- Alabama resident Kayla Rahn had surgery to remove a 50-pound mass from her ovary, NBC affiliate WSFA reported on Wednesday.
- Last year, Rahn started to experience weight gain, pain, and stomach issues, but some medical professionals told her the solution was weight loss, according to the WSFA report.
- Finally, after visiting the emergency room at Jackson Hospital in Montgomery, Alabama, she got a diagnosis: a benign ovarian mass known as a mucinous cystadenoma.
- INSIDER spoke with Dr. Gregory Jones, a doctor who helped remove the mass.
- He said that size of the tumor was "quite irregular."
- Warning: This post contains graphic images of the mass.
A 30-year-old woman in Alabama spent months plagued by weight gain she couldn't explain. It wasn't until this May that doctors finally discovered the cause: a 50-pound growth on her ovary.
Kayla Rahn began to experience pain, stomach issues, and weight gain starting last year, NBC affiliate WSFA reported on Wednesday. But doctors told her the solution was to lose weight, according to the WSFA report.
"I had been trying to lose weight for about a year, but I was gaining weight," Rahn told WSFA. "I legit looked like I was a solid nine months pregnant. We went to dinner and someone asked me if I was having twins. It was frustrating and rough."
But this May, on a day when her pain reached unbearable levels, Rahn's mother brought her to the emergency room at Jackson Hospital in Montgomery, Alabama, WSFA reported.
There, testing finally revealed that she had a gigantic mass on her ovary: A mucinous cystadenoma, according to a hospital press release. She underwent surgery to remove the mass the very next day, the press release said.
INSIDER spoke to gynecologist Dr. Gregory Jones, one of the two doctors who performed the surgery, who said the growth was unusually large.
Jones told INSIDER this type of growth — which could be called a cyst or a tumor — happens when certain cells become trapped inside a balloon-like cyst lining but continue to function normally, producing a substance called mucinin.
"It will continue to expand and grow until it either ruptures or it's removed," he said.
A 2013 case report on the topic reported that, in the vast majority of cases, these growths are benign. Jones said that Rahn's was too.
Jones has also seen these growths before. He removes a mucinous cystadenoma "every three to four months," he said, since patients are often referred to by other healthcare professionals in the area.
"But they're always not that large," he added. "This was quite irregular that it has progressed to this point."
This isn't the first giant ovarian growth to make the news in 2018. In May, a woman had a 132-pound mucinous cystadenoma removed in a surgical procedure in Connecticut, as INSIDER previously reported.
Rahn's experience is a powerful reminder that sometimes patients need to become fierce self-advocates in doctor's offices.
This is especially true when a patient happens to have a heavier, larger body.
A growing body of evidence suggests that some doctors have strong, negative opinions about obese patients, according to a 2015 paper in the journal Obesity Reviews. These opinions may influence the type of care heavier patients get. The 2015 paper cited research showing that doctors may spend less time with obese patients, for example.
And there's no shortage of anecdotes from patients who say they've experienced this bias. A recent story in Cosmopolitan highlighted a woman who was coughing up blood and struggling to breathe. Doctors told her to lose weight, but it turned out she had cancer. In 2016, a different woman told the New York Times she felt a sudden weight in her chest that a doctor blamed on her weight. She actually had life-threatening blood clots in her lungs.
Jones said it's important for all patients to be persistent when something seems amiss.
"If you see something's wrong, continue to bring it up to your physician," he said. "We're human and sometimes we don't see what the patient's seen or we perhaps don't appreciate the problems the patient is having. But continue to bring that up, and if you're not satisfied, make a follow-up appointment."
He also suggested writing down your concerns on a list and bringing it to doctor's visits, and asking a loved on to tag along to appointments.
"Sometimes [loved ones] have insight that you don't have, or they just see the same problem in a different way," Jones said. "Different communication styles sometimes allow us as physicians to better understand what's going on and help make that diagnosis."
After the successful tumor removal, Rahn feels like "a huge burden has been lifted off of her," the hospital's press release read.
"As soon as I got home and was able to move a little, I tried on every shirt I had on and it was awesome" Rahn said in the hospital's press release. "This dress I have on, I actually have not been able to wear in a year."
Rahn was not immediately available to respond to INSIDER's request for comment. Watch her interview with WSFA right here:
<script type='text/javascript' src='https://ift.tt/2yVbcsF href='http://www.wsfa.com' title='WSFA.com Montgomery Alabama news.'>WSFA.com Montgomery Alabama news.</a>
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