For me, diagnoses multiply as I age. It usually takes a year or two to recognize new symptoms as something other than side effects of existing meds, then another year or three to get the new diagnosis... have to make sure it's the proper fit.

It took me about a year and a half for POTS. I was lucky enough to have access to research articles so I already knew who I needed to go to for a diagnosis. I was gaslit by my primary care saying anxiety was causing me to blackout getting up from the couch. I may have fibbed to get a referral to a cardiologist and told him I had chest pain (enough though it was from asthma). It ended up working out and I now have an amazing cardiologist that knew what POTS was and tested me for that among others.

Looking back, I think I had cyclothymic disorder (a sort of preliminary bipolar, to put it extremely simply) for many years before I started presenting symptoms that finally got me diagnosed with BP1. But once I had a psychotic episode that hospitalized me, it was a pretty quick and easy diagnoses. So you could say years, or you could say not long at all.

7 years for the first one

26 years for EDS!

I am still waiting. The drs can’t figure me out

I was diagnosed with postnatal depression when my daughter was about 2 months old and after she was forcibly adopted when she was between 6 months old and 8 months old, she's 22 years old now, I was diagnosed with clinical depression. I was diagnosed with PCOS in either 2014/15 and that took years to be diagnosed with. I was diagnosed with asthma when I was in high school. I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2022, high blood pressure in February 23. I was also diagnosed with the start of a cataract in either my left eye earlier this year and my sleep apnea diagnosis was on the 30th of September this year.

I had to wait over 17 years to get a diagnosis as an adult.

Which one?

Doctors have really just now figured me out. Started having symptoms at age two… diagnosed with Mast Cell Activation Syndrome at 15. Diagnosed with dysautonomia at 14 then pots at 19. Diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis age 18. And a TON of other smaller diagnoses thrown in there in different places of a seventeen year span.