The next post will return to the series about the daily experiences of my relatively recent medical scare and ensuing hospital stay. Believe me, I still have a lot to say about this subject. A lot a lot. Probably too much to say. A small part of why I have been dragging it out is because some of my red-hot opinions on what it is to be sick and hospitalized in these United States are honestly too incendiary to touch right now. Too soon to not just be one long and fury-filled:
And I say this as one who had a relatively “decent hospitalization experience”. For the most part I received excellent care, but I shudder to think what might have been if I did not have the privilege of a middle-aged white guy with some education and insight into my own care, a spouse who could be a buffer between bureaucracy and me, and a sister who knows the ins and outs of hospitals, especially ICUs. A sister who could both explain things to me and advocate on my behalf to doctors, nurses, and other professionals. Even with all of these advantages I still literally cried and screamed in overwrought frustration more than once. I literally AARRGGHHed! like a stock pirate in a schlocky community theatre production of Treasure Island.
Let me speak of only one of the reasons I was horribly exasperated during my stay. I still look back at my hospitalization with a mixture of true gratitude to the many healthcare professionals who literally saved my life, and with fury at some of the same people for their clear anti-fat bias and fatphobia when presented with the large body that I somehow continue to live in despite of how grievously rotund I am to them. Let me say straight up that the nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists, and various technicians that cared for me were either not fatphobic, or kept it to their bloody selves. Most of the literal dozens of doctors and med students that I met were at least temporarily blinded by my fat body and could not see the living patient within until I fucking forced them to. I did this with whatever will I could muster, using my perceived privilege, and my cold fury at their gross unprofessionalism to acknowledge me as a person and a patient despite their protestations. The only doctors that did not harangue me about my weight were the kidney specialists who actually got me back to mostly whole. Unfortunately, my medicine doctors/hospitalists/generalists received almost daily tongue lashings from me for their automatic and pro forma weight lectures. They acted as though I would be magically and retroactively unpoisoned by prescription medications if only I would follow a low-fat diet and exercise. Don’t even get me started on the shaky “science” behind the lipid hypothesis. I repeatedly had to remind them that I agreed with getting movement in my life and eating with nutrition and nourishment in mind, but that 95-98% of all diets fail utterly, and did they have one that they could suggest that had an even 10% success rate? That usually shut them up. My glower of righteous indignation might have helped as well. I know that they have been trained to trot out the old parable of the wonders of diet and exercise since their premed days, but some of them were young enough to make me feel that maybe, just maybe, my words could have some effect.
One of these baby doctors gave up on trying to tell me the good news about diet and exercise only to suggest bariatric surgery to me. I present a playlet entitled Jeremy Schools Dr. S Yet Again on Weight-Loss as Panacea:
DR. S—What about bariatric surgery?
JEREMY—I am a terrible candidate for bariatric surgery.
DR. S—You’re a great candidate for bariatric surgery, actually.
JEREMY—According to your criteria, yes, but trust me—I’m a poor candidate.
DR. S—Why is that?
JEREMY—Both of my sisters just had weight-loss surgery in the summer. I wish them nothing but the best, but they are both driven, successful women who will follow the very difficult protocols for living with bariatric surgery for life. Whereas I am an impulsive and weak-willed lifelong fuck-up on the eve of fifty-years-old who has a fraught relationship with food and who cannot abide feeling deprived ever. To go for the rest of my life without things like caffeine, carbonated drinks, fried foods, or alcohol of any kind is not something I could tolerate. Not at all.
DR. S—But you would receive counseling.
JEREMY—I have been in therapy most of my adult life and I still have a terrible relationship with food. As much as I hate being fat, and I do hate it because of how the world treats me for being this way, I cannot change it without taking drastic measures. Drastic measures that almost never work long term. I’m an actor, but I hate attention that is not on my own terms, and being fat makes me stand out in the wrong way and limits the roles that I am offered. I dream of being an average-sized guy that can just disappear in a crowd. I hate that every person begging for change calls me Big Man. I need to eat for nourishment and have regular movement in my life, but I categorically refuse weight loss in any form. I haven’t weighed myself in a couple of weeks, but I’ve inexplicably lost sixty to seventy pounds since the pandemic started. This is me considerably lighter! Doctor, I have been on so many diets that I lost count years ago. The first time I was on a diet I was nine-years-old. I became bulimic at ten. I almost asked my primary care doctor to prescribe me Ozempic. Believe me when I say that I am a terrible candidate for bariatric surgery.
DR. S—I see what you mean.
JEREMY—Dr. S, you are young, and I am begging you to learn to treat me and your current and future fat patients as sick people first and foremost and not just fat bodies taking up space in your hospital. Please see us as people who need your A-game at all times.
DR. S—Mr. Nichols, I’ll see you tomorrow.
THE END
With young Dr. S. and his colleagues I almost made myself hoarse repeating this mantra that I learned from Jennifer:
“Suppose I was in an average-sized body, how would you treat me with this same exact problem?”
Several times a day I wished that I had business cards printed with this question to hand out to my doctors, and extras for them to give to their colleagues.
If you think that I was overly dramatic and touchy about this, might I tell you about how fatphobia kills? About doctors that will not prescribe even an allergy pill to a fat patient until they lose fifty pounds. About doctors who utterly ignore the sufferings of their fat patients. About being given weight loss lectures when seeking treatment for an earache or strep throat. About how these maltreated patients then only go to the doctor when gravely ill. The way many doctors treat fat patients is nothing short of malpractice. Mind you, I am giving you a fat white man’s perspective, which is bad enough, but fatphobia is an absolute plague upon women, black, indigenous, and other people of color. Just some cursory googling will show you how shockingly bad fat BIPOC women are treated by the medical establishment of this country. It is utterly shameful. While you’re googling that, look at how fat people have been treated during this COVID-19 pandemic if you want to be disgusted and hopefully radicalized into fat acceptance and advocacy. The way fat folks (especially BIPOC ones) were treated should be considered criminal eugenics. You will learn about how fat people were denied potentially life-saving treatments because they were considered lost causes—lost causes with no research or clinical trials to back this assertion up. Just vibes. Ugly, deadly, eugenic vibes.
I’ve ranted enough today, but I want to leave with this one thought:
There is not one disease or syndrome that only fat people get. Not one.
Thin and average sized people die every minute from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, and other so-called “fat ailments”.
I accidentally forgot to cancel my Zoom Pro subscription after our Zoom party last month, so I’m thinking about having a winter holidays/end of the year party soon. I’m looking at next Friday, December 16th at 8:00pm CST (-6 GMT). I have to work until 6:00pm—oh yeah, I have a part-time job with a very famous/infamous/notorious national grocery chain that I will tell you more about soon.
Until then, y’all have a good weekend.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
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