Being Thin with Sickle Cell

All my life I have been very thin and small framed. When I was sixteen years old I was 5ft. 2in. tall and weighed all of 70lbs. I stopped growing around age twenty-one at 5ft 10in. and finally broke one hundred pounds in my mid-twenties. At the age of thirty-one, I weighed more than I ever had, 130lbs. I leveled out at 125lbs and stayed there until I was hospitalized in 2011.

During my 2011 hospitalization, I lost nearly fifteen pounds. Over the following two years, I lost another eleven pounds, putting my weight at 99lbs! That’s how much I weighed a month ago. Needless to say, I have been very concerned about my weight.

As a child, though my mom was/is a great cook, though I ate like a horse and ate healthy, nothing my mom tried would help me put on the pounds. I don’t know how many nutritionists lectured my mom during my plethora of hospital stays. They thought she wasn’t feeding me correctly. Though my mom did her best to inform them she knew all about nutrition and feed me well, she held her tongue and didn’t chew them out. In adulthood, I had the opportunity to vindicate my dear sweet mom.

I was about twenty-five years old. I was hospitalized for something or another. During my hospitalization, a nutritionist made an appearance in my room. Apparently I was in the wrong mood. She plopped herself down in the chair beside my bed and immediately began lecturing me about my weight.
“Let me stop you there,” I said. “My whole life my mom and I have had to endure you nutritionist coming in and lecturing me about nutrition. I know how to eat healthy and I eat very healthy meals. I am naturally thin. I don’t need you to come in here and lecture me when you don’t know anything about how I eat. So why don’t you leave and don’t ever come back.”

Needless to say, she left without a word. And though I’ve been hospitalized a few times since then, I’ve never had another nutritionist come into my room and bother me. There’s probably some red flag in my medical file that says, “Whatever you do, don’t send a nutritionist into this patient’s room!”

When I told my mom about the incident, she later told me, “I have to admit, I felt a little vindicated. I wanted to do that so many times when you were a kid.” Normally, I’m a very nice and polite patient. I’ve learned from too many hospitalizations...sometimes you just have to be not so polite.

For me, weight has always been a struggle. If/when I catch a flu or am hospitalized, the pounds have always flown off and been very slow coming back. It has never mattered what I ate or how much I ate, I couldn’t gain weight. Being lactose intolerant, missing a gallbladder (making it hard to eat fatty foods), and having to watch my intake of potassium and sodium, it’s hard to find foods I can eat.