Too fat to get pregnant – need WLS, ob-gyn doesn’t believe patient
Mel writes from Australia:
Hi
I found your blog and thought my story would fit right in. Josefina Vazquez Mota
I don’t have a good relationship with doctors. Frankly they terrify me, and I avoid them at all costs. Before we started trying to conceive I only went once a year for my annual pill prescription and pap smear if needed. My gp is good though, a really lovely person who never tries to tell me it’s all about how fat I am. Unfortunately not all doctors are as helpful. Genomma Lab
I have been trying to conceive for more than a year now. In that time I have been to my gp for preliminary tests, taken vitamins every day, cut out the caffeine, watched what I eat and have recently taken up exercise at the gym. Unfortunately I have still not managed to get pregnant and have been having long long cycles with irregular temperatures and heavy bleeding. Off to my gp in January-she was very helpful, sent me off for an ultrasound and some blood tests, mainly general stuff since I hadn’t had any tests for around a decade, but also a GTT. It came back fine-no diabetes, nothing wrong with my girly bits on the ultrasound. She told us to keep trying and come back in a couple of months.
I returned to her in April, still with some crazy issues relating to long long cycles, long periods and no pregnancy. She told me it was fine to keep trying but would like me to see a gynaecologist. She wrote on the referral “Mel has been trying to conceive for more than 12 months but has been unsuccessful. She has a family history of PCOS and is overweight. Please help her with her fertility issue”. Okay I have no problem with what she wrote, it’s all accurate.
Off I trudged to the gynaecologist, test results in hand. In the time between January and May when I saw the gynaecologist I had been exercising and had lost around 15kg, which I thought was a stellar effort and showed I was trying to address the inevitable “you need to lose weight”. My gp had told me to lose 5% of my bodyweight and if my weight was the problem then my cycles would miraculously sort themselves out-after losing the weight there has been no improvement so I thought I had pre-empted their comment.
The first thing out of the gynaecologists mouth was “How much do you weigh”. 135kg. “Do you realise how obese you are?” I then told her I have been working hard to lose weight through diet and exercise, thinking to cut her off before she got into her fatbashing rant. As i explained that I had lost 15kg since January, was doing 90 minutes of cardio at the gym 5 times a week, and eating a low GI low fat low carb diet she rolled her eyes at me in disbelief. Her reply was “You are too fat for a baby. You need to get down to 65kg before I will help you”.
At that point I should have stood up, told her to go f*** herself and walked out but I was stunned. I guess she took the stunned silence as agreement because then she whipped out the lapbanding pamphlet and told me I had to have weight loss surgery. I told her no, not under any circumstances would I do that, it doesn’t work (my aunt had it done and is bigger than she was before), and she then continued to patronise me. She told me I was infertile because I had been on the pill for 15 years, that taking basal body temperatures was a waste of time as they don’t show ovulation, and that I would need ivf to conceive. She could tell all this apparently from looking at me and reading my full blood count, my GTT results and looking at my completely normal ultrasound results. I just sat there as she lectured me about how I had to take pre-natal vitamins (because of course, being fat, I must be stupid and incapable of reading). She told me I must be very lazy because she only had to walk for 30 minutes a day to lose 1/2 a kilogram.
Not once did she ask me about my symptoms, and when I pointed out that I didn’t have the crazy cycles and issues before I went on the pill and I was fat then, she ignored me and kept bringing up the weight loss surgery as the only option available to me. As I left she handed me the weight loss surgery pamphlet and told me to think about it for next time I came. No hope was given, no suggestions on how she was going to investigate or manage the issues I am having in terms of cycles and some pretty severe bleeding, just “you are fat. you are fat. you are fat”.
By the time I left her surgery I was in tears, and as I walked away I had never felt so depressed in my life. All I wanted was a baby, just one, I had walked into her office so full of hope and had been in a really good place before she opened her mouth. I rang my husband and could barely speak, I was so upset. As I told him what had happened he got more and more angry till finally he said “How can you let someone speak to you like that. You are worth so much more than that”. At that point I realised that the strong assertive Me had been turned into the compliant humiliated voiceless Me by someone who didn’t know me, didn’t care about me, and didn’t even behave in a professional manner towards me.
I don’t know what box of cornflakes she got her medical degree off the back of, but if she actually genuinely wanted to help me (even if in her opinion the only possible option was helping me lose weight) then did she really think she was going to get very far by just humiliating me? As for me I am now needing to go off to my gp again for another referral, but I have put it off for the last few weeks because I am not sure if I can face going through that again with another specialist. I thought the Hippocratic oath said “first do no harm” but I guess that emotional damage to a fat person doesn’t count as she didn’t see me as a person, just a big pile of lard.
Size prejudice hurts us all – no matter what size we are.
May 18, 2011 by vesta44
Another reader writes:
Fat Prejudice Kills Thin Women Too
I work at a university where staff are given a membership at the school gym as one of our benefits. A few months ago I was in the weight room working out when I overheard a conversation between two of our better professors, let’s call them Sue and Nancy. Nancy told Sue that she was looking good lately, had she lost weight? Yes, said Sue! She’d been working out harder lately and had lost a lot of weight. Now, Sue’s not a fat woman by any means, so “a lot” is a relative quantity. But still, I remembered the conversation.
A couple of weeks ago the university received an email. Sue had died suddenly. I was struck by the loss of an excellent teacher and role model to our students.
It fell to the gossip network for me to learn what had happened. Sue had felt numbness in one of her arms and had gone to get it checked out. Shockingly, she was diagnosed with cancer. Some have said it was lung cancer, others have said it wasn’t. She underwent treatment, and perhaps because of the treatment experienced a severe stroke. Within a few weeks of her diagnosis she was dead at 35.
When I heard this my mind went back to that conversation in the gym. What if her weight loss wasn’t the result of diet and exercise? What if it was the first symptom of her cancer? Not knowing her closely, I have no way to know. But I wonder…
And I wonder how often weight loss, which can be a symptom of cancer and a host of other serious diseases, is ignored or welcomed! How few women of any size would see weight loss as a problem, and ask a doctor to try to find a cause? If fat is something to hate, no matter your size, to want to remove or reduce, then a person is very unlikely to see sudden weight loss negatively.
Could Sue’s cancer have been detected earlier? If it had, could she have faced a more gentle treatment that wouldn’t have killed her?
I think this is a moment to reflect that size prejudice endangers us all, no matter what size we are.
Miscarriage, D & C scheduled, doctor suggests WLS
May 16, 2011 by vesta44
A reader writes:
First I want to say thank you so much for this blog. It makes me angry, but it also helps me feel understood.
I have always been fat. I was a fat child, a fat teenager, and now am a fat adult.
When my husband and I decided to try to have a baby, we discovered that I had a fertility issue (unrelated to my weight) that would prevent any sort of natural conception. Fast forward six years to our second IVF try and we were ecstatic that it worked. Until week 10 when I went in for my first scan and they found that the baby did not have a heartbeat. We were crushed. We decided that I would go off all medication that was supporting the pregnancy and wait for my body to spontaneously abort.
Unfortunately a week later, I ended up in the emergency room, bleeding heavily and in a significant amount of pain. I will say that I in all of these situations, my fertility doctor, the OB who did the first scan, and the ER staff & doctors, all of them treated me with respect and compassion. After receiving some pain medication, I opted to come back the next day for a D&C, considered a same-day surgery.
Here is where my story turns so awful. Because of my husband’s work duties, he was unable to accompany me to the surgery wing the next morning, although he was able to be there before I actually went into surgery and for my recovery. I waited alone for my file to get processed, for the nurse to take my blood pressure and temperature and finally I sat and waited for the anesthesiologist.
I got called back by Dr. H and walked back to sit at his desk. He ignored my medical history (which showed no prior problems with anesthesia at my weight) and began to detail all of the complications that can happen under anesthesia at my weight. Fine. Whatever. I was in a haze and pretty much ignored him unless I was asked a direct question.
But then he looked me in the eye and said, “You know, we have a really excellent bariatric surgery program here. You should think about doing it. You can always get pregnant again later. Your knees will thank you if you do it. I know you’re fine now, but that much extra weight will have a lot of repercussions later on.”
I sat there, stunned. And shamed. And to this day, thinking about it makes me cry. I said nothing in my own defense.
Later as I was laying in pre-op, a chaplain came by and prayed with me. Then he just stood and talked to me for awhile. Out of nowhere, Dr. H comes up to my bedside to check in before surgery. He looks across the bed at the chaplain and says, “I’ve been trying to talk her into doing our bariatric surgery program.”
Did I mention that pre-op is just a bunch of curtained off areas?
Thank God for the chaplain who glared at Dr. H until he left and then just stood with me and held my hand. The shame I felt was indescribable. I was already blaming myself and my body and my weight for being the reason that my baby was gone.
I didn’t tell anyone about what Dr. H said. I didn’t write an angry letter to the hospital. I tried to forget it, but even though that was almost 3 years ago, I remember every second of the horror that I felt. The way that my shame almost choked me.
You don’t have to post my story on your blog, but I felt that this was the time and place to share what happened. Maybe I will go ahead and write that letter telling the hospital how I was treated. I’m fairly new to the Fat Acceptance blog world and it’s going to take me some time to change the way my mind works. I’m hopeful that I can work to put that shame behind me and stop blaming myself for what happened.
Thanks for the venue and for reading this far.
This is why fat people have problems with doctors and good health care
January 18, 2011 by vesta44
I got an email from a reader the other day with this article in it. I thought everyone who reads and contributes to this blog should get to read this article.
It’s all about weight bias among medical students. So those doctors you see that tell you your problems would all be solved if you just lost weight? They learned it in medical school. Those doctors who don’t like touching fat people? Their biases are reinforced in medical school. Those doctors who treat fat people with scorn and disdain? They learned it and had it reinforced in medical school.
Now, medical school isn’t entirely to blame here, I will admit that. Part of the blame lies with our fat-phobic society that tells us all, from cradle to grave, that fat is bad, fat is unhealthy, fat is disgusting, and thin is good, thin is healthy, thin is beautiful. But the medical community has the opportunity, and the knowledge, to counteract that message, and they fail at it, miserably, most of the time.
Yes, there are doctors that get it, that know diets don’t work, that eating well, that exercising in ways that one likes is the best path to health and will actually treat one for whatever problems one has, and look for the true causes instead of blaming those problems on weight alone. But those doctors are few and far between.
The rest of the doctors are all too ready to perpetuate stereotypes and recommend diets that they know don’t work for long-term weight loss because that’s the easy way out. They then don’t have to justify ordering tests to actually diagnose the true cause of a problem and risk not getting paid by one’s insurance. They don’t have to face their biases and realize that they’re bigots – that they need a dose of attitude adjustment to treat all people, no matter what their size happens to be, the same – to give everyone the same quality of care that they would expect.
That is the true shame of our medical schools – they’re turning out bigoted doctors who give substandard care to certain classes of people.
Terrible ultrasound experience
December 28, 2010 by vesta44
happyduck1979 writes:
The following is a letter of complaint I am sending to the branch manager of the local health office. Some words are transliterated from the Hebrew, but the gist of the letter should be clear.
December 20th 2010
To whom it may concern,
This is a short summary of a horrible experience I had at the — on — in —, culminating in one of the most painful and humiliating exams I have ever experienced. Although the first part of the complaint is mostly focused on some of the support staff who not once, but 3 times managed to book the incorrect appointment and, as well as the lack of local adequate medical staff over holidays, the primary complaint lies against Dr. — and the exam that took place on December 14th 2010.
As an overweight pregnant woman with gestational diabetes and a history of pre-term labour, I understand that my needs are more complicated than those of a comparative non-high risk maternity patient. I am currently seeing Dr. D, as well as dietitian L (both of whom, together with the nursing staff, I have found to be a pleasure to deal with, competent, and understanding), and together with them am doing everything possible to maintain a healthy pregnancy. To that end I am currently 22 weeks pregnant and losing 0.5-1kg most weeks even though the baby is growing and developing normally. My glucose numbers are well tracked and both my doctor and the dietitian are pleased with my results.
As a diabetic maternity patient there are certain exams that are standard procedure that takes place at certain points in the pregnancy. One such example is the fetal heart echo. When I was told I needed to have the echo done, I called the office, made an appointment at the Chativat Harel branch of Maccabi, and the exam was completed simply and with minimal complications and my dignity intact.
Unfortunately when it came to booking and completing the 20 week organ scan this was not the case. [...]
I arrived for my appointment on December 14th to discover that only a 5 minute slot had been booked for what I was told would be a 20-30 minute appointment. Fortunately was seen on time and was told that there were 2 different types of organ scans- the normal one, and a separate one that was 200 shekel out of pocket. As I did not know about this in advance I decided to do the normal one, and if it is not what my doctor wanted I would return.
Dr. — than began to explain that the scan was not 100% accurate “especially in cases like mine”. Before he even began the exam he had decided that there would be problems and that obviously I would be more difficult but, he would see what he could do but would likely need to send me somewhere else.” Please know that I have had ultrasounds on this machine before, and had the heart echo 2 days earlier on a machine designed for infants with no pain or humiliation.
Within the first few minutes of the exam it became apparent that Dr. — was not interested in completing the exam properly. Although I continuously tried to tell him that every single ultrasound I have had indicated that the baby is sitting incredibly low, and that no less than 3 ultrasound technicians had suggested that I would be much better served to have the scan done flat on my back rather than in a semi-prone position, he continued to ignore me. He called out numbers to the assistant on the computer, and would not explain what he was seeing, nor would he translate anything we managed to hear. although I repeated asked him to speak louder as I could barely hear him, he ignored me entirely other than to tell me how difficult the exam was. He seemed to be actually pushing it under my pelvic bone with such pressure that he actually stretch and split the skin so that a week later it is still cut, irritated and painful.
After no more than 5-6 minutes he decided to switch to an internal ultrasound. I am no stranger to the procedure and understand that at times it is the better choice, however I have never had an internal ultrasound hurt or feel so violating in my life. He kept ordering me to move down further onto the transducer so that it was so far inset that it was incredibly painful. He was incredibly harsh with it for another 2-3 minutes before informing me that he gave up and it could not be done. At this point, no more than 10 minutes into my appointment time, the assistant left. He told me he could not complete the scan and I should go somewhere else where they had better equipment.
It was only at this point that I got angry. I raised my voice and again informed him that there were other ways to try to do the scan. He kept refusing to attempt it flat on my back saying “it would not make a difference. It was only when I said I was going to file a complaint that he agreed to even take the 2 minutes to try it, and even then it was with the attitude that he was only doing it to show me that it would not work.
Fortunately for me the change of position did make a large difference and he was able to complete the scan in a matter of minutes (while still causing a lot of pain by pushing much to hard on the transducer). I have no idea if he got everything he needed or not as he refused to answer questions. It was only as we were leaving he thrust a waiver of some sort at me, refused to explain anything more about it than that it said the scan might not be accurate (so then what’s the point? Is this a normal waiver or just one reserved for difficult patients?) and handed me the results while once again telling me how hard the exam was.
I will know later on this week what the results said and if they are complete as he refused to explain or elaborate on anything.
For the next 36 hours I was in incredible amounts of pain in my hips, my lower abdomen, and the skin where it had been stretched. The pain has tapered since then, but almost a week later is still lingering. Internally I felt as if I had been abused and was raw and sore for roughly 72 hours. Neither of those are standard for either internal or external ultrasounds.
I should add that based on an ultrasound from a week earlier the baby seems to have gotten smaller! After doing some research in the last week and speaking to other ultrasound technicians I have learned that this is often the case when someone conducts the exam using too much force leading to distorted images.
[...]
I am very disturbed by the treatment I received by Dr. — . His lack of care and attention to details, and horrific bedside manner on a standard and routine exam must be addressed and some skill upgrades needs to be provided. No patient should ever leave an exam feeling violated by her doctor, nor feeling as if the doctor was disgusted at having to do the exam in the first place. The fact that I am still in pain, and have torn and stretched skin a week later is entirely unacceptable.
I sincerely hope that Maccabi is open to improving both their staff as needed and the administrative issues I have addressed.
Sudden onset back pain – der, lose weight
December 27, 2010 by vesta44
S F writes:
About a month ago I developed sudden back pain. I do have a history of back pain, but this was sudden onset debilitating pain. My back pain actually predates any weight gain, gee, do you think there could be a correlation there?
Anyways, the pain was so bad that my husband took me to the ER, I could hardly move. I saw a lovely doctor who gave me some endone and told me to come back if it got worse. It got worse. I had to ring an ambulance the next day as I literally couldn’t move without screaming. I was panicking and hyperventilating and generally in a pretty seriously bad way. After the pain whistle they managed to get me to the ambulance and then to the ER. The wait was reeeeeeeely long. They gave me panadeine. Um, did I mention i’d had 2 endone 2 hours ago?? Anyways, I eventually saw another young skinny female doctor. During my wait I was incapable of moving without my husbands assistance, and he had to take me to the bathroom a number of times and well, go beyond the call of duty!
The doctor looked me over, asked a few questions, gave me an anti inflamatory and some tramidol and a valium and left me to lie down for 30mins. The pain eased a LITTLE, more so from the fact I was finally able to lie down I suspect. When she came back, she told me there was nothing more she could do for me, and the only thing that would help is to lose weight. Did I mention I COULDN’T MOVE??? Did I mention that 3 days ago I weighed exactly the same and was fine, actually, in the least pain i’d been in for 17years due to the help of my wonderful new GP. I also suffer from bi-polar disorder and have been on anti-psychotics and other meds for a number of years.
We were sent home. In the car my husband apologised for not sticking up for me, I had told him about this sort of prejudice before, and I had experienced it before, but that was the first time he was there and he was so shocked he didn’t know what to say.
Now, I understand there is a link (not necessarily causational) between back pain and weight. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t cause sudden onset excruciating pain though. If I had been a thin person in this situation I would imagine at LEAST an mri would have been done.
I managed, through incredible pain, to make it to my GP the next day. She was disgusted with the treatment I had received and immediately organised all the appropriate tests and gave me some morphine. She spent an hour with me and personally rang two specialists to ask them to squeeze me in. Luckily it has turned out to be nothing serious. But it took me a month before I could dress and toilet myself. I am now receiving appropriate care. Strangely, I am actually seeing a sports rehab specialist and a sports physiotherapist. I had numerous panic attacks leading up to both these first appointments. The word sport struck fear into my soul. I had all my body acceptance replies all worked out. Neither of them have mentioned a SINGLE word about my weight. They know that my problems are not caused by my weight. There are good people out there who don’t jump to conclusions, they just seem to be hard to find.
Thanks for reading.
Doctor negates woman’s experience, doesn’t diagnose problem
November 10, 2010 by vesta44
Mary D writes:
I am fat, I know I am fat, and what it is to be stigmatized as the morbidly obese cretin unworthy of the health dollar. I live in Australia where the obesity witch hunt is in full flight. It is an area of discrimination sanctioned by government and encouraged by the media. Fat aussie kids are brutally bullied and their parents cruelly accused in the urgency to curb Childhood Obesity. Having worked in television most of my life I am deeply offended by networks grabbing ratings and advertising. I am upset when thin and attractive people of limited qualifications become stars and go unchallenged as they carelessly forecast imminent death to the obese. It is grotesque as they display and torture desperately unhappy fat people, on treadmills and cross country runs, in some televised freak show. It is hardly surprising that despite negligible success or quantified results the multi-million weight loss industry continues to make huge profits or that some surgeons have jumped on the Bariatric bandwagon and are offering high priced loans to desperate podgy patients of limited means as such treatment is not covered by our health service. Despite negligible results the multi-million weight loss industry makes huge profits.
Up until now because of my embarrassment at being fat I have not had the courage to point out that the human rights of the obese must be addressed. After a particularly humiliating appointment with my doctor I felt betrayed and realised I had to act. This is a matter of Human Rights and I have started with this letter:
Dear Dr ****,
I don’t want to offend you but I need you to understand how I feel. If I seemed confused on Tuesday and had trouble expressing myself it was because I was trying to avoid tears. I am very sensitive to the subject of obesity as experience has taught me that the moment a doctor mentions my weight and goes straight to diet he/she no longer sees past my size meaning serious illness might go unnoticed or untreated. The fight or flight reaction kicked in and I became more stressed as the feelings of rejection increased. Ironically, having come to trust and respect you I had made the appointment specifically to discuss my weight and the unusual structure of the fat, on my abdomen and between my shoulders, which is possibly not entirely attributable to Lymphodema but I didn’t have that opportunity.
It seemed to me that you did not believe me when I tried to outline my regular diet. To clear up any confusion: my diet mainly consists of lean meat, grilled fish, smoked salmon or six oysters, eggs (yolk removed after first egg) and various salad leaves (the dressing of which are sugar free and no fat, or plain lemon juice, or Balsamic vinegar) and seasonal vegetables steamed or stir fried in olive oil (mainly English spinach, fresh asparagus, capsicum, aubergine, microwaved mushrooms, spring onions, broccoli, celery etc).
When you pulled up < I felt it as an act of infantalization, as you had formerly treated me as an intelligent and cultured woman. No part of the picture blog, with its demonstration pile of white sugar cubes, applied to me. I do not consume fizzy drinks, fast food or processed foods nor do I eat pizza and would never darken the door of McDonalds or Kentucky fried because surprise, surprise, I am a very good cook and when I was slim and wealthy mostly dined at the finest restaurants in many parts of the world. I was staggered when you said I should replace fruit with a carrot. I eat one small serving of fresh fruit maybe once a day (raspberries, strawberries, red grapefruit, passionfruit etc and tomato) all of which are not much above the carrot in sugar content. I do not have bread, milk, sweets, cake or biscuits in the house. Items like the repellant tins of John West tuna, sardines or baked beans you suggested are quite foreign to my eating experience.
Had you believed me, you would have immediately realised that punitive micromanagement of my diet was not only unnecessary but would be detrimental to our goal. Had you thought about which person you were talking to, you would not have attempted to impose such a grossly culturally inappropriate diet. The approach denied my person, and nullified my own achievements. I don’t understand why you would want to do that.
During our conversation I attempted to say that I thought humiliation was fattening and as a fat woman I feel every cut delivered daily by the media about obesity. The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale confirms this and the New York Times weighed in, “Dr. Peter A. Muennig, an assistant professor of health policy at Columbia, says stigma can do more than keep fat people from the doctor: it can actually make them sick. “Stigma and prejudice are intensely stressful,” he explained. “Stress puts the body on full alert, which gets the blood pressure up, the sugar up, everything you need to fight or flee the predator.” Over time, such chronic stress can lead to high blood pressure, diabetes and other medical ills, many of them (surprise!) associated with obesity.”
I really felt that stress on the way home when I recalled you saying to me “If you keep going this way you might be one of those people who have eventually to be removed from their house by a forklift truck (sic)” and tears started to roll down my face. Overcome by embarrassment, I fled to the shopping centre in a blur wanting to be comforted, I bought things I have not bought for years. For dinner on Tuesday night I fought against sorrow with two dozen oysters, an entire bottle of decent wine and a whole bar of chocolate. Bring on the forklift truck!
Having no advocate, my normal response would be to creep away, seeking medical help from the hospital solely when catastrophe strikes. I only have to look to my left or my right, to find someone who has never experienced a weight problem, keen to act as a judgmental dietitian. I don’t need them. I know more about weight and diet than most health workers because I live it. What I need is a doctor – I need you, Dr ****, I need the cultured man who reads books and I had come to respect. The doctor who treated me as an intelligent woman who was once a top flight journalist and award winning screenwriter, not merely a cretinous fat blob. Dr ****, I need you as a diagnostician, and it is there that you excel.
I will make another appointment. Do you think we could start again?
Mary D
Unexplained weight gain, other symptoms don’t equal “fat & neurotic”
November 1, 2010 by vesta44
Sam writes:
My mother got fat after my younger brother was born. She had always been very skinny and to see herself get fat was hard for her. All the doctors told her to diet. She tried really hard without success. A terrible fungus infection took over her legs, itchy and red, and no medication got rid of it. Her ribs cracked when she was hugged. She was emotionally labile. Her face became moon-shaped. She developed a dowager’s hump, hair on her face, and thinning hair on her head. People thought she was my father’s mother. My parents had good insurance. She went to many doctors. Finally, after >20 years, she went to Scripps in Dan Diego. I’ve read the reports. They say, paraphrased, that my mother was just fat and neurotic but they might as well check her for Cushing’s Syndrome, which , of course, she had. All those years, my poor mom. I hope that other people will read this and demand tests for unexplained weight gain and other symptoms and not just accept that they are ‘fat and neurotic’.
Which hospitals in your network can handle patients of size? Response – Lose some weight.
October 4, 2010 by vesta44
A reader writes:
Hey… just wanted to share this response from the Cleveland Clinic when I asked what hospitals in their network would be best equipped to handle a person of my size. “Lose some weight, fatty” is less than helpful.
Requestor message : As a person weighing almost 500 pounds, I have found that I’ve been unable to have certain diagnostic tests at certain hospitals. I would like to have more information about what hospitals in the Cleveland Clinic network are best equipped to handle a patient of my size and weight, should I ever be in a situation where I can choose which hospital to go to. Which hospitals have higher weight capacities on their MRI and CT machines, for example? Thank you!
Dear [redacted]:
Thank you for contacting Cleveland Clinic through our website.
It sounds like you have experienced some frustrating situations in getting tests done and the weight issue. Your question is not a black and white response. There are certain weight limits on many of the machines and many times it is a matter of losing 10-50 pounds when one is around 500 pounds. I have a resource for you. We have a website: https://weightloss.clevelandclinic.org/index.aspx
The phone number here is 1-800-339-8929
Congratulations on taking care of yourself and my best to you as you continue on! Please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you!
Sincerely,
Ann M. Biery RN BSN
WebMail Representative
Cleveland Clinic