When you leave your GP appointment suicidal, you know there’s something inherently broken with the system you’re entrusting your health and wellbeing to.

Dear Maggie—you don’t mind me calling you Maggie, do you? I know your title is technically Doctor, but considering our most recent face-to-face encounter and the fact you didn’t even know my name despite me having been your patient for years, and having it right there on a file in front of you, I think I’ve earned the right to call you Maggie.

Not to mention, you didn’t actually behave like a doctor, so I’m going to go right ahead and remove that title before I go back to thinking you have the right to give out medical advice to me. I’ve got some shit to say, and while I’m sure you won’t read it, I know there will be plenty of people in similar positions to myself, who will.

Yes, yes, while many of you reading will write this off as just another angry fat woman ranting on the internet at the quality of her (lack of) medical care, I’m still going to write this, because someone has to.

On January 31st 2023, after having an appointment with Margaret, I sat in my car for 90 minutes sobbing uncontrollably—such that I couldn’t drive, or breathe, or think about anything other than the fact that I dared to attempt to suck in oxygen allocated to the precious master race of skinny people.

Let’s rewind a smidge.

I called my doctor in January during the worst, most debilitating period of my entire life. As someone who got her first period when she was eleven years old, it’s fair to say that I’ve had some experience with the matter. So if it got bad enough for me to call someone to help me with something I’ve gone through for nearly 27 years, you know it was bad, bad.

Ladies, you know what I’m talking about: the bleeding through clothes and bedding at an alarming rate, clots so big you think organs are falling from your body, dizziness, weakness, cramps that feel like someone has a knife in your uterus… y’know, the usual.

Maggie brought me in for bloods, made an appointment to see her face-to-face around ten days later, once the bloods were due to be back. I’d love to say she was helpful, I’d love to say she was impartial, nonjudgmental, listened to a damn thing I said, or even offered suggestions on how to investigate my list of symptoms, but none of that happened. None. Of. It.

Instead, dear old Maggie sat me down and said: “Have you thought about losing some weight?”

I told her that yes, from the ripe old age of eleven years old, it’s almost all I’ve thought about. It’s a thought that consumes me damn near every second of every day. That every single bit of food I put into my body comes with such crippling feelings of guilt and shame that I’d almost give anything to think of something other than losing weight.

To this she told me I’d obviously been doing it wrong, that I clearly hadn’t tried the right way, and that despite my bloods not showing any indications, my pulse and BP being normal, that I was a high risk for diabetes and a list of other terrifying illnesses that are brought out to scare fat people into losing weight because they’re going to die.

Now, before anyone comes for me, I’m not saying I don’t need to lose weight, I’m not saying I’m not at higher risk of a slew of illnesses, and I’m not saying she was wrong.

But without asking so much as what I eat, how often I work out, or asking a single question about the changes in my weight, she diagnosed me as fat, needing to lose weight, and dropped me in the 1% of women in the world hitting premature menopause.

She also said if I wanted to have another child, I’d need to have one now, but that I was probably too big to carry a healthy pregnancy anyway. It’s in my file that it took 3 years to conceive my son through fertility treatments, she basically told me it’s too late to bother trying.

She printed out a graph with my weight from 2008 and my weight from 2023, you know those growth curve graphs that we get when we go to kids’ appointments? And she pointed to the graph. “You’ve gained 25kg since 2008. You really need to get it back down.”

No shit, Sherlock, thanks for that really helpful insight.

When I asked her if she had any ideas for how to do that, she told me to eat less and exercise, like it would somehow be a revelation to me. Like I’d never heard that before, or tried it. Well shit, why did no one tell me that before, Margaret? You’d think I might have tried it had I only known…

She ignored the fact I have PCOS.

She ignored the fact that I was healthier when I was on Metformin for PCOS/Insulin resistance in Texas.

She ignored my family history surrounding cervical cancer, the fact I have smear tests yearly (the norm here is every 3 years) and that my mother was adopted so we don’t know anything about her family history.

She ignored the fact my symptoms started post-having-Covid in 2022.

She ignored the fact that my mental health has been in the shitter and almost ALL of those 25kg have been gained since we were made move back here to NI in 2018 and my life took a sharp turn.

She ignored the fact I told her that despite my size I have a tendency to eat once or twice a day, and were it not for a series of alarms on my phone and some very supportive people around me reminding me to eat post-appointment, I’d have just stopped eating. Because Doctor Margaret told me it was the magic cure to being a lard ass so it must be true.

She wasn’t kind, empathetic, or open to listening to a single thing I had to say. Not one thing.

She judged and diagnosed my fat-chick appearance, told me I needed to lose weight, and when I asked if she wasn’t at least going to look inside my lady garden to make sure there’s not something sinister going on in there, she sighed and reluctantly sent a request in for an ultrasound.

I came out of that appointment broken and so deeply, deeply ashamed. I came out of that appointment having had over two decades of fat shaming and PTSD triggered. I came out of that appointment with zero NHS support, zero treatment plan, zero avenues for help, and worse than that, feeling as though I didn’t deserve them anyway. I came out of that appointment feeling like I’d wasted her time when the answer was so very clearly in front of everyone’s face: you’re a fat arse, just lose some weight and you’ll be fine.

Y’all, I feel bad enough about my size every goddamn day – especially post Covid years – without that sham of an appointment that I was forced to sit through. And before anyone tells me to go see another doctor in the practice, she’s not the first one I’ve been to with a medical issue, and the other doctor diagnosed me with the same condition a few years ago.

Diagnosis: Fatty.

I wish I could say I’m exaggerating, but when I fell into the front seat of my car a sobbing, snotty mess, all I wanted to do was hurt myself, all I wanted to do was not be here anymore. As someone who tried to commit suicide in my college years, I don’t tend to exaggerate or joke about mental health, so when I tell you I came out of that appointment not wanting to breathe anymore, I mean it.

Talking to her sent me into a mental health spiral, a crisis I was not equipped to deal with that left me on the phone with professionals talking me down from a really steep fucking ledge. I have an appointment with a new therapist this week to see if we can claw back some solid ground, but even eight days later, I can’t say my legs are all that steady. I haven’t spoken to many of my friends about it because every time I do, I just relive the whole embarrassing ordeal and go right back to: just go home and lose weight.

And ironically, those who don’t struggle with weight issues, or poor relationships with food, they won’t get it. To them I should just go lose weight and that would solve all my problems. To them she was just doing her job and telling me like it is, ‘tough love,’ or whatever.

As far as I’m concerned, I have one option left: I now have to go private, to call a doctor, pay them £150 and cry and plead with them to at least listen to me before they write me off as fat and unworthy of support and help. And pay for the luxury of being taken seriously as a fat person in a society that says I should be thin.

I’m also verging on asking for weight loss meds like I took in 2010 in Texas, and if I’m still a raging failure after that, I’m flirting with the idea of bariatric surgery. Why? Because I’m obviously not enough the way I am, right? I obviously need to be skinny and pretty to be listened to by healthcare professionals. And when I eventually get my surgery, and I’m finally skinny and worthy in the eyes of society and I still have medical issues, maybe then someone will listen to me, and dear ole Maggie will finally accept that Diagnosis: Fatty might be the easiest for her to write in her notes, but it sure as fuck isn’t always the right, or only, one.

I almost hate to say it but I miss my PCP Dr. Tiffany Albritton in Texas. She is a beautiful, tall, skinny blonde woman who couldn’t have been more different to me. She listened to me, treated me with kindness and respect, and always had suggestions and advice for me, and when she didn’t, she asked someone else. Yes, she came with a price tag and we were very lucky in that we had decent insurance, but she never once made me feel like I was the shit on her shoe.

I’m only here today but for the kindness and overwhelming support of people closest to me over the past eight days. Notably, two of my friends Tracie and Erika. I trusted my doctor with my wellbeing and came out of her office wanting to hurt myself. Were it not for my friends and some helplines, I would have, too.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be over here binge-eating 25 cheese burgers before the ultrasound of my hooha because that’s what us fatties must do with our time, right?

I’m not even sure why I’m sharing other than the fact that purging this kind of toxicity from my brain might help me get my feet back under me, and might let other fatties like me know that I see you, I value you, and if you’re having similar issues getting someone to listen to you, I get it. I don’t ever want to go and see another doctor for as long as I live after that experience.

It’s also a thank you to the friends who have rallied around me hardcore this past week. I’m more grateful than I can ever communicate to you all.

Maybe I’ll lodge a complaint at the health village here in town. Between bites of my many burgers I’ll keep you posted on the adventures of this fatty.