Diagnosis: "Fat"

This may be the hardest blog I’ve ever written. I don’t spend a lot of time talking about my weight or body image issues, because being open and honest about your insecurities tends to open you up to more ridicule and criticism, and that’s a dangerous thing to do, especially on the internet. However, I feel like maybe if I’m honest about what happened to me as a result of fat-shaming, it might save someone else from going through the same thing. And if I can help anybody out, it’ll be worth any criticism or ridicule. In my present condition I’m kind of past worrying about my own vanity anyway. There are much more important things to worry about.

I’ve been doing a lot of looking back recently. Most of the time I’m either trying to figure out when the cancer started, or I’m judging myself for not realizing I had cancer earlier, now that I can look back and spot all the symptoms. It’s not a healthy practice at all, but I have a lot of free time on my hands now that my official job title is “Cancer Fighter.” And what I’ve realized during the moments of reminiscing is…I spent so much time fat shaming myself, and letting one doctor do the same, that I put my own life at risk. 

You see, some of the major symptoms of my type of cancer (that I personally went through) are fatigue, unexplained weight loss, difficulty breathing, difficulty swallowing, and night sweats. The defining trend with all of those symptoms is that they can also easily be attributed to being overweight, or at least a lot of them can. And when you’re overweight and start losing weight, even unintentionally, you tend not to question it, and your doctors tend to encourage it.

So that is where I was for several months. What turned out to be fatigue due to cancer was something that I was ashamed of because I thought I was just overweight and lazy. I needed to work out more, right? I obviously just needed to build up my stamina. 

The difficulty breathing was another issue all together. I had a pretty bad upper respiratory infection in September. I actually started seeing a pulmonologist at that time, because of that infection and because I tend to have chronic upper respiratory problems anyway. This particular infection left me with a residual cough that lasted several months afterwards, and that’s what lead me to discovering what I for months referred to as “the lump in my throat.” The pulmonologist ran all kinds of tests on me, including two different lung capacity tests, the second one about two months after the first. The second test showed my lungs working at only 50% capacity, down from about 80% at the first.

The doctor thought this was simply because of my weight. I accepted that explanation.

By the time I received my diagnosis, I had lost over 10% of my body weight. I had been battling crippling fatigue for months. I did have other symptoms that could not be explained away with a diagnosis of being fat (like the fact that I couldn’t even swallow fluids anymore), and that’s what finally lead me to seeking medical attention. 

One of the few good things about my diagnosis is how I now have a logical explanation for everything I’d been struggling with for so long. And the explanation has nothing to do with my size. I can now look back and recognize that even with being overweight, I was actually in pretty good health before the cancer started. If only I had believed that.

So I guess my point in writing all of this is to first of all work through my regret in not listening to my body. While I may never have come up with “cancer” being the reason for everything, I definitely could have recognized that there was something seriously wrong if I hadn’t been so busy being ashamed of myself. Secondly, to let anyone else going through anything similar to this know that they’re not alone. I have heard other stories like mine. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Fat doesn’t always equal unhealthy, and whatever size we find ourselves at, we know our bodies well enough to know when there’s an issue that has nothing to do with weight. Maybe we just need to learn to trust ourselves rather than sit in silence due to shame.