Parenting

New Mom Says Doctor Brushed Her off & Just Prescribed 'Weight Loss' -- When She Actually Has Cancer

ParentingPublished Aug 20, 2019
By Genny Glassman
Jen CurranGoFundMe

There can be nothing more infuriating to hear than the cause of your health concern being simply your weight, but again and again women who are in pain are told their weight is most likely the problem. One mom recently shared an example of how dangerous it can be if you don't believe your doctor is listening and taking your concerns seriously, insisting that the only way you'll get better is through weight loss. Jen Curran from Tarzana, California, decided to take her health into her own hands, and in a thread on Twitter, she explained why it was so important that she got a second opinion.

Curran wrote that her trouble started when her doctor found protein in her urine after she gave birth.

The 38-year-old new mom explained on Twitter that she and her husband had just welcomed their first baby girl, named Rose. "We‘re over the moon," the mom wrote.

But her pregnancy had its share of complications. "At the end of my 2nd trimester they found high protein in my urine and I was diagnosed with preeclampsia," she continued. Curran was placed on bedrest for three months and things stabilized for the rest of her pregnancy. But after she gave birth, the protein in her urine remained.

"My OB was unusually worried about the protein in my urine. It was too high to match up with my other preeclampsia symptoms," she wrote.

Her doctor insisted that she go to a kidney doctor, but Curran had no idea what to expect.

Curran admitted that she never asked for a referral for a kidney doctor -- she merely chose the closest doctor covered by her insurance. "When I met with the kidney doctor, the protein was higher than it had been in pregnancy even though we were a few months out. Not a good sign," she continued. She explained that protein in your urine can "irreparably damage your kidneys and it usually indicates something more serious is going on."

But her doctor told her it was normal for it to take up to a year for "things to return to normal after pregnancy."

"I didn’t like that answer. It didn’t seem typical for my body," the mom recalled.

But then her doctor dropped a bomb -- could the new mom try to lose weight?

Her doctor only recommended diet and exercise and advised that “If it comes from a box it’s not good.” She was sure that if Curran lost weight, the protein would go away, and she asked her to come back in four months.

"I wanted to believe her but it didn’t feel right to me," Curran wrote. "Plus she was almost, like, talking past me. Asked me a question about breastfeeding and literally didn’t listen to the answer. Responded as though I said the exact opposite of what I‘d said. Not listening. Not present."

The mom added that she had already lost more than 110 pounds in her early 20s, but as she's grown older, she's become more dubious of diet culture. "Even though part of me wanted to jump head first into that doctor’s weight loss prescription, I knew in my gut something else was wrong," she wrote.

So the mom decided to get a second opinion and learned that she had bone marrow cancer-- a problem that weight lose couldn't correct.

"No other tests came back abnormal," she continued. "They barely found it. If I hadn’t had the baby, they wouldn’t have found it until it was possibly way too late."

She added that by the time her follow-up appointment with her first kidney doctors rolls around, she'll already be "weeks into chemo."

"Here’s the moral of this particular story," she concluded. "Lose weight if you want to. But if you think something is seriously wrong with your body, and a doctor tells you weight loss is the key to fixing it, get a godd-mn second opinion."

The mom also shared a GoFundMe page where her friends are helping raise money for her treatment.

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