'Dr Pimple Popper': Will Taylor have to spend rest of her life with tail-like lipoma, a fat deposit in spine?
Taylor has been conscious about the way she looks because of a lipoma that has been growing on her butt ever since she was a young girl. Fearing that people might point their fingers at it, Taylor had been hiding the truth from the world while thinking of ways to treat it. After several failed attempts of figuring out what it was, Taylor finally got help from a doctor who informed her it was a lipoma.
Taylor was then informed that the lipoma could be treated by removing it through surgery. Hearing this, Taylor was pleased and was looking forward to spending her life without a lipoma that looked like a tail. However, a couple of weeks after the surgery, Taylor noticed that the lump had come back. When she consulted the doctor, he informed her that it is something she could live her life with. However, Taylor did not feel the same. She felt hurt and defeated as her confidence started to crumble again. After years of waiting, Taylor decided to meet Dr Sandra Lee for consultation. She informed her about the medical background but Dr Lee had her doubts.
"There are two warning bells," Dr Lee told Taylor. "One is, why did this doctor remove this ... and then it came right back? And then the other big thing for me is, a regular lipoma does not appear at birth. You get that over time. There could be something else going on." Dr Lee even asked Taylor if she had any previous medical history. "It's never affected anything like that other than my confidence," Taylor said. "I've never had any problems." Dr Lee decides to take an MRI before moving on to any procedure. "There is no way I can do this procedure today," Dr Lee said. "In fact, I think it would be dangerous if I did this procedure today. You're not born with a lipoma unless there's something else going on."
A couple of days after this, Taylor returned to get her results. Dr Lee was surprised to find out that Taylor had a condition called lipomeningocele in which a patient has a deposit of fat or lipoma inside the spinal cord. While Dr Lee had her doubts about the surgery, she agrees to take out some of the fat but warns Taylor about how it could affect her spinal cord. "Remember now we know what this [bump] is connected to, and anything that causes trauma in this area could potentially damage your nerves that come out of your spinal cord," she said. Despite this, Taylor agrees to undergo the removal after consulting her father. While some of the lumps had still been there, the change had been drastic. Unlike before, Taylor's lipoma did not look like a tail. She was pleased to see the difference and assured Dr Lee that she would be spending the rest of her life in confidence.
'Dr Pimple Popper' returns on Thursdays at 10 pm ET on TLC.