At the pediatrician

Doctors and the medical world play a huge part in your life as you deal with chronic illnesses, and any illness. This is an important lesson to learn for you and for any caregiver who may be assisting you.

As a child, my pediatrician spent a great deal of time telling me and my mother that all my problems were based around the fact that I was overweight starting from the time I was 5 years old. As a female this continued to be a problem for most of my life, even after my autoimmune diagnoses.

As a child and a teenager, every time I went to the doctor for anything I was told that I was fat or obese, and never really felt like I got help for anything other than an earache or strep throat, which were chronic (and not always addressed.) I grew up with severe allergies, asthma, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hyperflexible). Many of these problems and too many others were ignored because of my weight throughout my childhood. The major symptoms of my autoimmune diseases started when I was still a teenager and were never addressed because of this problem.

It wasn’t until I lost over half of my body weight as an adult that doctors started to look at me like there may be something causing some of my problems outside of my weight. My weight didn’t cause any of the classic problems caused by obesity, like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, snoring, excessive sweating, etc. I didn’t have many of these issues until I lost all my excess weight, and that was after I was diagnosed with, lupus, hypothyroidism caused by Hashimoto’s diseases, and a variety of other autoimmune diseases.