Thin privilege is not having doctors always saying the solution to anything is to lose weight. My mother has pulmonary hypertension, which means the right side of her heart is expanded from stress (I think). She also has sleep apnea, which is when you periodically stop breathing during the night. When she used to go to doctors frequently to try and figure out what was wrong, they would always tell her to lose weight. What they failed to understand was that she couldn’t. She tired far more easily than she should have, and she later found out that, for people with pulmonary hypertension, it could be downright dangerous if they overworked themselves too much.

But no, before they found out what it was, she always heard the exact same thing: lose weight. She told me a few times it made her feel like crying when they said that, because she literally could not exercise. At that point, she could hardly walk from to door to the car, which is no more than 20 yards at the very most. There was no way she was going to go on walks or runs or work out.

I will mention, doctors are told ‘When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.’ This means that when you find symptoms of something, think of the common disease/condition first, instead of the uncommon ones. It’s not a good thing, however, when they automatically assumed my mother’s issue was her weight.

I believe they only had anything happen that found out it was her heart giving her a problem when she had to be hospitalized because of pneumonia. We had to call an ambulance so they could use some equipment to get her down the stairs, because her heart problems and pneumonia combined are that debilitating. She couldn’t walk down the stairs and to the car so she could be taken to the hospital. But I digress.