Hidden Blobs of Fat

Trigger Warning: you might find this discussion gross.

I’ve written about my weight loss and fitness journey before. It’s been a long journey with a LOT of bumps in the road. I had almost made my goal weight last year, but then something happened and I lost ground.

That something was a combination of stress eating and missing exercise time. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that with an exercise routine we call “Passive,” there would always be time. It worked great when I was working from home for a while during Covid. It worked pretty well after I “retired,” but once I went back to work, well…

So I gained back a chunk of my weight. But that’s not really what I’m here to talk about.

I’m here to talk about lipomas. Not the lipomas that cause lumps on people’s wrists and other external body parts. These are internal, and invisible.

A few years after I lost the initial 40 pounds of extra me, I noticed what felt like lumps in one of my “bat wings.” The doctor sent me for an ultrasound, after which I was duly informed that it was nothing to worry about, just cysts of fat, annoying but benign. The doc told me this in a tone that made me feel stupid. I suspect I was supposed to just be relieved it wasn’t anything dangerous. Of course, I was, but somehow I came away from the experience embarrassed that I had even toyed with the idea that they might be something of concern.

Just fat; it’s something that happens to some people of a certain age, mostly women. Great.

As if that wasn’t enough, I discovered little pudgy bits of fat under the skin at my inner elbows. If I get bored and don’t have a fidget or a pen or pencil to doodle with, I can always entertain myself by poking at my squishy, pudgy little fat pouches.

Then there’s the big one. When I first found out about this one, I brought it to my doctor’s attention. It’s in a rather embarrassing place. Thankfully, this doctor is new since the guy who belittled me for worrying about my arm lumps.

My doctor is a really nice woman at the Veterans Clinic. She listens to me. She never says things that sound like she’s making fun of me.

She checked it out. She didn’t know what it was. Neither did I at the time, but I knew I had never seen it nor felt it before. She sent me in for one of the most exciting tests I’ve ever had — a transvaginal ultrasound. The ultrasound showed nothing to worry about. In fact, it showed nothing at all.

That’s when I discovered that this one moves. I still didn’t know what it was, but by now I was determined to figure it out on my own. If it couldn’t be seen, but wasn’t my imagination, there must be something on the internet, right?

The fact that it moves helped me identify it, because movement (and squishiness) is what differentiates a lipoma from an actual cyst or tumor. When I say it moves, I don’t just mean that I can poke at it and it moves — which it does — but it will move about all on its own. When it does, it pushes into a nerve in my groin and I feel an absolutely irritating cold numbing in the area. I can’t stand it, so I move the darn thing.

I want it to go away, completely. I’ll be talking to my doctor about that. In the meantime, I learned something new.

My squishy pudgy mushy moveable fat globules may not be “left behind” fat after my weight loss, as I initially thought. Turns out, they can run in families and they may have existed even when I was fatter. Maybe they existed when I was still thin, but that was many moons and birthday cakes ago. They may have been hiding all along, and I may have only begun to notice them after the weight loss because all that other fat has gone somewhere else.

Whether they existed from the beginning of time or manifested in my Crone Years doesn’t really matter though, does it?

What matters is that they exist, and nobody told me about them. Not one of my primary care physicians said, “Hey, now that you’re fat, if you lose it you might notice some big ole’ blubbery balls o’fat under your skin.”

My weight loss doctor didn’t even mention it. What’s that all about, anyway?

On the positive side, while I’ve read and been told that “bat-wing arms” are inevitable, this might not be so. Some articles I’ve read recently tell me that I can exercise them into muscle if I do the right exercises. I just need to create a routine that won’t make my shoulder hurt. Apparently, that’s possible too.

Right now all my tabs are open, with stories about how to do this.

The work has begun!

~~~

This story first appeared in Petits Fours Magazine on Medium