How did I decide I wanted this surgery? It was actually a set of events that covered several years.
First off, my friend R. had roux en y gastric bypass. She talked about it a lot on her blog. It was a tough process for her, obviously, but she had good success with it. I have never had good success with any form of weight loss, so I was intrigued-- but the horror stories about surgeries gone bad were scary, and roux en y was pretty new, and I was leery. Still, it sat in the back of my mind.
Fast forward a couple of years, to the height of my association with Evil Ex Romantic Interest. From observing his patterns with other people close to him over several years, I knew my weight was likely the only "big thing" (bad joke, right) keeping him from trying out a relationship with me, and despite all that careful observation I had not yet allowed myself to realize what a disaster that kind of relationship with him would have been; I thought I had it in me to make ours end differently if he'd just give it a try. With this kind of faulty thinking buoying me to attempt desperate measures to get inside his britches, I formed the idea that I would go ahead and get the surgery if my current diet didn't work.
Within a couple of months, though, this fellow had changed from handsome prince to evil ex, and as a result of that and ongoing job/life woes, I went into a major clinical depression. Weight loss surgery got put on the back burner again, and I gained a LOT. :P Antidepressants will do that to ya. My pre-existing PCOS, hypothyroid, and fatty liver conditions will, too. Put them all together and you wind up with about three good-sized human beings walking around on one set of very unhappy feet.
After about two years of recovery from my severance of relations with the evil ex, I learned one of my friends, K., had undergone gastric sleeve surgery. She had really good results and recommended it highly; I could see how much better she felt-- and psychologically, too, not just physically. She was a different person, and a much happier one. Definitely food for thought, because frankly, from where I am now, I can see the end of the road coming fast, and it involves a lot of misery, culminating very prematurely in a size 4X coffin and some very unhappy pallbearers.
Then I came in to work one day and my co-worker M. was in the hall. I hadn't seen M. out from behind her desk for a long time and was flabbergasted to see only about 1/2 as much of her as I'd expected. "What are you doing? I need to be doing it too!" I said, and she referred me to the local city hospital's weight management center.
Thus started the long road I've only gone a few steps down, so far.
Right now I tend to think of bariatric surgery as a sort of "magic bullet." That's when a cop gets wounded in a way that puts him on easy street; he winds up not having to fight crime on the street anymore, and he can draw hefty disability payments and do more or less whatever he wants, if he's able-- but wow, there's a lot of serious nastiness you have to go through to get there, and a considerable amount of crap you endure as side effects for the rest of your life. So yeah. I know there's going to be a lot of unpleasantness, but when it all settles out, things will (I hope) be a hell of a lot nicer than they are now, in ways that really matter.
Next time: The First Meeting, plus Big Insurance Companies Are Heartless Bastards.
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