I went to a doctor’s visit after nearly a year of not having a primary care doctor. They required we call on the 1st of each month to get one and if you called in too late, you didn’t get one. That idiocy aside… I was assigned a random guy that they couldn’t tell me anything about other than he was “available”. I had tried to ask for someone that specialized in eating disorders and severe asthma issues but that wasn’t something they took into consideration.

So I get an appointment (nearly 3 months later because they were “booked” until then) and I get to the office. The last office I had would be sensitive to the fact that my eating disorder is triggered by knowing my own weight and only makes it worse. (You see, I have been “trained” so well about calories that I actually eat far less calories than I am supposed to, so my body is in starvation mode constantly and I gain weight from everything I do - or do not - eat. I’ve been dieting since I was a 12 year old child and nothing has ever truly worked for me despite me doing them down to the very T every time. At this point I throw away most of my food, convince myself it tastes strange and don’t eat it, or give it to the dog instead. Whatever I can do to not eat what’s on my plate, basically.) Anyway, the nurse required me to stand on the scale, did it twice “just to make sure” and then made me look at the weight and read it outloud so that everyone around could hear it.



As if that wasn’t enough, once I was in the room, I waited nearly forty minutes for the doctor. Once he came to get my chart (outside the door which was ajar) he picked it up and said “oh holy shit”. The only thing on the chart was my name, my date of birth, my ID number, and my weight and height. Even with that, I plunged ahead and when he came in, I asked him about my severe back pain (come to find it out nearly 2 years later now, I have a birth defect in my spine that causes the pain), my asthma, and for help with my eating disorder. He told me he could “only help with one” and I “needed to choose” which one. I explained I was low on money and even if I could get referrals for the others, it’d be fine. But he said no, choose. I chose my asthma meds because I needed them to basically function at all. But, in the end, he basically told me, “you know if you’d just lose weight, you could get rid of the asthma and the back pain,” before I left.

1. My asthma is actually due to being born prematurely. I have malformed lungs and severe allergies as well that set off asthma attacks. When I was a child and underweight, I still had asthma. When I was a baby, I had asthma. It’s not “going away” and 2. as I explained above, my back pain is related to a birth defect in my spine… again, not going away with weight, but he did nothing to see to that either because it’s just assumed if you’re fat, that’s the reason for all problems. But it’s a catch-22. No one will help you with getting over your eating disorders either.