I agree with the need for quicker female uro referrals in general and for educating internists, but my own experience was (fortunately) quite different When I called my PC physician's office about gross hematuria, I was taken in the same day, urinalysis was done, and testing set up right away (I think it was CT scan). I didn't see my own doc, but another nice young woman doc who was available the day I came in. She told me quite frankly before any testing was done that hematuria in a woman was much more likely to be due to cancer, while men sometimes had hematuria for other reasons. As soon as the CT results were in, which showed a probable small growth of some sort, they got me in to the urologist within a week. After the cysto that confirmed the tumor, the uro was kind enough to schedule me quickly for surgery, as we had a graduation to go to, and right after that had tickets booked for a 2 week overseas trip. It probably helped that I'd had a hysterectomy some years before, so there was no way the bleeding could be attributed to anything other than the urinary tract. Because I had no pain at all, they could also be pretty sure it wasn't any kind of kidney stones. (Interestingly, when they did the urinalysis at the first visit, a slight infection did show up, so they gave antibiotics, but nonethless proceeded with other testing and the uro referral as they were pretty sure the infection didn't account for the degree of bleeding I had.) From the first bleeding episode to the tumor removal was under a month all told. And, it turned out to be a small, low grade, non-invasive tumor.
