THE BIG ISSUE

Systemic fat-phobia in medicine has led to poor healthcare for maligned and maltreated overweight women for decades. Now, they are fighting back for their right to quality treatment.

- Bek Day

Lying flat on her back in the metal tube, a solid, heavy bar bearing down on her chest, Elissa Jenkins tried to remind herself to breathe. It wasn’t her first MRI – a benign pituitary tumour meant she’d seen her fair share over the past two decades – but the setup was different this time. The Brisbane children’s entertainer had gained weight since the last time she had undergone a scan, and this particular machine included a head capsule that needed to fasten down over her chest – something it couldn’t do properly because it was too small.

“I could feel this panic rising inside me,” she recalls. “The radiologist had tried to shuffle me down to get a better fit but she was unable to make it work, so she told me I’d have to put up with the pressure on my chest.”

It became physically impossible to fill her lungs, at which point a distraught Jenkins knew she couldn’t take another 20 minutes like this. Hot tears of humiliation pricked her eyes as she asked the radiologist to stop.

This wasn’t the first time the failure of medical equipment to properly accommodate her body would pitch a barrier to healthcare for Jenkins, and it wouldn’t be the last. Once, she’d been in hospital for a routine treatment and two trainee nurses refused to let her go home because her blood pressure was too high. They’d failed to realise the blood pressure cuff they were using was too small, causing a false high reading.