Fat chance

Another email from a happy interviewee – and my heart danced with joy when this one arrived today.

Leanne Snowball suffers with a condition called lipoedema – it’s what used to be known as elephantitis. She was embarrassed talking about it, but had decided too few people understood the condition. She even bravely allowed us to publish pictures of her in this week’s That’s Life! magazine. Today she wrote to thank me for the way her story appeared.

Here it is...

‘I was ten years old when my periods started, and my body suddenly ballooned.

My mum, Angela Pink, 31, couldn’t understand it. All through my teens she thought I was overeating in secret. I swore I wasn’t – I was an unusually fussy eater who’d always hated crisps and sweets, along with most other foods.

But nobody could believe that I had really got so big from my tiny portions of plain chicken, pasta and salads.

At school I hid my body under my black blazer and trousers.

I hated dressing up and drawing attention to myself and, when, at 18, I met my first serious boyfriend, Robert Snowball, 19, I used text messaging as a way of helping him get to know me better between dates because I was so scared my size would be a turn off.

We fell in love and married on Robert’s 22^nd birthday, when I was 20.

At 21 I started working as a midwife and knew I should practice what I was preaching, and lose weight before starting my own family.

By 23 I’d lost nearly four stone – but it had all come off my torso. My arms and legs remained just as big as ever – and I needed size 28 trousers. 

I started to realise I could become anorexic and still have these huge embarrassing limbs.  It seemed so odd that I searched my symptoms on the internet and found Lipoedema or “Painful Fat Syndrome” - the modern name for what people used to call Elephantitis.

It caused the metabolism to slow down so anything a sufferer ate was likely to be stored as fat. But the main problem was the fatty build up on the limbs. It wasn’t just permanent, but also extremely tender and painful. My limbs were unbearably tender. I seemed to be a classic case.

Yet I was scared to approach my doctor... After all my dieting, and all the years Mum had thought I was stuffing myself, I would have been mortified if he dismissed my online diagnosis and said “No – You’re just fat!” 

It wasn’t until I’d had my sons Alexander, when I was 26, and Benjamin, when I was 28, that the pain got so bad that I finally went to a doctor I knew and trusted from work.

I could have cried when he agreed I had lipoedema. But the bad news was the excess fat had blocked my lymph nodes and now I also had a lot of painful excess fluid that couldn’t drain away – a condition called lymphoedema. 

My doctor referred me to a nurse specialist for treatments to reduce the fluid build up.

But nothing could or ever will shift the stubborn fat on my limbs. Even if I resorted to liposuction, which some women do, it could make the condition worse!

The pain is now so bad I need a morphine like painkiller – but it’s so zonking I daren’t take it when I’m looking after my boys, so can only get relief at weekends when Robert can take over.

Even worse, Lymphoedema makes cuts and bruises so slow to heal that some sufferers have had their infected limbs amputated.

That is a terrifying thought, but there are experts working on a cure!

In the meantime, I hope my story will warn other women not to ignore unusually stubborn fat. If your weight seems wrong for the amount you eat, then it probably is!’