Living FAT - The Hard Way

I’m here to tell you about my journey that led me to have Gastric Bypass Surgery and why. I will have to break it into sections so please excuse the length. Comments are always welcome.

Introduction:

You’ve seen the shows on DISCOVERY CHANNEL about ‘Christy’s Story’ and the 750 pound man. There are more and more clinics, doctors and practitioners rushing to perform this operation on thousands of people. In most cases it is a legitimate need, others, well, it is questionable.

Some of the more famous that have undergone Gastric Bypass Surgery are:

• Al Roker, Today Show’s host, secretly had his gastric bypass.
• Carnie Wilson from Wilson Phillips.
• Sharon Osborne - Yes, Ozzy Osborne’s wife
• Star Jones from The View
• Rosanne Barr. We know here from Rosanne the sitcom & more.
• John Popper from Blues Traveler
• Randy Jackson, an American Idol judge.

I am sure there are more.

I’ve listened to so many people say that having gastric bypass surgery performed is the easy way out to losing weight. Of course, those people were not fat.

Let me be the first to dispel the myth right now. There is nothing easy about getting your insides rearranged in such a way that for the rest of your life, you are going to most likely be anemic, have to take injections of B12 monthly and quite literally make yourself sick if you eat too much carbohydrates or happen to swallow a  bite of food that wasn’t chewed properly. Surviving surgery means having to retrain yourself about eating and how food plays a role in your life as well as learning to cope with the good and the bad without turning to food for comfort.

It isn’t easy to be told by a doctor that you have less than a year to live. It isn’t easy to hear from the surgeon that you have less than a 40% chance of making it off the operating table or if you do, there is still a chance you could die from a blood clot or worse yet, peritonitis. It isn’t easy to fill out your Last Will and Testament in your mid 30’s on the advice of medical professionals. It isn’t easy to hear a rescue squad member tell a fellow volunteer that they are going to need help lifting or that performing CPR on you would be literally impossible because of you being so fat.

In daily life, it isn’t easy watching people stare at you, kids point at you and say, ‘mommy, look at that fat man.’ You can’t blame the children. They are only mirroring what they have been taught.

It makes a person feel bad when they can’t sit just anywhere in public. I was always on the lookout for sturdy seating. Never rattan furniture, never chairs with sides, never a booth in a restaurant and never going to a theater that didn’t have a bench seat in the last row. I’ve always had to be careful with folding chairs. I’ve only flown a couple of times paying DOUBLE FARE because of my weight.

Grocery shopping was a chore. I had to take a sturdy folding chair with me to the local grocer and sit down at the end of each aisle to catch my breath. There are a few stores that offer benches now, but I remember many times I would have given anything to sit and rest.

I was fortunate in that my weight although crippling was not bad enough that I was bed bound. I was able to go places in a modified pickup truck in which the back of the seat had been removed and pushed back to allow me to still drive.

When did my weight become an issue? Could it have been avoided? Was it genetic? More questions than answers. Lets go back to the beginning. My childhood.

The early years:

I remember the first time I set foot in school. Kindergarten, my first exposure to peers and the school system was in the fall of 1968. I wasn’t aware that I had a weight problem at such an early age, but I was tipping the scales then at nearly 90lbs when we had to all go to the nurses office for height and weight assessment. I didn’t know that I was ‘different’.  It wasn’t long before I started to realize that I couldn’t keep up with the other kids. I started to hate gym class and everything to do with school.

During the first few years of school, the pounds kept piling on, and my classmates would get more and more hateful, spiteful and downright mean. In third or fourth grade, my family doctor prescribed pills and I was instructed to take them 3 times a day, even in school. At that time, you had to go to the school nurse in order to take medicine. That lasted all of one whole week.

You know how cruel children can be at taunting the outcast. I was labeled the fat kid. I know all of the words to ‘fatty, fatty two by four’ by heart. They are seared into my mind to this day.

By 16 I had already surpassed 300 pounds and it seemed like I was just going to keep getting bigger and bigger. By this time the seeds had been planted and I was reaping the rewards of so much guilt, fear, anger and mental anguish that I would get up and eat in the middle of the night, just because.  In high school, the pressures seem to magnify tenfold. I still had only two or three friends and to everyone else I was introverted. I didn’t date. I found solace with food and only food.

Throughout junior high and high school. I had maintained an interest in tinkering with wires, speakers and electronic devices and against the advice of a guidance counselor who wanted me to just take local vocational training, I took my SAT’s and got into a technical college.

At age 20, I graduated tech school with a 2.79 GPA and was past 450 lbs. This had a profound impact on my ability to find a job. I was told that big companies would hire me.  Texas Instruments, Boeing Aerospace, and a bevy of recruiters would come to the college placement office, but for some reason, I was not hired on. Most times the excuse was given that my GPA was below 3.0.  I wasn’t the best of the best, so to speak. Regardless, the placement office kept sending me on interviews and I kept comig back with refusals.

I had an interview with a local copier repair shop owner one day. He talked to me on the phone prior to my interview and things seemed to be looking up. My hopes were dashed when he told me the following words after my interview. He said that off the record, I would not get the job because of my weight. He pointed out that his company was to be represented by people that looked a certain way and that I didn’t fit in. He also informed me at this point that if anything was said to anyone, he would deny my whole story. I was young and job discrimination wasn’t a word that I had learned about yet. At this point I gave up. Even though the school offered lifetime job placement, I never went back.

To be continued…