A WOMAN was given a devastating diagnosis after claiming doctors initially fobbed her off and called her fat.
Amanda Lee was told she had colon (bowel) cancer after trying for weeks to find out what was causing her symptoms.
She had booked an appointment with the doctor after experiencing severe abdominal pain and cramping for months, BuzzFeed reported.
Amanda said: “I’ve always had GI issues, and they’ve always been ignored.
“I was getting really sick, dropping weight, not consuming any food, and I was trying to get my insurance to send me to a GI.”
Amanda said she was “desperate” for answers and had already been seeing a dietician to find out if food were triggering stomach pain.
When she was able to see a gastroenterologist, she was dumbfounded at the lack of care.
She recounted what happened in a TikTok video that has gained 105,000 views while sitting in a car outside the medical practice.
Amanda says while crying: “I told him that I hadn’t been eating because it causes pain and I have pain when I eat.
“He looked at me and had the audacity to say, ‘Maybe that’s not such a bad thing’.”
“I’m so upset.”
The video was posted on Amanda’s account @mandapaints in February 2021, and a month later, she was given the blow of a cancer diagnosis.
She had searched for her new doctor and chose a woman, who immediately ordered a colonoscopy.
This discovered a tumour, which finally “made sense” to Amanda.
According to the NHS, abdominal pain, discomfort of bloating brought on by eating is one of the key signs of bowel cancer.
Blood in stool and a change in bowel habits – such as going more often or having looser stools – are the other two.
These symptoms can be vague or not occur at all. But they should be brought to a GP if they are experienced for more than three weeks.
Amanda was told by medics that her tumour was cancerous and she would need emergency surgery to remove her colon.
But due to an infection, she was unable to get it removed for a while longer, and had to stay in hospital while she came to terms with the fact she had a deadly disease.
Speaking of her experience with the doctor, Amanda said: “Fatphobia in the medical industry literally kills.
“It’s been too many years of people not being heard, tested, or treated well because they are overweight.”
“I’m a normal-sized American. I teeter between a size 12–14. How did I, a barely above average-size woman, almost die from fatphobia?”
Last month, Amanda reflected on the video she had made that day in the car park a year prior.
She said: “It still baffles me that a doctor ignored all my colon cancer symptoms, to just put fat, ignorance, lazy medicine on me instead.”
Amanda has since made videos discussing how she tried to sue for malpractice, but was unable to because she would have had to prove her bowel cancer had less than 50 per cent survival.
Amanda told The Independent that she is a “NED,” meaning that there is “no evidence of disease” in her body, having had chemotherapy.
