My Dad has always been big, he was 16 stone at 16, but he played Rugby so no one complained. However, when he left school and got various desk jobs he started to put on weight, until he was at around 22 stone (~300lbs) a few years back. At a routine doctors appointment he was asked to come back for some tests and was told he was at risk of giving himself diabetes. He was genuinely shocked by this and, realising he’d let things slide for too long, decided to sort his shit out.
He was referred to a nutritionist and started doing things right. He ate regular - and healthy - meals, started drinking wine instead of beer and took up walking (he regularly did about 5 km a day). He lost quite a bit of weight, but just couldn’t seem to get below 18 stone. He wasn’t overly worried about this however, as he knew that he was the healthiest he’d been in since his teenage years.
His doctors, however, disagreed. It seemed to be their personal goal to get him to be skinny. He repeatedly explained that he’d never been skinny, but they wouldn’t listen. This just made him really hate going to see the doctors and he grew more and more frustrated with - what he described as - a skinny woman in her 20’s telling him how if he just tried out this amazing new all veggie diet his life would magically improve over night. What bugged him most was that the doctors started intruding on other parts of his life as well. Though they were ostensibly just trying to help him get fit and prevent diabetes, they took an - again, as he described it - unhealthy interest in his cholesterol levels.
This hurt him a lot more than just refusing to let him stop at 18 stone, as he felt they were just out looking for things to fault him on. Again, he tried to explain that he was in his early 50’s, no one could rationally expect him to have the arteries of a 16 year, and again they seemed to think this would be a normal thing to find. They tried to get him to take medication for it, which he refused to do. Partly because that was something “old men” did, and he would have to do it for the rest of his life, and secondly because they were doing it based on tests from 3 months beforehand and wouldn’t allow him to try and cut it back “naturally”. He said he felt like he was constantly being talked down to because he was fat, and therefore obviously didn’t know what was good for him.
Eventually, after months of being brow beaten, he capitulated and started taking an asprin a day. You don’t know my Dad, he’s a stubborn bastard, so they must have really harassed him if he agreed to it. Anyways, a few months ago, I got a kind of panicked message from my Mum about Dad being in hospital. Turns out, he’d been admitted after having a 3 day nose bleed as a direct result of having to take an asprin a day. He had to spend a few days in hospital and undergo uncomfortable surgery in order to cauterise the burst blood vessels. Apparently, the admitting doctor got really, really angry when my Dad explained he was on an asprin a day, and went off on a rant about how bad an idea it was to put a 50 year old man on that kind of medication. I think this kind of cheered my Dad up more than anything anyone else said to him that whole week because, finally, he had a medical professional take his side.
This may not be a very interesting story, but I just wanted to get a FA story out there that’s based around a man for a change. Like, yeah, Men don’t get the same kind of societal pressure that women get to be attractive, but all the other stuff still exists over here too.Maaaajor frown face at the doctors. What are they playing at! D:
Wow, that is some horrid doctoring right there. Much love to your Dad.