Woman Thought Swollen Armpit, Fatigue Were Pregnancy. She Had Lymphoma.

• Erin Basinger thought she had a swollen armpit and was tired because she was a new mom. 
• She thinks fatphobia delayed her stage 4 cancer diagnosis.
• Fat pregnant patients receive negative messages from clinicians, including that they’re bad moms.

When Erin Basinger went wedding dress shopping in 2019, she struggled to find bras that would accomodate the growing mass under her armpit, and dresses that wouldn’t accentuate it. 

So she bought a wireless bra and a looser-fitting dress, and tried to push her concerns about the lump aside. After all, she’d always had some fatty tissue in that area and had recently undergone surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome. Perhaps, she thought, the procedure had prompted some fat redistribution or swelling.

Even when it continued to grow during and after her first pregnancy in 2020, Basinger chalked it up to hormones. She’d attended the standard prenatal and postpartum visits, and the doctor hadn’t raised any concerns.  

Basinger, now 36, had been battling extreme fatigue too — “scream-singing” to keep her eyes open in the car, and pulling over to nap when that failed. Still, she figured, that’s what pregnancy and new parenthood must be like. 

But more than six months postpartum, the mass had grown to the size of a grapefruit. After consulting with her sister, a nurse, Basinger visited a new doctor to specifically ask about the lump in December 2021. 

A few tests and referrals later, she was diagnosed with stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She had an aggressive subtype that had spread to her head, neck, chest, abdomen, pelvis, and parts of her bones. 

“My PET scan lit up like a Christmas tree,” she said. “It was terrifying in general, and for me it was terrifying because I had a seven-month-old.” 

She shared her story — including how she thinks weight stigma played a role in her delayed diagnosis — with Insider to encourage women to advocate for themselves, and to validate pregnant patients who also feel they have been overlooked, if not downright ridiculed, for their weight. 

“I want other people to know: I’m fighting for you, even if you feel like you can’t fight for yourself,” she said. 

Basinger suspects doctors dismissed the lump as ‘just fat’ 

Basinger, a communications professor for the University of North Carolina Charlotte’s health psychology graduate program, wishes she had better advocated for herself when she first thought something was off. “That’s my biggest regret,” she said. 

But she also can’t help but think weight stigma contributed to her delayed diagnosis. “When I look back, I think maybe that was incompetence,” she said. “I suspect there was also probably some fatphobia there, like, ‘She’s fat, so this is probably just fat.'”

She has a lifetime of anecdotes to back that suspicion up. Doctors chalked up her rheumatoid arthritis to fatness, for example, and said her request to be tested for PCOS was just an “excuse” for her size. 

“Every time I went to the doctor, it was like, ‘Well it’s probably because of your weight,'” she said. “And it’s like, ‘I think if I hurt my elbow, it’s just because I hurt my elbow.'” 

That didn’t change before or during her pregnancy. When she got her IUD removed, the OB-GYN warned her that infertility and pregnancy loss were likely. “Her words were really just a dark cloud over my pregnancy because I was constantly afraid that I was going to miscarry,” Basinger said. 

Doctors also told her that if she gained more than 19 pounds while pregnant, she’d have to leave the state-of-the-art practice where she was being monitored to deliver at a poorly rated hospital because it had a NICU.

“It just felt like this consequence hanging over my head,”…