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Doctors Told Her She Was Just Fat. She Actually Had Cancer.Rebecca Hiles and millions of women like her are getting judged too quickly by their doctors — and it can mean the difference between life and death.By Maya Dusenbery Apr 17, 2018At 17 years old, Rebecca Hiles came down with bronchitis and walking pneumonia. Three years later, she was still coughing every day. "Doctors said, 'If you lost weight, you wouldn't have this many coughing fits,'" she recalls. One night, she started coughing up blood, but when she went to the ER, her doctors said it was probably just a broken blood vessel and sent her home with an inhaler. "That was the first time I started to think that maybe it wasn’t just weight," she says. ...Hiles's coughing fits were getting steadily worse, but her healthcare providers were still so fixated on her weight that they ignored symptoms that should have been worrisome in any active young woman. "Instead of listening to a patient when they say, 'Well, I'm trying to work out, but then I can't breathe,'" she explains, "they just dismiss them by saying, 'Well, if you lose a little bit more weight, it's going to be easier for you to breathe.'" ...Before Hiles made the appointment with the pulmonologist, another bloody coughing fit landed her in the ER. This time, the doctors did a more powerful CT-scan, rather than an X-ray, and found a tumor in her bronchial tube. Less than two weeks later, she had surgery to remove her entire left lung, the bottom half of which was a black, rotting piece of dead tissue. ...
