Welcome to my Cushing’s blog again dear readers:
Today I’m going to treat you to some pictures. One is fairly explicit as it is of a younger Cushie
who decided to do a picture of herself in a bikini so folks could see what
Cushing’s has already done to her body.
I have her permission to use her picture and plan to point out a few
things from it. So here it is:
Look at her face, how round it is. That is called a “moon face” and is one of
the signs of Cushing’s syndrome and disease.
Next is the “buffalo hump” behind her neck. Because of the color of the door in the
background it doesn’t stick out that well.
But if you have the ability to zoom in and look it is there. Note how her fat is somewhat concentrated on
her torso. In her case it’s not as
extreme as some I’ve seen, myself included, but her obesity is somewhat
truncal. Lastly get a load of those
stretch marks! Those are huge and stick
out prominently. Every Cushie knows the
look of those, as do pregnant women. But
then women enter a pseudo-Cushingoid state while in pregnancy and stretch marks
like those are the bane of their existence aren’t they. And look at how dark some of them are,
especially those towards the back. That
isn’t just a play of light as Cushing’s stretch marks are often darker than
normal, even sometimes achieving a dark purple in color.
Usually we only get to see this sort of thing from
nude pictures taken by doctors. And
those aren’t the easiest pictures to get to see much less legally use. So I’m thankful to this lady for having this
picture done and even more thankful for her permission to use it.
Now for a few before and after pictures, the first
is a single picture a lady posted on Facebook showing before, while she had
Cushing’s and after:
The lady is clothed in this one, of course. However, one can clearly see what truncal
obesity looks like as hers is more pronounced in the picture of her as a victim
of Cushing’s. See how skinny those arms
are in comparison to the rest of her body?
That look of toothpicks stuck into a basketball is the classical look of
the Cushie as the disease progresses.
Cushies both tend not to have much fat, if any, on the arms and legs and
they’ll lose muscle mass as well. Hence
the distinctive profile we see here in this picture.
Next I’ll give you a picture of my mother:
That’s my young bride with her back in early 1982. But focus on mom. The way she’s dressed you can really see most
of the symptoms we’ve discussed today on display. You see the moon face, the buffalo hump and
the pronounced truncal obesity. Mother
was almost fifty in that picture and only had about fifteen more years to live before
the ravages of the disease took her.
Later in life mother developed COPD and extreme heart problems, both
diseases morbidly obese people often die from.
Mother was never officially diagnosed with the disease although she had
virtually all the known symptoms of the disease, including the mental health
issues. The doctors just weren’t
interested in going down the road as they were thinking horses instead of
zebras.
Finally, I’ll finish up with two more photos. The first one is a “before” picture of me at
age fifteen in 1971:
The next picture is my graduation picture from
Waycross College in 1994 when I received my associate’s degree before moving on
to a university. I’m thirty-eight years
old in that picture:
That’s quite a change, isn’t it? I’m obviously extremely obese and have the
classical moon face in that picture, more so than in my later pictures. I was probably around 400 pounds in that
picture. That’s what Cushing’s syndrome does
to a person.
Of course the picture isn’t all negative. That last picture is on the occasion of my
first graduation from a college. I would
go on to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in the same field, though I haven’t
been able to get a job because of my disability. I still have those and smaller triumphs in
the face of Cushing’s syndrome and still try my best to spit in its eye. I’m hoping that my next visit to my
endocrinologist will have some good news and that I may finally get treated.
