Me On The Right With My Two Friends, Liz Nutton and Donna Poulin Presenting A Check To The Muscular Dystrophy Association. We Raised Money By Doing Three Dances With Me As The DJ Way Back In The Mid-Eighties. I was At About 375 lbs In This Picture. The Worst Was Yet To Come.
The anniversary of my weight loss surgery is coming up again. This year marks my tenth year anniversary. It’s hard to believe because the time has gone by so quickly and so much has happened. I wrote this a little while after I got the surgery but I never did much with it until now.
Now that I have my own blog, I thought I would share it with 27 loyal readers. I hope you like it.
I began the journey into my new life by being pretty useless. When I say that, people tend to get very angry with me because they think I am putting myself down. But those who have been through this journey, know exactly what I’m talking about. I’m just stating facts.
Please keep in mind that I was 500 hundred pounds. I will forgive you if you take a moment to put your eyes back in your head. In the meantime, I will say that that was a pretty good size if I do say so myself. I like to think that it took a lot of work to get there, but it really didn’t. Not unless you call driving to the Chinese food take-out hard. I will try to describe what it was like to be that heavy.
Because I weighed that much, there was hardly anything I could do without a great deal of effort. I couldn’t stand up for more than half a minute. To walk from one room to another, I had to stop at least once. My back hurt constantly and I was always out of breath because by the way, I also smoked about two packs aday. Other than that, I was fine.
When we moved into our house back in 1990, my wife and I agreed there would be no smoking in the house. That was easy for her to say because she had already quit. If I wanted to have a smoke, I would go down to the basement or out on the deck. Before you start pumping your fist in the air, shouting “Well, it was your house too!” keep in mind that I smoked just about everywhere else we went especially when we went on vacation and she never complained. So it was a fair deal.
Going down the stairs was relatively easy simply because weight rolls downhill faster. But, coming back up was another matter. There is an area above the stairs that has a shelf where I put my keys, wallet etc. Back then; it also became my leaning post.
Just walking up that short flight (five steps) would leave me breathless and I would have to stop to try to compose myself. When I caught my breath, I would stumble on over to my recliner.
If I wanted to do something around the house that involved multiple tasks, I would try to figure out how to do them all in one shot. For instance, let’s say I tried to clear off the table after dinner. I would look at the table and say ‘Okay, if I take all the stuff that needs to go in the refrigerator and possibly carry the plates as well, I won’t have to go back and forth three times.” Either way, it would take me about 15 minutes to do it. I became very adept at multi tasking.
Because our bed had wooden slats beneath the mattresses, like most normal beds, I could not lay on it because when I did. the slats would collapse. Neither my wife nor I thought that dealing with that every night would be that amusing, so I decided to sleep on a futon we had in our living room. Since it was extremely difficult to fold up every morning, we never did and it laid flat 24/7. This caused us to lose space in half the room.
I got used to it’s hardness after a while but because but I also had sleep apnea, a sleep disorder which is just another delightful by-product of being very overweight, I would wake up literally every two hours. Even if I slept for longer than that, I would still wake up exhausted. It was like I never slept at all because I wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Even though I was laying down, because I was so big, my weight constricted my air passages.
A lot of times, I slept in in my recliner either on purpose or because I passed out there. Most times, if I sat in my recliner (or anywhere else for that matter) to watch TV or something, I would immediately fall asleep. And would be a deep, deep sleep. Normally, when a normal person starts to nod off, he can feel himself getting drowsy and finally passing out.
But, with this, it was like flicking a light switch, it was that instant. Also, because of the sleep apnea (and rotten sinuses) I snored like a jet engine. I was definitely a window rattler.
My wife couldn’t enjoy watching TV with me sawing wood like that and although she never really said anything, I could tell that she was angry or frustrated. I can’t blame her. Many times, I found her in the living room watching the TV or trying to read in there because I sounded like a buzz saw.
I did get a better sleep there than on the futon, but the problem with it was that my legs would swell to the size of caveman’s clubs. They would swell so much that I couldn’t put on my shoes because they didn’t fit. They were loafers; by the way because I couldn’t bend down to tie regular shoes. If I was lying down, they weren’t too bad. (Who am I kidding? They just a centimeter smaller.) But, if I sat for any length of time, it was worse. Patti would call my feet ‘pillow feet.’
On the days when I managed to go to work, to walk from my car to my desk, which is a distance of about fifty or sixty yards, became an effort of epic proportions. I got a company handicapped sticker using my back as an excuse, from work so I could be closer to the building. But I would still have to stop at least four times. God forbid if I forgot my ID badge in the car! I used to check for it constantly because one of my worst nightmares would be to haveto walk back to my car to retrieve it.
Next to the entrance, there was a little stockade fence that I would sit and rest on. How that thing held me up is a true testament to the wonders of Mother Nature. Who knew wood could be that strong? So I would sit there vainly pretending that I was having one last cigarette before going in. In reality, I was sitting there so I could catch my breath, praying that my back would stop hurting. Then the trek to my desk would begin.
Realize now that my desk was only about a hundred feet from the back door but I managed to find everything there was to lean on. I would stop at the postage vending machine. I would lean on the wall moldings because I could put my arm on it as well as resting on the wagons sitting in the hall waiting to be taken out to the loading dock.
I then would reach my desk and lean against the filing cabinet to catch my breath. To go to the cafeteria, which was the same distance, but further away, was unthinkable. But, it didn’t stop me from asking someone to get me something while they were going there. I really couldn’t do it on my own.
I was living in a constant state of denial. I would bitch constantly about how much my back hurt. I deluded myself into thinking it was because my father also had very bad back problems and I had just inherited it which actually turned out to be partially true. But carrying around five hundred pounds certainly didn’t help it. The difference was that he is a walking stick and I wasn’t. The only things I inherited from him besides that was allergies, rotten sinuses and a very strange sense of humor.
I really knew knew inside what the problem was. Deep down in the little nooks and crannies of my mind, there was that little voice constantly saying ‘You know what it is fender head. I wonder of there are any more potato chips left?’
Aiding in my delusion, my doctor at the time suggested I have some sort of an ultrasound test on my legs to find out why they were so swollen all the time. That test was lot of laughs. The procedure involves sticking these long needles into the affected area, namely my calves, and then sending a little shock though them. I swear I still have a twitch from it.
On top of that, the guy who administered it looked like he just crawled out of Frankenstein laboratory and he seemed to really enjoy his work just a little too much. I swear to God I thought I heard him giggling at one point. I kind of got the feeling that he secluded himself in his basement a lot, late at night, doing God knows what to small animals.
One day, I went to my doctor’s office yet again, complaining about my legs, back and just about everything else. I sat in his office extremely frustrated and said that I didn’t think anything is working, all the while wondering what I was going to have for lunch.
He tried to weigh me but his regular office scale didn’t go high enough, which is something I could have told him. He then tried having me straddle two regular scales, side by side, with one foot on each one to see if he could get a reading, but it didn’t work. He measured my legs and kind of pondered the problem. It was probably right then and there when he decided to stop feeding my delusions. Finally, he said, “I’ll be right back” and disappeared.
He came back with a scale. Only this time, it was a heavy duty one, not the little puny ones you see in any drug store. He told me to get on it.
Inside, I was having a not-so-mild panic attack because I knew I was finally going to have to face the problem head on. When you weigh that much, most people honestly have no idea exactly how much they weigh. Oh they have some faint notion (or fear) as to how much, but they really don’t know. Most of the time, if I had to make a choice of gouging my own eyes out and getting on a scale, the eyes would have lost.
I could have either got on it or turned around and hobbled on back to my car. But I thought, it’s now or never. I stepped on it and not only did I see what I really weighed, but it was about fifty pounds more than I thought. It was around 495 pounds.
I immediately broke down and cried. I felt like I the biggest failure in the world. How could I have done this to myself? He left me alone for a minute or so because he it was obvious that I was upset. When he came back, he just looked at me for a second as if saying, “Now you know what’s wrong.”
He told about a drug called Meridia that I could try and he gave me a prescription. He also told me about a doctor who did gastric bypass surgery and gave me his name and number. I asked if he thought the surgery would be the way to go and he just nodded as if to say, “Well, what the hell do you think?!” I asked him to let me try the Meridia first before I make any rash decision. I knew the Meridia wouldn’t work but inside, I was scared out of my mind. An emotional wreck.
I came home and told wife and what the doctor said. I didn’t tell her how upset I was, but she knew. In spite of my sometime outgoing personality, I also have a very quiet side. When I have something very important on my mind, I am not very talkative and I just kind of sat there contemplating my life.
I told her about the surgery but it was sort of dropped, or so I thought. I tried the Meridia and it did nothing. Probably because of my mental state. I just wasn’t ready for yet another in a long line of weight loss products.
After a day or so, we did start talking about the surgery and how it might help. The thought of it scared the daylights out of me because I never have had a broken bone or anything and I certainly have never had surgery. However, I also knew that for me, it was my only chance.
My wife is not the type of woman who will constantly nag at me and I thank God for that. But, she also knows when I don’t want to deal with something, I will put it off forever. Years before this, when I was putting off making a doctor’s appointment for a checkup I needed to have for insurance, she knew exactly what I was doing. I was putting off the appointment because overweight people and doctors are natural enemies. I will never forget the time I went to an emergency room with what turned out to be pneumonia and the doctor said to me “You know, if you weren’t so big, you would be having this problem.” For pneumonia!
Instead of bugging me about it, she came into the living room while I was watching TV and said, “What are you doing on the seventeenth?” I said, “I don’t know.” She said “Well, you better keep it open because you have to see the doctor. I just made an appointment for you.”
Somebody else probably would have gotten angry, but I just had to sit there and laugh to myself because I knew she was right. If it weren’t done for me, it would not have happened. I didn’t want to deal with it and thought if I ignored it long enough, it would just go away.
She did not nag me about it, but it was constantly in the back of my mind. Could this be the answer? Well, maybe. But as every overweight person knows, I was just afraid to raise my hopes up that high. I would think that either it or I would just fail again and I would be right back where I started. So waht would be the point?Did I have the strength to deal with it both mentally and physically again? I wasn’t so sure.
She would ask me if I called the surgeon at least to talk about it and I would say no, I haven’t gotten around to it. I would tell he I was busy and forgot, like I had such vast social life. Whenever I came upstairs and complaining that I was out of breath, she would gently ask me again. Whenever I complained about my back hurting, she would ask me again. Not angry, mind you, just asking.
Next; The Decision Is Made
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