Well, here I am the night before my weightloss surgery, which was a Mini Gastric Bypass. I had the surgery on 7/5/07, in Davenport, Florida. My surgeon is the wonderful Dr. Cesare Peraglie. He is the most skilled and caring doctor I have ever encountered.
In a nutshell, I started out at 256lbs, and have lost 94lbs so far. I have about 26 lbs to go before I reach my goal. But hey! I'm really getting ahead of myself.... Let me back up a little and give you the whole story.
I started life as a nice little 7lb baby. (Told you it'd be the whole story!) Looking back at pictures, I see a nice little toddler girl, just the perfect size. My dad was tall and slim, with big muscles from being a working man. My mom was always slim back then, about 103lbs when she married my dad. So, you'd think I had all the right genes for being a nice skinny person right? Wrong! Around 5 years old, I started getting chunky, and just kept going in that direction. I don't remember eating more than other kids, nor do I remember playing less. I just remember being bigger. Not only was I fatter, but I was taller. I was usually the tallest kid in my class. Remember when they would line us up for picture day? Yeah, that was me - first in line every time. I was actually taller than my 2nd grade teacher, but I will say she was pretty short.
I reached my full height of 5'5" in the fifth grade, and weighed in at 175lbs. Some 5th grader, huh? At least that was my weight in the first quarter of school. I still have the report card that my mom wrote back to the teacher, "Please refrain from listing Susan's weight on her report card, as it causes teasing by her brothers and sister."
I will say that even though I have struggled with my weight all these years, I do feel blessed. I don't remember the teasing much. We got a new teacher during 5th grade, when our regular teacher died suddenly. This new teacher was young, pretty, and heavy! I can still remember hearing the swish-swish-swish of her hose when she walked. Needless to say, I loved her! She was a great role model for me. She made it ok for me to be "bigger". I was even voted president of my class that year, after running against some skinny girls. I was smart and fun and either kids were afraid I'd sit on them, or they just liked me....I was never lacking for friends.
As time went on my weight climbed. I'm sure I was around 200+ for all of high school. Even though I had friends, and many of them boys, I didn't really have a boyfriend. That was not so fun. I tried many diets. I remember going to a TOPS group with my mom and sister. I would always lose a few pounds, but never anything major. I hated gym class. Those gym uniforms -AWWW! I had cellulite before anyone knew what it was. (And believe me, I don't remember seeing it on any other teenaged girl!) But hey! I could sing and I was at the top of my class. I was always active and had lots of fun, so being overweight didn't hold me back. In addition, I had committed my life to Christ at 13, and I credit the Lord for giving me a sense of worth and the knowledge that I was loved- regardless of my weight.
After high school, I did go on one diet that caused me to really lose some weight. I must have weighed about 215lbs, and went on a doctor supervised diet called the Modified Protein Sparing Diet. I can still remember what I ate. It was basically a boring starvation diet, but I did it and lost 60 lbs in 4 months. I remember getting down to 155 or so...but never to 150. I probably stayed at that weight for a month or so...still have the pictures.
Over the next 10 years I bounced around from 160 to 250 to 170 to 200...joined Weight Watchers over and over, never reached goal. By 1989 I was around 170 or so, having done a stint with WW, and I maintained my weight by not eating, smoking and dancing the weekends away. I also hit the gym at work both during my lunch break, and after work. I was still overweight, but looked pretty good. And then I met Louie.
Ah, Louie, the love of my life. He is still today. It was nice to finally meet a guy who really loved me, and wanted to commit himself to me. Although we knew each other for about a year, I had no idea he was interested in me, as he had a girlfriend at the time. He was nice enough to set me up with his friend, but I later found out it was so he could see me! After he broke up with the girlfriend, he told me that he had been in love with me from the first night we met. He asked me to marry him on our first real date...and then proposed officially with a ring about 4 months later. We've been together and happy ever since, and he's loved me literally through thick and thin. Now, back to the story.
When Louie and I started dating in earnest, my gym sessions got less frequent...hey! I needed to be with my new love. And then I started cooking for him. He let me know one night that I hadn't been cooking enough, he was stopping at McDonalds after leaving my house, 'cause he was still hungry! Well, don't ever tell a southern woman you didn't get enough to eat at her house. I started cooking for 4, and we started eating for 4! At least that's what it seemed like. I also quit smoking right before we got married, so those pounds just started inching up.
Over the next 5 years, we struggled with infertility. I have no idea why, Louie had a son already, so it didn't seem to be a problem with him. It could have had something to do with my weight. I know PCOS is the big thing now, but it wasn't something they looked at back then. I was a DES baby myself, so it could have been that. Regardless of the reason, we couldn't get pregnant. I did get pregnant after taking some fertility drugs, but lost that baby at about 6 weeks. Several years later, we opted for invitro-fertilization, got pregnant with twins, but then lost them at 20 and 22 weeks. I was devastated. However, God blessed us a year later...we were miraculously pregnant, and finally had my beautiful boy. I was about 250lbs when I delivered him, and having only gained about 20 lbs while pregnant, and having an almost 8lb baby, I wore my regular pre-pregnancy shorts home from the hospital. I vowed to lose weight - my son would not have the fattest mommy in the kindergarten class!
Fast forward 5 years!!! Oh, so glad that boy was born in September! That gave me an extra year to take off the pounds, which had now crept up to 262. I explored gastric bypass surgery, went to the informational meetings, met folks who had surgery. At that time, the wait was about a year, and they advised you to see your doctor and get on a supervised diet, so that you could prove to your insurance company that you couldn't lose weight. So, off I went to see my doctor.
She asked me if the reason I was there was to have the surgery, or to lose the weight. I told her that I was interested in losing the weight, whether with the surgery or without it. Good. She had me diet for 3 weeks, doing a 1200 calorie-write it all down diet of my choice. I lost 11 lbs. She was pleased and felt that since I had done so well on my own, she would be willing to prescribe a diet drug for me. I began taking Adipex/Phentermine. It was wonderful. I was not hungry and was able to follow my 1200 calorie diet. I lost about 90 lbs over the next year, but still needed to lose another 40 or so pounds. Even at that weight, I was able to keep my promise to my son, and he did not have the fattest mommy in the kindergarten class! Yeah! But things seemed to be at a stand still.
I tried exercising, joined a gym, still hanging in there with my diet. My doctor had kept me on the Adipex for much longer than the recommended 3 months. She considered me her prize patient, as I had lost more than anyone else she had worked with. She even bragged about me to other doctors at a seminar on obesity; they were saying that the only long term solution to obesity was weightloss surgery. We both agreed it might not be the only solution, but it did seem that there should be something that you could continue to take on an ongoing basis that would allow you to lose all your weight, and keep it off. Since my weightloss had stalled for some time, she felt that maybe we should increase the dosage.
Well, I was going through a lot of stuff in my life at that time. I had retired early, was selling my house and preparing to move to North Carolina, and my husband almost died from a perforated colon. Needless to say, losing more weight was not high on my priority list. So, instead of upping my dosage, I weaned myself off the Adipex completely. And my metabolism knew it immediately. Pounds started packing back on, slowly but surely. I started buying bigger clothes and packing away the smaller ones. I was always going to get back to working on my weight - tomorrow.
Now even as a fat person, I was always very healthy, probably one of the healthiest people you could meet. The only problem I had was sleep apnea, which I developed while pregnant with my son. It went away when I lost the 90lbs, but as the pounds came back, so did the sleep apnea. Then age started to enter into the equation. I visited my doctor in early 2006, and at almost 48 years old, I got the Type II Diabetes diagnosis. No. Didn't think it would ever catch me, but it did. Oh, and did I mention the borderline High Blood Pressure? I vowed to lose weight and exercise it away, and being the good patient, got right to it.
I lost about 15lbs, and was being very good with following (again) a 1200 calorie diet, and exercising daily. Then, screech, I could hear the brakes hitting my weightloss. Try as I did, no more weight was coming off, although I had brought my sugar down to an acceptable level, about 120, and with the help of a mild diuretic my blood pressure seemed ok. I was thrilled with my lab reports, but not with my weight loss. So, I did what any good fat person does - I went back to my regular eating and lack of regular exercise...and watched the pounds return.
Now it was 2007, and I had watched my daughter-in-law's mother, her step dad and now herself as they underwent the Mini Gastric Bypass. They all lost weight, and seemed to have no problems with the surgery. My brother had been in a motorcycle accident, and after having both legs broken, he was anxious to lose weight, and offered to pay for my surgery if I would do it with him. I went to the informational meetings, decided I'd had enough time to try to do it without some help, and took him up on the offer. By summer, I was scheduled for surgery, with or without him, and it turned out to be without him. He's still thinking about it, but very proud of me.
I'll go more into details on the surgery in another post, but as I said above, I've lost 94lbs, and I feel great! My sleep apnea went away almost immediately, and my blood sugar is at 91. Life is good.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it!
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