When Hannah Richards noticed she’d put on weight in 2023, she put it down to her comfortable lifestyle with her boyfriend, Nathan Baker.
The ‘happy and content’ pair had been enjoying date nights and cheeky takeaways together since meeting the year before. Really, a few extra pounds were no big deal.
But when the 28-year-old hit three-stone heavier and a healthcare worker told her she had a puffy ‘moon face’, the Norfolk local began feeling really ‘horrendous’.
Unable to stop the spiralling changes in her body, she saught help.
In March this year, Hannah was diagnosed with Cushing’s disease – a rare condition that can cause weight gain -and doctors suspect a benign brain tumour is the cause.
‘When they diagnosed me, I cried. I didn’t feel upset or shocked, I just felt really relieved,’ Hannah says.
‘It’s been going on for so long and I was like “I finally have answers and I know what’s happening to my body now”. I wasn’t just going crazy.’
Cushing’s is a rare condition caused by having too much cortisol hormone in your body and can lead to increased body fat and mood changes.
When Hannah first met Nathan, 33, everything had been going well. ‘During the early stages we were having more takeaways and doing nice things together,’ she explains.
‘You know when you get into a new relationship and you go out for food a lot and get takeaways a lot and you get comfortable.’
As she began to get a little heavier, people told her it was ‘comfort weight gain’ from being in a comfortable and loving relationship, but any attempts at losing it were futile.
‘I went back to the gym and ate healthier but nothing was helping, I just kept gaining,’ Hannah, a healthcare assistant, explains. ‘I started swimming. No matter what I was doing I wasn’t losing the weight.
‘It got to the point where I’d look back at old photos and I looked completely different. If I put that online on a dating app people would probably think I’m like a catfish.
‘I looked in the mirror and I’d get really teary, depressed and upset thinking “it’s just not who I am anymore”?’
She adds that her hormones were all over the place and she felt like she was going through menopause and all the changes that come along with it.
‘Everything changed, my body, my mental health and my personality. It’s really tough,’ she adds.
‘I started to get quite a lot of breathlessness and heart palpitations,’ she says.
She felt like she was gaining all her weight on her chest and belly, and got stretch marks between her thighs, as well as other symptoms.
‘I had a lot of hair growth on my arms and side burns, they come through quite dark. My knuckles get quite dark and swollen, too. I get a lot of dark circles under my armpits and round the back of my neck,’ she says.
Hannah even shares how she had what a medical colleague referred to as a ‘moon face’, referencing the weight gain in her face, and her ‘buffalo bump’ where she gained weight in her upper back.
It was this colleague who pushed Hannah, from Cromer, to get checked.
‘One of my colleagues actually said to me “have you heard of Cushing’s syndrome?” I was completely oblivious to it,’ Hannah recalls.
‘She said “I’m not being rude but your face has got puffier and you’re tiny from the back but from the front you’re on the larger scale. You should go to your GP”.’
It was then her GP referred her to an endocrinologist, and she was finally diagnosed with Cushing’s disease. Doctors suspect a benign tumour in her brain is to blame, and Hannah is awaiting an MRI scan to see if it’s in her pituitary or adrenal gland.
‘It turns out my pituitary gland is sending signals to my kidneys and it’s producing too many steroids, which affects your cortisol levels and your body and your hormones,’ Hannah explains.
‘They need to take a blood sample from [my pituitary gland] to just confirm it’s 100% Cushing’s. They need to confirm it’s from my pituitary gland and not my adrenal gland.’
Once this is confirmed, the healthcare worker will have to have brain surgery to remove the pituitary gland from her brain, and following that, she’ll have to be on steroids for the rest of her life.
‘After that, I’ll never get Cushing’s again, which is a really good thing,’ she says. ‘Even now I feel horrendous considering what I was before. I used to be quite petite and fit and active.’
This diagnosis hasn’t affected her relationship though, with her and Nathan now getting married in September 2026, after meeting back in 2022 on Tinder.
Hannah now wants to spread awareness about Cushing’s disease and believes it ‘needs to be talked about a lot more’ to encourage others to get themselves checked out.
‘There’s so many things people are unaware of. It’s quite scary really,’ she adds. ‘You wouldn’t have thought something so small in your brain can change your body so much. It’s so important that people know about it.
‘Even if you do have the symptoms and you don’t have Cushing’s it could lead to something else you never thought it would be.
‘Get checked out because it’s your body you know what’s right and wrong. Don’t let anybody tell you differently because they are not in your body and they don’t know what’s normal to you.’
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