So, if you’ve read my first post, then you’re probably
wondering “Why the hell did she wait so long to get Bariatric Surgery?”
I mean, I did give explicit details of my life long weight
gain.
Well, it was a great mixture of things, to be honest.
The easiest of which to explain is my job. I am currently a Legal Secretary with really
good insurance (the surgery will only cost me $200 out of pocket). Compared to the retail job I held for six
years before this and the towing clerk job I held before that, I simply didn’t
get paid enough coupled with my insurance benefits to be able to afford it.
But my choice not to have surgery sooner was by far a more
intellectual and emotional one.
At first, I didn’t trust it.
It was a new procedure, and I simply hadn’t seen or heard enough about
it to trust that it was safe or that it would work long term. At the time, I was still in the 20’s sizes
also, and still confident I’d *eventually* get down to a safe weight on my own.
By the time my mom went for the gastric bypass surgery about
eight years ago, the surgery was becoming a little more prominent and already
had a reputation for being safe and relatively successful. I was already wearing size 32 clothing and
getting close to my 30 years old, so I was beginning to think about it, but I
was easily deterred when we ran into a couple of post-op patients that had
resumed their old ways and easily put all of their weight back on. A teacher of mine had recovered from gastric
bypass and successfully lost all of her excess weight – but then received a
cancer diagnosis. Due to her surgery,
treating her cancer was a little more complicated, and that worried me
too. I was no longer untrusting of the
surgery itself…just whether or not I was desperate enough to take that step.
I watched my mom struggle at first with her post-op
diet. She was miserable for quite some
time. But, immediately and rapidly, the
pounds began to fall off and she suddenly felt it was all worth it, and I began
to look at the surgery in a different light.
That was until I watched my mom do what I was most afraid
of. She was depending upon a side effect
called “Dumping” to ease her need for sweets.
Dumping occurs when a post op patient east something that
doesn’t agree with them – mostly sugary things.
The post-op patient can become violently ill, either throwing up or
experiencing diarrhea as their body violently tries to expel what they have
eaten. It’s a relatively common side
effect of Roux-en-Y surgery (aka:
Gastric Bypass).
My mom was one of the lucky ones but, without dumping to
help sway her from eating her beloved sweets, she quickly resumed her old
habits. Don’t get me wrong her appetite
definitely decreased and I never saw her finish a meal again. But, knowing she couldn’t eat much just meant
that she saved her appetite for her candies and cookies and cakes and
pastries. For days at a time, I’d see
her eat nothing else with any real nutritional value.
Her weight loss slowed.
Stopped.
Then reversed.
I witnessed firsthand what the surgery could do. I also witnessed how easily you could
override it’s success if you were not 1000% ready to commit to it.
I considered it.
I carefully tried to imagine myself eating only a half a cup
at a time. I carefully tried to imagine
how my life would change. In my mind’s
eye, I attended birthday parties and dinner with friends. I turned down the soda. I declined the cake. I ordered the plain chicken breast.
And the idea of it all made me desperately anxious. In that instant, I knew two things: I was not ready for bariatric surgery, and I
fully felt the weight of my unhealthy obsession with food.
The idea of being so terribly limited made me feel as if a
very dear, lifelong friend were preparing to
move far, far away.
I was literally experiencing the most severe separation
anxiety I had ever known.
I was no longer against it, but I had developed the
understanding that it was a tool – not a fix.
My weight problem was not in the size of my stomach, but in
the way I looked at and related to food.
Slicing off part of my stomach would do nothing to heal my mind and help
me get a healthy outlook on what food is and what food does.
Like my mom, I could not rely on intense side-effects to
cure me of my affliction. My body was a
vehicle – my mind the horse that pulled the cart. Priorities first – I had to cure my mind.
As I said previously – there were a good four or five years
where my mom and dad were both in hospitals 30 miles apart. When they weren’t in the hospital, they were
home and relying on me to care for them.
I dieted here and there. I
exercised here and there. I lost and
gained weight. But, I wasn’t simply too
distracted to work on truly healing myself.
I witnessed firsthand what the surgery could do. I also witnessed how easily you could
override its success if you were not 1000% ready to commit to it.
I considered it.
I carefully tried to imagine myself eating only a half a cup
at a time. I carefully tried to imagine
how my life would change. In my mind’s
eye, I attended birthday parties and dinner with friends. I turned down the soda. I declined the cake. I ordered the plain chicken breast.
And the idea of it all made me desperately anxious. In that instant, I knew two things: I was not ready for bariatric surgery, and I
fully felt the weight of my unhealthy obsession with food.
The notion that I would no longer be able to be whatever I
wanted, whenever I wanted and how much of it I wanted depressed me terribly.
I was literally experiencing the most severe separation
anxiety I had ever known.
I was no longer against it, but I had developed the
understanding that it was a tool – not a fix.
My weight problem was not in the size of my stomach, but in
the way I looked at and related to food.
Slicing off part of my stomach would do nothing to heal my mind and help
me get a healthy outlook on what food is, what food does or the healthier way I
needed to view it.
Like my mom, I could not rely on intense side-effects to
cure me of my affliction. My body was a
vehicle – my mind the horse that pulled the cart. Priorities first – I had to cure my mind.
As I said previously – there were a good four or five years
where my mom and dad were both in hospitals 30 miles apart. When they weren’t in the hospital, they were
home and relying on me to care of them.
I dieted here and there. I
exercised here and there. I lost and
gained weight. But, I was simply too
distracted to work on truly healing myself.
One day, I woke up with a severe lower back ache and, when I
tried to get out of bed, my knees hurt and throbbed. I hobbled, bent halfway over, leaning on my
dresser, my walls and the doorframe for support as I attempted to make my way
to the bathroom and it hit me – I am too young to be living like this.
I think a lot of overweight people have these thoughts at
random moments. You think of what you
have suffered because of your weight.
You think of the things you’ve given up in the name of food. You vow to make changes. You decide that this time, you will not fail.
I’ve been there. I’ve
done that.
It wasn’t working.
At the same time, there was my mom.
By January of 2016, my mom was reliant on oxygen canisters
and a wheelchair. There were other
health factors affecting her quality of life – but her weight was definitely
one of them.
Her very active social life diminished to staying home with
the cats all the time. Taking her out to
doctor’s appointments or family gatherings became a carefully orchestrated
dance between her, my father and I that would take at least 30 – 45 minutes to
get her to the car and another 30 – 45 minutes to get her out of it. Despite tons of regulations, we discovered
that the world is still not a handicapped friendly place.
She was on blood thinners, her skin thin and mottled with
bruises. She’d lean on a door way while
we tried to get her wheelchair and oxygen in place, but she’d often fall from
weakness and exhaustion and tear open the thinning skin of her arms.
By the end of January, she had to fully rely on my father
and I to lift her from her recliner. To
walk her to the bathroom. Her legs
trembled when she attempted to stand.
She was only 64 years old but her vibrant, outgoing, funny,
amazing, silly, caring, crazy, talkative, social personality had slowly gotten
buried beneath the layers of unhealthy eating.
Near the end of March, I was visiting my mom in the
hospital. At the time, I wasn’t too
worried – hospitalizations had become a common occurrence, so it never crossed
my mind that this could be her last. She
needed to use the restroom, so she and I set about the arduous task of sitting
her up in bed, bringing her legs over the side and angling the wheelchair into
position. I leaned over, wrapping her
arms around my neck as I wrapped mine around her waist. My lower back trembled in response – the bulk
of our weight straining it painfully, but I knew better than to make a sound or
let her know it hurt.
Once on her feet, I pivoted, angling her rear for the chair
and slowly…painfully, setting her down into it before wheeling her the teen
feet to the hospital bathroom, where we reversed the maneuver to sit her onto
the toilet seat.
There was a stabbing pain in my lower back, but I knew I’d
have to do this procedure at least two more times to get her back into
bed. I said nothing, but she knew from
the way I stood, bent, stretched and leaned against the doorframe that I was in
pain. Neither of us addressed it, but I
saw the guilt in her eyes.
I got her back into her wheelchair, wheeled her once again
to her bedside and bent down to lift her.
As she stood, the arms she had around my next shifted downward, her
embrace slowly morphing into one of her patented Carol hugs. Come to think of it…in this moment, as I
write…I realize it was the last time she ever really hugged me.
But I digress.
She hugged me tightly.
I could feel her trembling in my arms as her legs and back struggled to
support her weight, trying not to give out.
She apologized. “I know you’re
back hurts, baby, and I’m so very, very sorry.”
She kissed my cheek over and over again, as if she could kiss my back
pain away. Of course, I told her it was
okay and that I was perfectly fine; just glad I could help.
A moment later, as her legs grew wobbly from the exertion,
we pivoted her back into bed. As she sat
down, her hands found mine and squeezed tight.
Her eyes were terrified pools.
I will never forget the look on her face.
“I’m scared. I’m so
scared. I can’t do anything for
myself. I can’t remember things. I can’t think right….”
There are so very many wonderful, amazing, beautiful things
about my mom that I strive to be like; but young, ill, terrified and dependent
on other people is not one of them.
As I’ve said – who knows how much her weight attributed to
her death and how much genetics and life and accidents and injuries and illness
were at play.
But, I think of myself.
My inability to move. My daily
aches and pains. The way I struggle to
breathe.
I am many of the wonderful things that
my mom was. I have her kind heart. I have her outgoing personality. I have her crazy, silly, wacky sense of
humor and her desire to do anything to make other smile or laugh. But, how much of that is getting buried beneath
the stupid choices I am making?
I compared my life now to my teenage years and began to
realize how much I was losing. No…how
much I’ve lost. I began to think of the
things I would do or could do if I lost weight…the things I won’t or can’t do
now because of it.
There came a time when my family and I had to decide if we
would keep my mom alive on ventilators and dialysis and iv’s…or whether we
would remove her from them and allow her to rest.
I was the strongest advocate for her quality of life. If anyone believed she could recover and have
a true
quality of life, I argued, that I’d be all for continuing the fight.
But we all knew there were simply not enough miracles. The best we could hope for was existence…and
we wanted so much better for my beautiful mother.
So, we let her go.
Everyone says she’s in a “better place”.
We sure as hell hope so.
But now, she’s left me behind and I realize I need to fight
for my own quality of life as much as I defended hers.
It different for everyone; the proverbial “straw that breaks
the camel’s back”.
I guess, this is the best way I can explain mine.
Please be kind.
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