“Doctors are supposed to be trusted authorities, a patient’s primary gateway to healing. But for fat people, they are a source of unique and persistent trauma. No matter what you go in for or how much you’re hurting, the first thing you will be told is that it would all get better if you could just put down the Cheetos.”
–Read the full article “Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong” at Highline (Huffington Post)
Do you want to know what the medical director of my unit says about “obese” patients, often unconscious and critically ill in the ICU– he says to calorie restrict them to 1,200kc a day and that at least they’ll lose weight in the hospital. I don’t even think I can fully explain how cruel this is. The patients are critically ill and it is hard to even get 1,200 calories into an unconscious person via tube feedings. The tubes can be tricky to get in the right place, the bowels often are not properly functioning so we don’t know what is even being absorbed, and tube feed is notorious for causing copious diarrhea. Which takes all the nutrients and additionally much of the water out of your body. Conscious patients who are able to eat often are so exhausted that they just can’t, not to even mention the frequent periods when patients can’t eat before tests or procedures. Even food brought from home, which I highly encourage, is often left untouched.
But fat shaming, per se, doesn’t happen as much in the inpatient hospital setting. It’s at the doctor’s office, the lab, the radiology department. Its at the OB-GYN’s office when you’re told that maybe if you had weight loss surgery, the heavy menstrual bleeding you’ve been experiencing continuously for over 6 months might get better. Or at the neurologist’s office when you’re told that a brain condition nobody understands might be caused by being fat but that, again, nobody understands why. Or at your primary care physician’s office, when you go in with your first ever joint problem (a sprained knee, it turns out, basically nothing, fine in a week), you are first (FIRST) even before the physical exam of your knee, told that if you weighed less, you’d hurt yourself less. And then the same doctor says later in the appointment, “I don’t want to be the asshole doctor that weight shames you.” Too late, doc, too fucking late.
If you hadn’t noticed, I am the fat person here. I am one of us, a person traumatized and triggered by the very industry that I work in. I have more to say about this, but the words evade me now.
