There is not only one story anymore. There are three versions: the mocking story Felix told Ann two years ago, Ann’s memory of it, and my version. Since I was the victim of Rufmord, I am now following with my story of how I remember the last vet visit, shedding light into the darkness of my weight. Not the emotional weight, dear reader. We are now talking about the pure physical weight I carry in my body.
So let me remember clearly, to make the echoes in my head stop: They brought me back to the vet. Not for punishment. Not for redemption. Just a routine check-up. Vaccination day is a little side quest. I took the needle with dignity while Schmutz hissed at the vet when he pricked her.
Felix carried me like precious cargo. Ann whispered encouragement like a stage mother before a doomed ballet solo. Schmutz came, too, ready to leap from exam tables and into the nearest potted plant. It blinked. It beeped. It settled.
I endured the scale.
Then—silence.
Ann asked the question that had haunted our household ever since that visit: “At what point, precisely, would Franzi be considered unhealthy?”
The vet glanced at me, then at the number. He smiled. “She’s perfect.”
Perfect.
I blinked. Schmutz sneezed. Felix adjusted his scarf. Ann frowned.
“But last time, you called her in danger of being fat,” she said.
The vet looked confused. “I would never say that.”
Ah. So it begins.
The Revisionist History of the Exam Room
It turns out memory is a slippery thing. Especially when it’s wrapped in shame and lit by fluorescent ceiling panels, Ann insists she heard it. The phrase. The judgment. The sting.
But the vet denies everything. And now Ann’s spiraling.
“Maybe it wasn’t that bad,” she mutters while brushing glitter from Schmutz’s fur.
“Maybe Felix made it up or imagined it.”
Did he? Or is this the tidy ribbon society ties around weight bias once the scale says you’re ‘normal’?
The Tyranny of the Moving Goalpost
You see, health is a narrative. And, like all good stories, it gets revised. When the numbers align, past slurs get erased. Suddenly, you were never judged. Suddenly, you were never called a potato-based armored vehicle. Suddenly, the shame is yours alone to bear.
But I remember.
I remember the vet tech’s laugh.
I remember the cartoon tater-tank that haunted my dreams.
The Internalized Glitter of Shame
Ann is caught in a loop now. She doubts Felix, the vet, or even me.
“Maybe she just meant Franzi’s… build.”
My build is aerodynamic. My build is Art Deco meets Predator Drone. My build is not up for public interpretation.
But when society gaslights your memories, even your allies forget the sting.
Reclaiming the Pommes Panzer
Maybe I was never called it. Perhaps the phrase came from the swirling soup of anxiety and defense. Maybe Schmutz whispered jokes in Ann’s ear to mask her fear of the scale.
But that doesn’t erase how I felt.
The shame was real.
The silence in that exam room was absolute.
And so is the quiet victory of returning there—healthy, dignified, unbothered.
So here I stand. Sleek. Triumphant. Possibly heavier than last year. More powerful.
Let the record show:
The Pommes Panzer lives.
Not as an insult but as a legend.
A symbol of resistance against medical microaggressions, family-scale doubt, and the erasure of feelings not written on paper.
And if you’re reading this while your vet shrugs and your loved ones reframe your pain as “drama,” let me say it clearly:
You’re not too much.
You’re just enough.
And you’re not alone.
—Franzi
