For decades, my mother-in-law had been a bit rounder than most women - mostly genetic, as many women in her family have been that way historically, and been perfectly healthy - but was experiencing a strange, seemingly randomly-occurring symptom of blood in her urine from time to time.
Doctor after doctor would look for the cause, but most fell back on some variation of her being overweight. Meanwhile, she continued steadily gaining weight, year after year, even though she ate less and less.
At the beginning of Thanksgiving week 2010, she went in for a checkup with her new primary care physician. They went over various things - like how tired and drained my mother-in-law felt, for a start - and as they were about to leave, the doctor had them drop off a blood sample, because she had a hunch and wanted to check something (creatinine levels, in case anyone is curious).
When they got home from the visit, the phone was ringing. It was the doctor.
“Good news! I know what your problem is. Bad news, your kidneys are failing. Go to the hospital now.”
Her kidneys had dropped below 10% function, the minimum for healthy living. It turned out, after extensive testing and a lucky incident, that she’d been having small, minor kidney infections for decades, which had been slowly chipping away at her kidney function - hence the ‘random’ blood in her urine.
Doctors had mostly just told her to lose weight and get more fit - when it reality, she was retaining water because her kidneys were slowly failing. She was otherwise completely asymptomatic for kidney failure.
The first week of dialysis, they extracted fifty pounds of water from her. It was agony to go through, but she felt amazingly better after that (wonder of wonders, a working faux-kidney, and she felt better? gasp).
But the fat-shaming didn’t stop there. Later, once we’d determined I could give her a kidney, her assigned transplant doctor’s first statement upon entering the room (she’d been previously instructed to lose weight to a certain point, to make the surgery safer, which she’d actually been doing just fine, if a tad slowly) was, “Your problem is portion control.”
At that point in time, she was eating no more than 800-1000 calories per day, and feeling full from that, but he didn’t believe that she was being truthful, and for the duration of the time she had to interact with him, he continually insisted she was eating too much. (She still eats less than everyone else in the house, and she’s the only one ‘classically’ overweight, though much less so than before the transplant).
By the time of the transplant, she was down to only 3% kidney function, despite dialysis six nights a week. Had this not been caught when it was, we probably would have lost her by then.
Thankfully, since giving her one of my kidneys, she’s been able to maintain a healthy weight and be more active, though she will always remain ‘rounder’ because of her genetics.
For years, doctors assumed all her problems were because she was overweight when, in fact, her being as overweight as she had been was a symptom of an underlying problem.
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