Now 104 pounds lighter, Allison Fisher has a new lease on life after surgeons removed a massive cyst. The ovarian cyst was carrying roughly 46 liters of fluid.
“I let myself believe that if I ignored it, it would go away,” Fisher told Action News Jax. “I was scared. I was just really scared.”
A lifetime of being told her health problems were due to her weight led the young woman to avoid doctors and just hope things would get better.
“[Growing up,] regardless of what I was there for — whether it was a cold or an ear infection, I was always told, ‘You need to lose weight,’” Fisher recalled. “If no one’s going to listen to me, if they’re always gonna tell me I need to lose weight, then what’s the point of going? What’s the point of listening to my body?”
After her father passed away in 2016, Fisher said she stopped paying attention to her health. By 2020, the pain from her mystery condition was getting worse, but circumstances led her to keep quiet about the issue.
“It was also — you know — the height of the pandemic, and I was terrified to go out,” Fisher said. “I didn’t want to try to find doctors. I also didn’t have health insurance, so I just ignored my issues completely.
“I felt like I was pregnant with 10 kids. I couldn’t lay on my stomach. It felt like all my organs were being crushed.”
In 2022, Fisher’s mother was fighting cancer and the 20-year-old decided enough was enough. Right before Christmas, Fisher visited St. Vincent’s Riverside. According to the hospital’s Dr. Martin Martino, a gynecologic oncology surgeon, the mass in Fisher’s stomach was so large that it was impacting her breathing.
“We’ve seen ‘em big, but to remove them through little incisions, I haven’t done that before,” Martino told Action News Jax.
“What was really interesting in your [Fisher’s] case is that once we removed it, we looked at the other ovary because now we could see it, and the left ovary was twisted three times. That [the left ovary] was about 10 centimeters that really helped us to be able to untwist it and save your [Fisher’s] future fertility, and the chance to have kids.”
Moving forward, Fisher plans to take advantage of her new lease on life.
“There are other people out there who are in my shoes, other bigger people, who are just so scared to go to the doctor because of their weight,” Fisher said. “I just want them to know that they shouldn’t be scared.”
