as small as a world and as large as alone

Yes, I have gastroparesis.  I was first hospitalized for it sometime like 2009, but they didn’t know what it was then, they just thought I had chronic nausea.  I was hospitalized again in 2012, where I was finally diagnosed because I couldn’t eat solids and had dropped 45 pounds in a few weeks.  Then I was tested in 2013, where the diagnosis was confirmed by a gastric emptying study (which caused such severe vomiting it put me in the hospital again).  And shortly after that I got my feeding tube, both because I couldn’t eat (my weight had dropped, by that point, from 245 to 193 pounds) and because I needed to vent my stomach contents to prevent pneumonia.  I gained a little weight after the tube, but then started losing it again and now I’m seemingly stable around 178 pounds.

I’m including the weight information because I think it is important for most people to know that fat people can get gastroparesis too, and that the symptoms don’t always wait until you’re starved into thinness to become severe.  (In fact, given the strong link between type 2 diabetes and being fat, and diabetes and gastroparesis, it’s probably quite common among fat people.)  What I was told by a doctor was that even though I was still technically “overweight”, the way that I was losing weight from gastroparesis guaranteed that I was losing muscle, including possibly heart muscle, which could be deadly.  So they did not want me losing weight this way, and did everything they could to help me gain a little weight and then stabilize.  That’s how responsible medicine is practiced.

I just was not going to include that information on a previous ask, because I don’t hand out free information to people who clearly just want to poke fun at me for being fat, hairy, and unfeminine.

I do think it’s important for fat people to know that they can get this condition, and for people who treat this condition to know that fat people can get it.  In fact, in some instances gastroparesis causes weight gain, because the restriction of calories causes your body to try and hang onto every extra calorie.  So after an initial weight loss, you suddenly gain a whole lot of weight.  So for some people, weight gain is actually a symptom of gastroparesis.  I haven’t had that happen yet, although now that I’m on steroids for adrenal insufficiency, it’s possible that I’ll gain weight again.  Because it’s possible the adrenal insufficiency is part of the reason for the weight loss, and dexamethasone has been known to cause weight gain.

People who see me in person never say all this bullcrap about how fat I am.  They always tell me that it’s astounding how much weight I’ve lost (it really is, few of my clothes even fit now), and want to know why.  Many of them are extremely worried.  A few annoying ones “compliment” me on how “good” I look, or even tell me they wish they could be sick so they could lose as much weight as I have.  (I wish they could be sick for a day so they’d take back that statement.)  So this idea that I’ve stayed the same weight is purely an Internet fiction cooked up by bullies with nothing better to do with their time.  In the real world, both laypeople and medical people have seen an extreme amount of involuntary weight loss and are highly concerned and troubled by it.  So far I seem to have stabilized at 178-183 pounds, and I would be happy staying at this weight forever.

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