When I was around 20, I had to be circumcised. Needless to say, this is a very painful procedure usually conducted under both general and regional anesthetic When they started the operation, I started wincing and my blood pressure shot up. When I came round, I was told by the surgeon that the penile block anesthetic hadn’t worked.

As I was recovering (i.e regaining consciousness and awareness), my blood pressure started to rise again. Within 20 seconds, I was screaming in pain and being held down so they could shove me full of morphine.

Before I got the morphine, though, I had to sit through a next lecture. My “blood pressure was a bit high” so I “needed to lose weight”, but this was a totally fine lecture to give because she “didn’t care how I looked”. Nothing to do with the fact one of the most sensitive parts of my body had been lopped off with a knife five minutes ago without a local anesthetic.

I also have a very rare neurological thing going on (around 30-40 of us in the UK). I understand my condition very very well, not just coz I’ve had to live with it for a decade but because I spent 5 years of University studying brains. So when the region’s only specialist neurologist for these conditions says “maybe if you lost some weight, it would help” or “you could obviously use more exercise, that would help too..” I know she’s speaking fucking bullshit. Weight has literally nothing to do with the condition at all (sometimes the fatigue it causes causes weight gain).

My condition (periodically) has some similarities with narcolepsy, like an inability to stay awake. “Well, it’s difficult to fall asleep if you’re jogging.. try jogging on the spot for 10 hours?”

The latest incident was today. I’ve had an unusual sensation of weakness and a mild pain constantly in my left side for about 3 weeks. Walk in; “you should lose weight; your blood pressure is a bit high”. It was 125/90. For me, this is the physiological equivalent of getting someone in pain out of bed at 3am, making them walk a mile on a painful leg then diagnosing them with hypertension; it’s just not valid.

I explain this every time and get practically laughed at. After all, I’m fat and NOTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD EVER could cause an apparently slight elevation in blood pressure that is “ABOUT TO KILL ME” than being fat, right? That’s not even going into the panic I start to feel about the imminent fat shaming whenever they reach for the magic fat-shame-validating toy.

And it’s only going to get worse; the government is trying to make “every encounter count” by making doctors and nurses weigh fat patients every time they see them and bully and shame them into weight loss.