As if modern medicine couldn’t get any more twisted, doctors have recently removed a human-sized tumor from a Mississippi man who’d been told he was “just fat.”

The tumor, which had been growing for about 15 years, weighed a shocking 130 pounds. Roger Logan, the 57-year-old man afflicted by this massive tumor explained to television station KERO, “We did what we had to do to get here. Usually at home I would sit and it would rest on the floor.”

Logan spent most of his time confined to a chair in an eight-foot room. He was no longer able to work at the antique shop he owned, or participate in activities he had enjoyed. As the mass growing from his abdomen continued to increase in size, the quality of Logan’s life clearly decreased.

Despite frequent visits to various doctors, Logan’s plight was consistently dismissed as plain old obesity, and was told not be concerned by his condition.

“They said it’s just fat, you’re just fat,” Logan recalls. “It’s just fat developing there.”

Finally, after years of suffering, Logan and his family did some research and traveled to Bakersfield Memorial Hospital, with the hope of finally getting some real answers.

By that time, the benign tumor had reached a critical 130 pounds, and was simply hanging from his midsection.

Logan commented, “From here up I was a normal person. I used to say put a strap around you and you’re carrying three bags of cement around you all day long just swinging.”

Confident in the journey to Bakerfield Memorial, Logan says that Dr. Vipul Dev was the only one who could truly help him, noting that Dev had worked with a similar case in the past.

Dr. Dev was able to confirm that the massive protrusion was indeed a tumor — one that may have started out as merely an infected ingrown hair.

“We’re fortunate to have a facility like this where we can do this kind of surgery with very little or no complications,” Dev noted.

Fortunately for Logan, the surgery was successful and he is recovering well. Soon, he will return to his home in Mississippi, 130 pounds lighter and with a new lease on life.

Delayed diagnoses, like Logan’s, are one of the leading causes of medical malpractice complaints. Logan is an extreme case where he was dismissed by doctors for years — and was caused an equally extreme amount of unjustified suffering because of their neglect.

Weight is thought to often be a factor in misdiagnoses. Because obesity can cause such an array of negative health effects, doctors (understandably) can be quick to assume that being overweight or obese is the source of a problem. While there are no statistics on how often weight plays a role in misdiagnoses, it’s estimated that doctors make mistakes in 10 to 15 percent of all their patients. About half of those are said to cause significant harm.

Beyond stereotypes, extra fat can also make it hard to diagnose conditions like cancer. And in Logan’s case, his tumor supposedly even felt like fat, making it even more difficult for him to get a diagnosis. A woman going by the pseudonym “Karen Tang” told CNN  in 2010 that when she went to the doctor for pelvic pain, her doctor said that they didn’t feel anything.

“By the time I was referred to a gynecologist, I had a fibroid the size of a melon — so large it was putting pressure on my bladder,” she explained.

Sources:

ABC13.com

CNN.com

NOLO.com

CNN.com