My best friend might be dying because she’s a fat woman. For over 15 years I’ve watched doctors tell her that her problem is that she needs to lose weight, prescribe weight loss plans, send her to eating clinics, suggest surgery as a solution to her horrific periods that last for months, massive fibroids (I’m talking 12 x 6 inch clots here ladies), fainting, breathing trouble and chest pains, constant body and joint pain, anemia. The last five years she’s barely even been able to leave the house and blacks out walking to the bathroom and it still wasn’t an issue, and all her fault for being fat.

Turns out that iron deficiency was damaging her heart. Those clots were a symptom of another problem. The pain, the breathing issues, all of it would have existed whether she was fat or thin because she has fucking cancer that has likely metastasized to her lungs. No one checked, no one considered any other options until one er doctor was horrified to see her history of iron transfusions and hadn’t checked her heart health , which led to further testing of the non-fat-lady variety.

It’s bad guys. It’s a bad cancer, rare, and has had decades to grow, because she’s a dramatic, emotional, paranoid female who’s fat.

I guarantee any fat man in the world can walk into an ER with chest pains, and they’d check his heart, not put him on a diet.

Please don’t put this on the er, as you pointed out she made it for years with these symptoms. The sad truth is that unless it’s causing a true emergency cancer is a slow killer that a primary care doctor should find and manage. If an obese woman over 30 is checking into the ER she is absolutely getting her heart checked for emergencies - eg heart attack. Unless it’s causing hypoxia, fluid overload heart failure is managed out patient.