” she says. “They sent me home with a prescription for Ativan (an anti-anxiety medication), which I was petrified to take because I was very convinced that something different had happened.”
Kirk stayed up all night fretting over it, and after a few days of ongoing symptoms, she sought support from another neighbor who was a neurology resident.
“I was fortunate that he knew me, and so he really wanted to help,” she says. Her neighbor called in a favor, and got her into an MRI five days later.
Kirk’s intuition was right. The symptoms doctors had chalked up to a panic attack had been a stroke all along.
“I didn’t feel like they really listened to me,” Kirk says. She had a hole in her heart, which required a minimally invasive procedure to cover the hole with an occluder.
She is hardly alone. Women often report having their symptoms dismissed in medical settings − even turning to social platforms like Reddit when doctors leave them in the dark.
According to a 2023 study published in Frontiers Journal, stereotypical traits associated with women, such as vulnerability and dramatics, can cause providers to wrongfully believe that women exaggerate the severity of their symptoms. In turn, providers are more likely to recommend psychological services in response to pain to a woman than a man, and more likely to offer men painkillers.
Doctors said it was ‘probably hormonal’: It was colon cancer.
It’s more than ‘just one misdiagnosis’
When Kait Leno, 47, began experiencing heart rate spikes, doctors attributed it to anxiety. It took a heart attack in 2024 for her doctors to discover that her medication was having a life-threatening interaction.
But she says her story isn’t about just one misdiagnosis – it’s about what happens when complex physical symptoms are repeatedly misinterpreted as symptoms of anxiety.
Leno lives with Ehlers-Danlos syndromes (EDS), which causes chronic, widespread pain, and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), which can cause fainting, exhaustion and fatigue, excessive heart rate increase within 10 minutes of standing, shortness of breath and nervousness, among other symptoms.
When Kait Leno began experienced heart rate spikes, doctors attributed it to anxiety. It took a heart attack in 2024 for her doctors discovered that her medication was having a life-threatening interaction.
She says her health further deteriorated after a COVID-19 infection, and her symptoms persisted past the initial infection.
“I was in 10 out of 10, full body chronic pain every day, still being told I was just anxious and that everything was psychological,” she says.
She listened to their judgement and even tried somatic therapy. But in 2023, doctors found a 5-millimeter brain aneurysm, which they removed via surgery in February 2024. She was told she was “cured,” but by December, she felt her body “shutting down again.”
She had been prescribed propranolol to treat high blood pressure, and took it for the first time after going into hypertensive crisis, a life-threatening, severe spike in blood pressure.
She says it triggered an “NSTEMI” heart attack, a type caused by a partial or temporary blockage of a coronary artery. Her husband called her primary care physician, who she says called 911 and told the paramedics she was having a panic attack. She was given a psychiatric evaluation and released, so her husband finally drove her to the emergency department.
But she says six hours passed before a heart monitor was even placed on her; during that time, her symptoms were still being framed as a panic attack.
“When they tested my blood, my troponin levels (used to diagnose a heart attack) were four times the level that they should have been,” she says. “I was not in a panic attack or in a psychiatric crisis whatsoever. I was legitimately having a heart attack.”
‘I have gone through this for a reason’
Leno looked for care outside her area of Rochester, New York, and landed at Mayo Clinic.
“Going in there and having them explain things to me and understand me and understand my body for the first time completely changed the way I present myself in an office,” Leno says.
As a woman, she feels if she gets frustrated in an office, she’ll get labeled as a “hostile patient.” To be taken seriously, she says she has to be “cool and calm at all times.”
She’s started using AI tools to log her symptoms, and presents them to physicians to provide context around her conditions. Working with doctors on a new treatment plan, she’s been able to get back on her feet.
Leno has since gotten involved with HeartMates, a supportive community for people who have undergone heart health challenges and their caregivers.
“Experiencing a body like this, and then having people tell you that you look just fine and you must be fine is absolutely excruciating,” Leno says. “Advocating also helps keep me going. It helps make me feel like I have gone through this for a reason, and I have a purpose.”
Christy Kirk, now approaching 50, has finally decided to speak out about her condition after being “terrified” for “forever” to do so. The neurologist who diagnosed her had advised against it, and that stuck with her.
“He said, ‘You’re a young dentist, and if people find out that you had a stroke, they might not have confidence in your ability to treat them,’” she recalls. “I used to worry, ‘Am I going to be able to be a dentist? Am I going to be able to be a mom?’ All of the things I really wanted were in jeopardy in my mind.”
But now, 23 years into her career, she sees patients who have heart issues and major medical crises and shares her history with them.
“I love my patients, and I want to make them feel better,” she says.
“I don’t want anyone to experience what I have,” Leno says. “There’s a lot of us (with invisible illnesses) that don’t have a voice, and I’ve never been afraid to use mine.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: A hole in her heart went undiagnosed after doctors dismissed it as anxiety