I think it would be relevant to note that although I am a guy, I am FtM transgender and at the time the doctor in question considered me a young woman. I don’t think she would have treated me this way if I had been a cis man; the stigma against overweight women seem much worse than overweight men.

Anyways, this happened about a year ago, when I was 19. I had a terrible relationship with my doctor, primarily because she spent most of every checkup questioning me on my eating habits, and clearly did not believe what I told her (I live a pretty healthy lifestyle, and still manage to be 5’5″ and weigh 220lbs). She was convinced I needed to lose weight to help my asthma (still not sure how that one was supposed to work) and my somewhat high blood pressure that I couldn’t seem to mitigate regardless of changes in lifestyle.

I started having fairly severe pain in my upper chest, especially at night. Being as I lived at school at the time, I went to see the campus health center, which is staffed by extremely nice and competent nurses. The woman I saw there told me it sounded like a very bad case of gallstones. She suggested I change my eating habits, come back the next day and see if that helped. It did indeed help; no fats or oils, no pain. I also talked with my mom around this time and found out women in our family have a history of developing pretty severe gallstones around this age. So I called up my doctor and scheduled an appointment for that weekend, when I could get home.

She seemed very skeptical of the nurse’s conclusion when I told her, and insisted I get her notes from when she met with me. The people at the campus health center were also somewhat bewildered by this, but happy to comply after working out what forms I needed to sign.

So I go home, then to the doctor with these notes; she barely glances at them before stuffing them into her file and asking me to describe what was going on. I do so; she cuts me off as I start talking about how eliminating fats from my diet had done a lot to help with the pain (although at this point it was starting to come back if I so much as twisted too suddenly). She asks me if these ‘fatty foods’ were pizza and nachos that I was eating in the middle of the night.

I was rather stunned and told her no, I was talking about salad dressing, some fatty red meats, and the occasional side of french fries. And I don’t eat in the middle of the night.

She insisted, though, basically telling me she thought I was sneaking junk food in the middle of the night and that it was just causing me heartburn. She also insisted I was too young to get gallstones, even though I told her my family has a history of it.

I argued with her about it and finally she consented to schedule me for an ultrasound to have a look, as well as several blood tests to ‘cover all the bases’. I happily complied with the blood tests, went for the ultrasound the next weekend. By this point I am restricted to eating things that contain absolutely no fat or oil, and am in a constant, although somewhat low level of pain; I’m having attacks every night after dinner regardless of what I eat.

The ultrasound tech was very nice, and when I described my symptoms also immediately concluded it was gallstones. It didn’t take him very long to locate them; I could see them on the screen before he even started to point them out to me – there were a lot; my gallbladder was (quite literally) about half full of gallstones. Afterward we discussed the standard treatment (removing the gallbladder) which he said would be the best option in my case, and should be done soon. He sent the results along to my doctor and said she would help me get a surgeon.

So I go back to school, wait for the call from my doctor to schedule an appointment. A week goes by; no call. The technician said she should have gotten the ultrasound results the day after the procedure. I decide to call and find out what’s up.

Turns out yes, she did get them! No, she hadn’t been intending to schedule an appointment with me. Why? She doesn’t think the gallstones are the problem. It’s my weight, she insists.

Apparently at this point she wasn’t even bothering with the sneaking junk food idea any more; I was just in pain because of my weight.

At this point I decided enough was enough. I stopped seeing her and immediately found a new doctor (the one my dad went to, so she was somewhat familiar with our family). She was able to fit me in that weekend when she found out what was going on; she then immediately scheduled me for an appointment with a surgeon, who scheduled me for surgery within the week; he was somewhat alarmed by the fact that I was in constant pain now, implying that the gallbladder was probably becoming infected.

After the surgery, he informed me that if they had waited much longer (as in a matter of days) there was a high likelihood I would have died or, at the very least, had a much longer recovery; my gallbladder had been so swollen it had started to fuse with other neighboring organs. Much more vital ones.

At the next appointment I had with my new doctor (my first proper appointment really, since at the first one she had been mostly concerned with getting me to the surgeon) we started going over medication I was taking and she was shocked to find that old doctor had instructed me to take Albuterol (an inhaler for asthma symptom relief) preventatively, twice a day, every day. Apparently this is not how Albuterol is meant to be taken, and is in fact fairly detrimental, since it causes – wait for it – high blood pressure!

As soon as I started taking my inhalers the way they were meant to be taken, my blood pressure dropped right down into a very healthy range. What a surprise.

I’d like to tell my story so that women in menopause know that having a period (after not having one for at least 6 months) is NOT normal.

My tale really involves 2 women – myself and a friend who is about my age and about the same size as I am.

We both had what seemed and felt like a menstrual period after having been told we were in full menopause. Since I had a reliable doctor, off I went to be checked out. My doctor said it is definitely not normal and sent me for a D&C. The tissue from the D&C came back as “pre-cancerous” and my doctor said the standard prescription for that is a hysterectomy. I did a little research and found the same thing. So my doctor sent me to a surgeon, who though grumpy and mean (to everybody), scheduled the surgery. The surgery was decidedly not fun, but all went well. The pathology report came back with the info that there had indeed been a tumor (cancer) in the cavity of the uterus. Now it is 6 years later and I am able to dance/work/chase-my-grandkids to my heart’s delight.

My friend’s story is very different. She had what seemed like a period and thought it was normal and ignored it for several years. She mentioned it to another friend, who urged her to talk to me and I urged her to go see a doctor. So she did and got the usual “you’re too fat” run-around. She insisted that something must be done and did get a referral to a local surgeon – who said she was too fat, that nobody could do a hysterectomy on her and refused to do the surgery. I’m not clear how many doctors she went through, but she did eventually find one competent enough to do a hysterectomy on a 300ish pound woman. My recovery was 6 weeks; hers has been over 6 months. My total time from first visit to totally recovered was 5 months; hers was about 3 full years, some of it listening in misery to some jerk tell her she’s too fat and refusing to treat something she clearly knows is not okay. Her outcome now is pretty good, so this story has a reasonably happy ending for both of us.

I think it does have two clear points.
1) If you think something is wrong, get to a doctor and keep going until you find one who will treat you respectfully and actually listen to what is going on.
2) It does really help to have found a doctor you can trust before you really need one. I know how hard that is and yes, it is hard. I had to drive an hour and a half from my home to the doctor’s office (same distance to the hospital) and it was absolutely worth it at the time I needed a reliable doctor most.

I think my sis may have narrowly missed disaster the other day because the docs at the ER were convinced that she had gall bladder issues (yes, she is fat… AND has recently lost some weight…). It turned out to be her appendix, infected and on the verge of bursting. They kept running unnecessary tests on her for 5 more hours till they figured this out. (So now she owes them more money for their denseness, as well!) Two other people with appendicitis came in and were admitted sooner, while she continued to wait. Bets that if she were thin this would not have happened??

Hi
I found your blog and thought my story would fit right in.
I don’t have a good relationship with doctors. Frankly they terrify me, and I avoid them at all costs. Before we started trying to conceive I only went once a year for my annual pill prescription and pap smear if needed. My gp is good though, a really lovely person who never tries to tell me it’s all about how fat I am. Unfortunately not all doctors are as helpful.
I have been trying to conceive for more than a year now. In that time I have been to my gp for preliminary tests, taken vitamins every day, cut out the caffeine, watched what I eat and have recently taken up exercise at the gym. Unfortunately I have still not managed to get pregnant and have been having long long cycles with irregular temperatures and heavy bleeding. Off to my gp in January-she was very helpful, sent me off for an ultrasound and some blood tests, mainly general stuff since I hadn’t had any tests for around a decade, but also a GTT. It came back fine-no diabetes, nothing wrong with my girly bits on the ultrasound. She told us to keep trying and come back in a couple of months.
I returned to her in April, still with some crazy issues relating to long long cycles, long periods and no pregnancy. She told me it was fine to keep trying but would like me to see a gynaecologist. She wrote on the referral “Mel has been trying to conceive for more than 12 months but has been unsuccessful. She has a family history of PCOS and is overweight. Please help her with her fertility issue”. Okay I have no problem with what she wrote, it’s all accurate.
Off I trudged to the gynaecologist, test results in hand. In the time between January and May when I saw the gynaecologist I had been exercising and had lost around 15kg, which I thought was a stellar effort and showed I was trying to address the inevitable “you need to lose weight”. My gp had told me to lose 5% of my bodyweight and if my weight was the problem then my cycles would miraculously sort themselves out-after losing the weight there has been no improvement so I thought I had pre-empted their comment.
The first thing out of the gynaecologists mouth was “How much do you weigh”. 135kg. “Do you realise how obese you are?” I then told her I have been working hard to lose weight through diet and exercise, thinking to cut her off before she got into her fatbashing rant. As i explained that I had lost 15kg since January, was doing 90 minutes of cardio at the gym 5 times a week, and eating a low GI low fat low carb diet she rolled her eyes at me in disbelief. Her reply was “You are too fat for a baby. You need to get down to 65kg before I will help you”.
At that point I should have stood up, told her to go f*** herself and walked out but I was stunned. I guess she took the stunned silence as agreement because then she whipped out the lapbanding pamphlet and told me I had to have weight loss surgery. I told her no, not under any circumstances would I do that, it doesn’t work (my aunt had it done and is bigger than she was before), and she then continued to patronise me. She told me I was infertile because I had been on the pill for 15 years, that taking basal body temperatures was a waste of time as they don’t show ovulation, and that I would need ivf to conceive. She could tell all this apparently from looking at me and reading my full blood count, my GTT results and looking at my completely normal ultrasound results. I just sat there as she lectured me about how I had to take pre-natal vitamins (because of course, being fat, I must be stupid and incapable of reading). She told me I must be very lazy because she only had to walk for 30 minutes a day to lose 1/2 a kilogram.
Not once did she ask me about my symptoms, and when I pointed out that I didn’t have the crazy cycles and issues before I went on the pill and I was fat then, she ignored me and kept bringing up the weight loss surgery as the only option available to me. As I left she handed me the weight loss surgery pamphlet and told me to think about it for next time I came. No hope was given, no suggestions on how she was going to investigate or manage the issues I am having in terms of cycles and some pretty severe bleeding, just “you are fat. you are fat. you are fat”.
By the time I left her surgery I was in tears, and as I walked away I had never felt so depressed in my life. All I wanted was a baby, just one, I had walked into her office so full of hope and had been in a really good place before she opened her mouth. I rang my husband and could barely speak, I was so upset. As I told him what had happened he got more and more angry till finally he said “How can you let someone speak to you like that. You are worth so much more than that”. At that point I realised that the strong assertive Me had been turned into the compliant humiliated voiceless Me by someone who didn’t know me, didn’t care about me, and didn’t even behave in a professional manner towards me.
I don’t know what box of cornflakes she got her medical degree off the back of, but if she actually genuinely wanted to help me (even if in her opinion the only possible option was helping me lose weight) then did she really think she was going to get very far by just humiliating me? As for me I am now needing to go off to my gp again for another referral, but I have put it off for the last few weeks because I am not sure if I can face going through that again with another specialist. I thought the Hippocratic oath said “first do no harm” but I guess that emotional damage to a fat person doesn’t count as she didn’t see me as a person, just a big pile of lard.

Fat Prejudice Kills Thin Women Too

I work at a university where staff are given a membership at the school gym as one of our benefits. A few months ago I was in the weight room working out when I overheard a conversation between two of our better professors, let’s call them Sue and Nancy. Nancy told Sue that she was looking good lately, had she lost weight? Yes, said Sue! She’d been working out harder lately and had lost a lot of weight. Now, Sue’s not a fat woman by any means, so “a lot” is a relative quantity. But still, I remembered the conversation.

A couple of weeks ago the university received an email. Sue had died suddenly. I was struck by the loss of an excellent teacher and role model to our students.

It fell to the gossip network for me to learn what had happened. Sue had felt numbness in one of her arms and had gone to get it checked out. Shockingly, she was diagnosed with cancer. Some have said it was lung cancer, others have said it wasn’t. She underwent treatment, and perhaps because of the treatment experienced a severe stroke. Within a few weeks of her diagnosis she was dead at 35.

When I heard this my mind went back to that conversation in the gym. What if her weight loss wasn’t the result of diet and exercise? What if it was the first symptom of her cancer? Not knowing her closely, I have no way to know. But I wonder…

And I wonder how often weight loss, which can be a symptom of cancer and a host of other serious diseases, is ignored or welcomed! How few women of any size would see weight loss as a problem, and ask a doctor to try to find a cause? If fat is something to hate, no matter your size, to want to remove or reduce, then a person is very unlikely to see sudden weight loss negatively.

Could Sue’s cancer have been detected earlier? If it had, could she have faced a more gentle treatment that wouldn’t have killed her?

I think this is a moment to reflect that size prejudice endangers us all, no matter what size we are.

First I want to say thank you so much for this blog. It makes me angry, but it also helps me feel understood.

I have always been fat. I was a fat child, a fat teenager, and now am a fat adult.

When my husband and I decided to try to have a baby, we discovered that I had a fertility issue (unrelated to my weight) that would prevent any sort of natural conception. Fast forward six years to our second IVF try and we were ecstatic that it worked. Until week 10 when I went in for my first scan and they found that the baby did not have a heartbeat. We were crushed. We decided that I would go off all medication that was supporting the pregnancy and wait for my body to spontaneously abort.

Unfortunately a week later, I ended up in the emergency room, bleeding heavily and in a significant amount of pain. I will say that I in all of these situations, my fertility doctor, the OB who did the first scan, and the ER staff & doctors, all of them treated me with respect and compassion. After receiving some pain medication, I opted to come back the next day for a D&C, considered a same-day surgery.

Here is where my story turns so awful. Because of my husband’s work duties, he was unable to accompany me to the surgery wing the next morning, although he was able to be there before I actually went into surgery and for my recovery. I waited alone for my file to get processed, for the nurse to take my blood pressure and temperature and finally I sat and waited for the anesthesiologist.

I got called back by Dr. H and walked back to sit at his desk. He ignored my medical history (which showed no prior problems with anesthesia at my weight) and began to detail all of the complications that can happen under anesthesia at my weight. Fine. Whatever. I was in a haze and pretty much ignored him unless I was asked a direct question.

But then he looked me in the eye and said, “You know, we have a really excellent bariatric surgery program here. You should think about doing it. You can always get pregnant again later. Your knees will thank you if you do it. I know you’re fine now, but that much extra weight will have a lot of repercussions later on.”

I sat there, stunned. And shamed. And to this day, thinking about it makes me cry. I said nothing in my own defense.

Later as I was laying in pre-op, a chaplain came by and prayed with me. Then he just stood and talked to me for awhile. Out of nowhere, Dr. H comes up to my bedside to check in before surgery. He looks across the bed at the chaplain and says, “I’ve been trying to talk her into doing our bariatric surgery program.”

Did I mention that pre-op is just a bunch of curtained off areas?

Thank God for the chaplain who glared at Dr. H until he left and then just stood with me and held my hand. The shame I felt was indescribable. I was already blaming myself and my body and my weight for being the reason that my baby was gone.

I didn’t tell anyone about what Dr. H said. I didn’t write an angry letter to the hospital. I tried to forget it, but even though that was almost 3 years ago, I remember every second of the horror that I felt. The way that my shame almost choked me.

You don’t have to post my story on your blog, but I felt that this was the time and place to share what happened. Maybe I will go ahead and write that letter telling the hospital how I was treated. I’m fairly new to the Fat Acceptance blog world and it’s going to take me some time to change the way my mind works. I’m hopeful that I can work to put that shame behind me and stop blaming myself for what happened.

Thanks for the venue and for reading this far.

Now, medical school isn’t entirely to blame here, I will admit that. Part of the blame lies with our fat-phobic society that tells us all, from cradle to grave, that fat is bad, fat is unhealthy, fat is disgusting, and thin is good, thin is healthy, thin is beautiful. But the medical community has the opportunity, and the knowledge, to counteract that message, and they fail at it, miserably, most of the time.

Yes, there are doctors that get it, that know diets don’t work, that eating well, that exercising in ways that one likes is the best path to health and will actually treat one for whatever problems one has, and look for the true causes instead of blaming those problems on weight alone. But those doctors are few and far between.

The rest of the doctors are all too ready to perpetuate stereotypes and recommend diets that they know don’t work for long-term weight loss because that’s the easy way out. They then don’t have to justify ordering tests to actually diagnose the true cause of a problem and risk not getting paid by one’s insurance. They don’t have to face their biases and realize that they’re bigots – that they need a dose of attitude adjustment to treat all people, no matter what their size happens to be, the same – to give everyone the same quality of care that they would expect.

That is the true shame of our medical schools – they’re turning out bigoted doctors who give substandard care to certain classes of people.

The following is a letter of complaint I am sending to the branch manager of the local health office. Some words are transliterated from the Hebrew, but the gist of the letter should be clear.
December 20th 2010

I sincerely hope that Maccabi is open to improving both their staff as needed and the administrative issues I have addressed.

About a month ago I developed sudden back pain. I do have a history of back pain, but this was sudden onset debilitating pain. My back pain actually predates any weight gain, gee, do you think there could be a correlation there?

Anyways, the pain was so bad that my husband took me to the ER, I could hardly move. I saw a lovely doctor who gave me some endone and told me to come back if it got worse. It got worse. I had to ring an ambulance the next day as I literally couldn’t move without screaming. I was panicking and hyperventilating and generally in a pretty seriously bad way. After the pain whistle they managed to get me to the ambulance and then to the ER. The wait was reeeeeeeely long. They gave me panadeine. Um, did I mention i’d had 2 endone 2 hours ago?? Anyways, I eventually saw another young skinny female doctor. During my wait I was incapable of moving without my husbands assistance, and he had to take me to the bathroom a number of times and well, go beyond the call of duty!

The doctor looked me over, asked a few questions, gave me an anti inflamatory and some tramidol and a valium and left me to lie down for 30mins. The pain eased a LITTLE, more so from the fact I was finally able to lie down I suspect. When she came back, she told me there was nothing more she could do for me, and the only thing that would help is to lose weight. Did I mention I COULDN’T MOVE??? Did I mention that 3 days ago I weighed exactly the same and was fine, actually, in the least pain i’d been in for 17years due to the help of my wonderful new GP. I also suffer from bi-polar disorder and have been on anti-psychotics and other meds for a number of years.

We were sent home. In the car my husband apologised for not sticking up for me, I had told him about this sort of prejudice before, and I had experienced it before, but that was the first time he was there and he was so shocked he didn’t know what to say.

Now, I understand there is a link (not necessarily causational) between back pain and weight. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t cause sudden onset excruciating pain though. If I had been a thin person in this situation I would imagine at LEAST an mri would have been done.

I managed, through incredible pain, to make it to my GP the next day. She was disgusted with the treatment I had received and immediately organised all the appropriate tests and gave me some morphine. She spent an hour with me and personally rang two specialists to ask them to squeeze me in. Luckily it has turned out to be nothing serious. But it took me a month before I could dress and toilet myself. I am now receiving appropriate care. Strangely, I am actually seeing a sports rehab specialist and a sports physiotherapist. I had numerous panic attacks leading up to both these first appointments. The word sport struck fear into my soul. I had all my body acceptance replies all worked out. Neither of them have mentioned a SINGLE word about my weight. They know that my problems are not caused by my weight. There are good people out there who don’t jump to conclusions, they just seem to be hard to find.

Thanks for reading.