You don't just wake up one day, decide to have weight loss surgery, make an appointment, and go in. Before the surgeon agrees to do the surgery, and perhaps more importantly, before the insurance company approves coverage, you need to go through an extensive battery of tests: blood work, GP, psychiatric consult, endoscopy, nuclear cardiac stress test, pulmonary function test, ultrasound, nutritionist, pre-op educational session and of course, pre-surgical clearance. Managing all these appointments, along with a full-time job, can be tough, which is probably why on Thursday morning I had a total melt down and cancelled two doctors' appointments I had that day.
(Reminder to self, don't ever schedule anything more taxing than a pedicure the week leading up to the biggest fundraising event in our annual calendar. Our golf invitational, which nets over $135,000, is tomorrow. We are over-subscribed, players are changing by the minute, silent auction gifts are still coming on, and, oh, there is a monsoon going on.)
Back to the topic at hand...
Even harder than managing all this is the repetitive questioning, which over time become humiliating: how much do you weigh (too much)? How tall are you (not tall enough)? How long have you been overweight (forever)? When/how did you gain all that weight (I don't know).
That last question has proven to be the most vexing. Before, when I was "normal" weight, I would see obese people and wonder how they let themselves get so big? Didn't they see the scale inching upward? Why didn't they stop? Now, I know.
I didn't see myself getting so big. Sure, I gained weight in college - the dreaded freshman fifteen, and then got back to running, stopped eating every carb offered in the cafeteria. In grad school, where I was absolutely miserable, I stopped eating, ran and did aerobics obsessively. I started working at a local gym, and began weight training, too. I returned to my undergraduate alma mater for a year, working first in the training room and then the alumni office. My roommates were undergrads, and athletes, and our meals were comprised of more junk food and ice cream than lean proteins and veggies, and the weight started creeping back on.
My first "real" job was running a call center for Georgetown University as part of their multi-million dollar fundraising campaign. My compensation package included an expense fund, and my colleagues and I would go to a local restaurant late afternoon every day for a big meal before we started calling at 5:00 pm. We would work until 11 or so, go out for a drink, go home to bed, and start all over again. I started gaining, slowly at first, until I realized I was 30 pounds overweight. By then I had amore normal job, was eating on a regular schedule, started running, and found Weight Watchers. I lost all my excess weight and kept it off long enough to become a life member. I even started leading WW meetings as a sub.
I maintained my weight loss for a good period of time, even keeping it off once I move to New Jersey. I continued to run, started to ski, and even bought a bicycle, which I eventually took to China for a two-week tour with friends. I was active, healthy, and happy. Then things started to break.
First, it was my heart. I had moved to NJ believing that I was in love with a man who lived there, and if we just lived closer to one another, we would marry. Well, that didn't happen, and I didn't take it well. I started drinking (not obsessively, but more than I should), which then lead to my loosening control over my eating habits. And as most people know, when you are drinking, or are hung over, you don't want carrots and celeries. You want McDonald's.
Then I broke my wrist, followed by my hip. While the former kept me out of the gym for several weeks, the latter kept me sedentary for almost two years, between the first surgery to fix the break, and the second to remove the pins. The pounds started coming on fast and furious, and I was soon hovering around 180. I was so excited when a colleague from work, who had lost 60 pounds, told me about phen-fen. I tried it and loved it! I was down 30 pounds before they pulled it from the market. But I had never really embraced healthy eating, so I quickly gained them all back and then some.'
During that time, I was going through a lot of change -- new jobs, new homes, new relationships, and then 9/11. When the planes hit the World Trade Center, I was working as a fundraising consultant for the Red Cross, and was asked to help with the disaster recovery. That first day, I set up a calling center, and all missing persons calls were directed to me. It soon became clear that the calls I was fielding were for people who had been seen last on the higher floors of the Twin Towers. In the months to come, I would check names off my list as I read about them in the New York Times' "Lives Remembered" section.
Those names, and that experience, haunted me, until I had a complete meltdown on an airplane from Newark to New Orleans on my first Katrina recovery trip. I was flying a three-seats-across plane, and had a panic attack that was so severe I asked the flight attendant if they could land the plane and let me off. She had obviously dealt with this before, though, and lined up a bunch of airplane bottles of gin in front of me, even though it was just 9:00 in the morning. A kind doctor in NOLA prescribed me with anti-anxiety meds that enabled me to get on a return plane 10 days later, and see my physician in NJ who prescribed me with PTSD. My way of dealing with that was to eat.
I never went back to running or biking, though I did work with a personal trainer for a while. I climbed Crough Padraig, the tallest mountain in Ireland. I also tore the cartilage in both knees, and had surgery on both, about two years apart. After that, I was never able to really get back on track. I watched the needle on the scale go up, but my everyday life didn't seem affected. I was still, for the most part, able to do what I wanted.
Unconsciously, though, I cheated, using my parents and my cousin Don, who had Parkinsons, as a way to hide whatever limitations I had. I was the one who always stayed with them, walked slower, took cabs, or used golf carts to get from one place to another. Somehow, I didn't realize that I too was now relying on them, not able to get around on my own.
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