11:16am October 20, 2013

➸ "You don't need this junk. You need a cat.": Some idiot went to my main blog and told me I couldn't need a feeding tube because I'm "maintaining my considerable...

youneedacat:

(He had to put in the dig at me for being fat. Because he had to.)

Then he proceeded to tell me that when he had stomach cancer (which is… uh… not gastroparesis, and therefore can’t be compared, at all) he lost a certain amount of weight, and the fact that I was still fat meant that “something…

Yeah. :( That is also an extremely common pattern with celiac, and likely other problems which can affect your digestive system and cause malnutrition. It is totally possible to be severely malnourished and never lose massive amounts of weight, especially once your body realizes it’s not getting enough/good quality nutrition and starts trying desperately to hold onto whatever energy it can. (Very similar to how food insecurity makes a lot of people actually gain weight, and then there are all of these awful digs about poor people obviously not really being in that bad a shape, because look at them! :/) Then people, including medical professionals, too often act like you couldn’t possibly even be sick, because you don’t fit an emaciated stereotype. Plus 31 flavors of fatphobia.

I never got super-thin from the celiac malabsorption, which is probably part of the reason I had to figure out what was going on myself, and then fight for even antibody testing. And then didn’t get the standard nutrient level testing or bone scans ordered at all, and classic celiac deficiency symptoms turned “all in my head”. This is surely a problem with any number of conditions. And I’m sorry people have been shitty about it with your gastroparesis. :(

Unfortunately, I know what you mean with the internalized bullshit causing all kinds of conflicts around losing weight from illness. With the (probably related autoimmune) diabetes, I have needed to actively try *not* to lose more, because I keep hovering on the verge of it screwing with my hormones for years now. (Between that and deficiencies, I also lost a lot of muscle mass.)

And sometimes I do feel guiltily glad about it, with a restrictive ED history. With my build, the lowest I ever reached at near adult size was 140, and looked awful enough that people kept saying so. That was also the lowest weight my mother with the same build got to with cancer, while she could still step onto a scale, and she was scarily bony. (That gave some perspective on reasonable expectations, oh my.) So I also expect all kinds of shit from medical professionals over BMI, even when I am personally unhealthily thin. Having diabetes ratchets the judginess up several more notches, and it has triggered me into severely unhealthy restrictive episodes which they would probably think was great, because BMI over 25. :( Worse where I live now, with much smaller people on average than where I grew up. It’s been helping keep me from getting the care I need.

But yeah, I definitely wasn’t trying to hijack with all the ranting, but offer some sympathy. That particular comment may have turned out to be from a known troublemaker, but this crap is everywhere, and it can really mess with your head sometimes. Besides the bad assumptions keeping people from getting proper, maybe lifesaving, treatment.

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