Tag: Gained

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I Lost My Fertility to Breast Cancer—But I Gained a Best Friend


It’s just a plugged milk duct, I thought, as I stared at my bumpy breast in the bathroom mirror. I had just stopped breastfeeding my nine-and-a-half-month-old son, so this was bound to happen. But when the lumpy area on my miniature mound was still there a few weeks later, I made a doctor’s appointment to check things out. “It’s probably infected,” I told my family physician as I undressed, talking nonstop and ignoring the look of panic in her eyes as she felt the suspicious area on my right boob. She ordered an urgent ultrasound and mammogram. A follow-up biopsy confirmed: It was cancer.

They caught it early, I had a double mastectomy, it didn’t spread. Really, I’m a lucky gal. But due to the hormonal treatments, which I will be on for many years to prevent a recurrence, I’m unable to carry another baby. My husband and I were ready to start trying for a buddy for our first bundle of joy, so as you can imagine, this was, shall we say, a bummer.

But then we remembered the Fabulous 14—our fertility Hail Mary.

Several years back I’d read about the rising trend of couples in their 30s freezing their embryos, giving them more time to save money and work on their careers. At that point, my husband and I had been talking about having kids but weren’t quite ready. Freezing our future chances seemed like a brilliant idea. I shot needles in my belly for several weeks, had my eggs retrieved, and we were able to freeze 14 embryos, aka the Fabulous 14. After it was confirmed I wouldn’t be bearing our next love child, we did some research, met with a lawyer, and decided surrogacy would be a great way to complete our family.

Green tea latte in hand, I went where I always go when I need an answer in a hurry: Facebook. A few keystrokes later, I found a handful of very active groups dedicated to surrogacy in Canada. I figured I had nothing to lose, so I posted my story. Within minutes I had multiple responses, including one from a surrogate who was currently pregnant but had a close friend who was looking for IPs (intended parents). “I think you two would really get along,” she wrote. “She has a great sense of humor.”

She passed along my info, and this gal, let’s call her Rose (after my favorite Golden Girls character), and I start messaging each other daily, getting to know each other and feeling things out like some weird surrogacy version of The Bachelorette. A fellow Scorpio, she’s hysterical and whip smart (like me, right?). She texted me pictures of a coworker napping at the office, and I of my son having a meltdown. We shared details here and there about our surrogacy expectations, but mostly it just felt like two girlfriends catching up. I flew to see her one Monday—as much as I love a good text, an IRL meeting seemed like a prerequisite to asking this lady to carry my baby—and we spent the entire day at a Swedish spa laughing, drinking, and almost getting kicked out of the “quiet meditation pool.” Silent Scorpios, I think not.

We made it official when she popped the question: “Listen, I was wondering, would you like to go out with my uterus?” We were a perfect match.

She’s the first person I reach out to when I wake up, oftentimes with a video of me singing Queen off-key in the car on my way to Starbucks. When she came to Toronto, where I live, for the medical screening, she brought her husband and kids. I fell in love even more. It was so easy to be around them all, almost as if we had been in each other’s lives forever—the oldest and dearest of family friends.



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I Gained 20 Pounds Before My Wedding and It Was Still Perfect


When my wedding was over, I was relieved. It was the most fun I’ve ever had, sure, and I was happy to be married and so thankful to our family and friends, but I honestly couldn’t wait to get back to the hotel and take my wedding dress off—and never, ever put it back on.

When you get engaged and you tell the internet about it, weight loss pills and workout plans hashtagged #sweatingforthewedding will start to fill your feed. We don’t know you, those ads seem to say, but we know you’re getting married and we know somewhere inside you’re very nervous about what your arms will look like in your photos! The onslaught is inescapable. I wasn’t prepared for it, and it made me angry. I had spent the majority of my thirty years on earth at war with my body, and now I was finally happy! I had found love! Leave me alone!

I expect to see this kind of pushy and tone-deaf marketing from influencers on Instagram, but I thought we had been dedicating real time and effort lately in order to combat this message in mainstream media. I was wrong; the New York Times apparently felt the need to weigh in with an article titled “The Perfect Workout for Your Wedding Dress Silhouette.” After a raging backlash from women like me on social media, the Times attempted to do damage control by changing the headline to “Getting Married? Get Strong.”—a headline that doesn’t match the article’s content, which reads as a guide for women on how to change their bodies so they can be able to “rock” a specific kind of wedding dress on their big day.

Wearing a trumpet dress? The Times’ expert says this dress calls for a small waist and big hips, giving exercise routines to specifically “shape your hips and reduce the size of your waist, as well as tone your arms and abdomen.” An earlier version of the story—which has been “condensed” to take out some of the more offensive lines, including this one—suggested swimming as a way to burn calories before the big day, but warned against overdoing it “so that your back does not get too wide.”

Ma’am. If I am planning a wedding, you’re telling me I have to worry about how wide my back is? Thanks for the tip.

In the run-up to my wedding six months ago, I vowed to not let my body issues get to me. I didn’t want to miss such an important and special time in my life, like I have in the past. The night I graduated from college, my hair wasn’t cooperating and I couldn’t find anything in my closet to wear. Long story short, I stayed home and missed the campus-wide celebration, sulking around my apartment because I felt I wasn’t inhabiting a body that “deserved” to have fun. That was 10 years ago and I still think about it in regret. I will never be a college graduate again. That’s over. I was not going to make the same mistake for my wedding.



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‘I Gained 90 Pounds in A Year—And Doctors Have No Idea Why’


Hannah is a 22-year-old former athlete and student in Spokane, WA. Nearly four years ago, she gained nearly 100 pounds in the course of one year. Soon after, she began suffering from severe GI issues, brain fog and chronic pain. She’s seen more than six types of specialists and no one has been able to diagnose her medical illness. In the essay below, she reveals the journey that led her to join the cast of Chasing the Cure, a new show which aims to crowdsource a diagnosis for patients like Hannah who are suffering from an illness without answers. Watch Hannah’s story air on August 8 on TNT and TBS.

It all started my junior year of high school. I was an athlete on our soccer, basketball and golf teams when I began gaining mysterious weight. I’d been as active as I’d ever been, but the number on the scale steadily creeped upward. But when I went to see my doctor, they weren’t concerned. I was a “growing woman” and putting on weight would be my new normal, they told me. I kept training and playing on my teams, but the weight kept adding up. By the time I was a senior and ready to graduate, I’d gained 90 pounds.

The prior year, I was a size two weighing 120 pounds with six pack abs. Something was up. The weight gain itself wasn’t what concerned me—I loved my body and all it could do—but as an athlete, I was also deeply in tune with my body. I knew something was really wrong but no one, including my doctor seemed to take my concerns seriously. Without a sense of medical urgency, I continued preparing for college as normal. I had earned a golf scholarship, which meant before joining the team, I’d need a full physical. At this point, my primary care doctor had started some testing and found out my right thyroid was enlarged, but as I had no other symptoms besides the weight gain, I was cleared to join the team.

But from there, my health spiraled out of control. I soon developed GI issues so extreme I was forced to drop out of school. I had to use the bathroom constantly—more than 20 times a day—and it made attending class embarrassing. It got so bad, I would have panic attacks thinking about whether or not I’d have access to a bathroom. I started isolating myself at home.

I felt like my body was no longer my own, my resentment towards my doctors growing by the day. This was definitely not a normal part of being a “growing woman.” I trusted them to help me, to figure out what was going on with my health, and I was told it’s normal. Gaining 90 pounds in a year and having to drop out of college due to illness is not normal. It’s nowhere close to a standard part of becoming a woman.

It’s been four years since I first started having symptoms and I still have no answers. I’ve seen endocrinologists, cardiologists, rheumatologists, gastroenterologists, and orthopedics. I’ve had colonoscopies and more blood tests than I can count. I’ve been told, This is a weight issue. Lose the weight and everything will be okay. Eat celery—that will do it. It’s just anxiety and depression. I used to trust my doctors, but now each visit is heartbreaking because I already know they won’t know what to do.

My mother and grandmother are the ones who’ve kept pushing for solutions and answers. I was very active in trying to find a diagnosis for the first two years, but at some point, it weighs you down. The constant pain, the doctors who might know and then don’t, the tests, the research—it’s a lot. I badly want a diagnosis. I wish I was living life like a normal 22-year-old, but I’m not. Going to the movies, walking around downtown, being active, I’d be doing all sorts of activities if I weren’t shrouded in pain. My entire life is different simply because doctors didn’t know how to help me.



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