While at my last Nutrition and Chronic Pain course, a few of us were chit-chatting about diagnoses and diagnostic tests and getting misdiagnosed and all of those fun topics.
One person mentioned that they had received a diagnosis of a chronic and auto-immune health condition (I am leaving out details for privacy concerns). Now, technically, this was bad news, but the first words out of someone's mouth was "Congratulations".
Now we all understood exactly what he meant by this.
When a person is dealing with constant pain, a symptom that won't go away, or any discomfort that is unusual and lasts for a long period of time - sometimes the waiting and the testing is worse than just getting an answer - however awful it may be. When a person is going through months of diagnostic testing and nothing is showing up, it is often the case that a doctor MAY give an umbrella diagnosis (depression, fibromyalgia in some cases, IBS, etc...) and give up on trying to find the real source of the problem. Even worse than that, sometimes an assumption is made by a healthcare professional that it is all in the patient's head. THIS is far more disheartening than a diagnosis of, say, Arthritis. After months and months of trying to figure out where the problem lies, even a bad diagnosis feels like a wave of relief for a patient who has, perhaps, started to feel crazy!
So, although a negative diagnosis was made, "congratulations" truly was the most natural response. On the other side of that too... When 'nothing' shows up on a diagnostic test, now you know why those of us with chronic pain don't usually react as though this is good news. Keep that in mind when dealing with someone who is chronically ill.
:)