FAT DUDES

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TheNib.com

@thenib

some nice bits that were on the link! medicine has a massive misogynistic bias it needs to address.

my family has a history of hypothyroidism, but my mom wasnt diagnosed for decades. she was misdiagnosed and only symptoms were addressed without searching for the actual reason. even now, because how how long she went untreated, her bodys systems are extremely taxed, causing other issues. her body is permanently off the deep end to some degree because doctors refused to investigate to a proper degree.

if you have consistent symptoms, keep pushing. the doctor is not always right. keep pushing.

God the timing on this is perfect. A few weeks ago, I accidentally got scheduled for a yearly physical instead of a med check, so I wound up getting a routine TSH test. Turns out I have hypothyroidism, which I FUCKING CALLED a whole year ago. I’m a textbook case. My dad has hypothyroidism, FFS.

My best example of having my symptoms dismissed, however, was when I first got sick with Crohn’s disease. In less than six months I became so ill I genuinely thought I would die. I was emaciated. I was always in horrible pain. I was so tired my older brother had to carry me up and down the stairs. My hair fell out, my legs were covered in welts, and I was shitting blood several times a day.

Again, I was a textbook case. The GI surgeon and the pediatric GI doc I was eventually referred to needed only a quick look to know what was probably going on. But my family doctor? No idea. It was acid reflux, he said. It was an infection, he said. Then it was diverticulitis (not something you see in kids), or menorrhagia (I hadn’t had my period for almost a year), or cancer.

By the time I finally got a colonoscopy, my ileum (the part of your small intestine that connects to your large intestine) was so badly damaged my doctor had to stop the procedure early because she was afraid the scope would perforate my intestine.

One week later I started biologic therapy. In just two weeks the pain was gone. Completely. I could run around and play dodgeball at camp without getting tired. I could eat whatever I wanted without pain. The welts on my legs disappeared, and my hair started to grow back, and I began putting on the weight I had lost.

The nightmare was over. But it went on so much longer than it should have. It’s been eleven years and I’m still in remission, but you can bet your ass I still have emotional scars from the whole experience.

No child should ever have to look their mother in the eye and tell her “I don’t think I’m going to make it.” But I did, and I’ll have to live the rest of my life with her face haunting me.

All this because no one would acknowledge the obvious. No one would believe me, until it was almost too late.

Yet there is palpable frustration within the Jewish community over how little our efforts on this score seem to matter. Our public discourse about anti-Semitism seems almost immune to being influenced by what the actual Jewish community wants to talk about.

As noted, the majority of the Jewish community is politically left of center. We welcome a more robust and nuanced conversation about Israel entering American politics – including the need to mobilize to counteract Israel’s increasingly right-wing drift. Yet we do not endorse those who wish to wipe Israel off the map, and we see the trap when Jewish efforts to participate in American politics are cast as “proof” that we exert a nefarious sway over the polity.

When liberal members of Congress evoke anti-Semitic tropes, we have no desire to let them go unchallenged. But neither do we have any interest in having our criticisms lumped in with cynical and hypocritical denunciations emanating from the political right.

We understand that the most tangible threats to Jewish lives and livelihoods in America – the anti-Semitism that sheds actual blood in America – emerges from the political right, including (especially via Soros conspiracies) the mainstream Republican Party. But we also claim special pain at anti-Semitism coming from inside our home and our political community – an anti-Semitism that hurts us directly precisely because it comes from those we are in coalition with.

There is no conceptual difficulty in holding to these positions together. A great many of us are wholly comfortable in our own skins on these issues. But to the extent these distinctions are impossible to maintain in practice – to the extent that “criticism of Omar” simply is encoded as part of a right-wing campaign, to the extent that “supporting Omar” simply is an endorsement of extreme-left anti-Israel politics – the net effect is that most Jews are silenced. We may speak the words, but they go unheard.

For all the talk about the Israel Lobby this and Jewish Power that, the clearest takeaway from this whole ordeal is the striking disempowerment of the Jewish community. Spoken about and spoken over, the Jewish community is being systematically stripped of our ability to contribute to the dialogue happening over our own lives. We are “represented,” if you can call it that, by Glenn Greenwald on the one side and Lee Zeldin on the other (surely, this is the definition of Jewish hell), both of whose elevated stature in public discourse about Jews is almost exclusively a feature of gentile, not Jewish, interests.

It makes for a crushing feeling of powerlessness. The nation is having a conversation about Jews virtually impervious to the input of Jews themselves.

This is from 2019, and the world has changed dramatically in many ways since it was published and since I last reblogged it. But one way in which it has not, is that the points of this article are still true. That’s why I dug through my archive to find it, because I think it captures this particular frustration so well.