Designated Fat Girl (18 page)

Watching on the sidelines, fully clothed while my kids swam, or trying to cover up my body with a T-shirt, was not going to work as my kids got older. And it wasn’t just water parks or Santa trains at the mall that I had to fear.

Before I had children, I learned that as a morbidly obese person, I had to avoid amusement parks at all costs. Growing up I had always loved visiting fairs and thrill rides, always game to try the latest and greatest roller coaster. As I started to gain weight, I suppose it didn’t occur to me that not all of these attractions would be available to me. When I’d reached about 250 pounds, Michael and I visited Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia. They had a brand-new roller coaster at the time called the Alpengeist—it was one of those that ran on rails above your head and your feet dangled down. The lines were long and the day was hot, but Michael and I were excited to ride, so we settled in for the wait. As I looked around, I started reading all the signs that said how the Alpengeist wasn’t for everyone and how you should avoid the ride if you were pregnant or had heart trouble.
Well duh,
I thought to myself. My own heart dropped to my knees, however, when I read the other signs. They said that “some larger passengers” might have difficulty fitting on the ride and that there was one row of seats reserved for “larger riders.” I gulped. I felt silly, because it hadn’t occurred to
me that I might not fit on the ride. I hadn’t had any trouble with the other coasters at the park, but this was a newer, fancier ride, and apparently it had restrictions. How would we know where the line for the larger seats was? Would I have to humiliate myself and ask? Plus, could I even bring myself to tell Michael I was worried about such a thing? I looked at him while he people-watched, oblivious to my worry. I made a comment about having a headache, trying to set the stage for a possible bailout.

As we inched closer, I strained to see where the larger seats were and which line we needed to go to in order to get them. I didn’t see any signs, so I just started to look for “the larger people,” and sure enough I noticed the beefier men tended to go to the row in the middle. As deftly as I could, I steered Michael toward that middle row, waiting for him to figure out what was going on. He was oblivious. As we stood and waited, I wondered what would happen if I was too big for the fat seats. Would I be asked to step off the ride? Surely that had happened before, but I couldn’t even begin to imagine it happening to me. I would be so devastated, so embarrassed. My heart pounded and I felt nauseous. Michael finally commented on how quiet I was, but then went on to tease that it must be because I was scared of the ride. I played along, not wanting him to know the real reason for my fear. All I wanted to do was throw up and run away.

It was finally our turn. I got into the fat seat and held my breath while we waited for the harness to automatically come down. Mine did, and it fit me—just barely. I was safe. Michael didn’t know any better. I’d managed another escape.

I knew a life with kids wouldn’t provide many chances to avoid fat pitfalls. I felt I had to get the weight off—and fast—to avoid further embarrassment and humiliating my kids. Life in the (fat) mommy lane would not get any easier.

I’m a big believer in signs. Fate, destiny, religion—whatever you
want to call it—I think it’s real and true. Whenever I have a big question mark in my life, a crossroads I am trying to navigate, I pray to God for answers, and then I sit back and wait to see what happens. Surely something will point me to where I am supposed to go. Somehow, I will find the way.

When it came to the possibility of having gastric bypass surgery, however, I didn’t want to see the signs. When I look back, fate was screaming the right thing at me, but I refused to hear the message. I’m not sure if it was stubbornness or fear or a little bit of both, but I just didn’t want to accept that surgery was the route I needed to take in order to save my life. I ignored the signs for a long, long time—almost until I couldn’t deny them anymore. Everything I tried to lose weight failed miserably, and at the end of 2007, I was very near crisis mode.

I was seeing a nurse practitioner about my diabetes. Actually I’d been seeing her for a couple of years, ever since my son was born and I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. She first put me on a few different oral medications and advised me to keep track of my blood sugar numbers. I only took the meds half the time, and I couldn’t bring myself to perform regular finger-stick tests. I suppose you could call it denial, although I
was quite aware of what was happening to me, both physically and mentally. I just couldn’t accept that at thirty-three years old, I was a diabetic for the rest of my life—that my daily existence would involve checking my blood sugar, taking medicine, and saying good-bye to certain foods forever.

I kept thinking that there had to be a different way, a better outcome for me. I felt if I could just lose the weight, if I could only get a hold of my morbid obesity, then the diabetes would take care of itself, would disappear forever. Even though the nurse practitioner told me that now I was likely too far gone for that to happen, I simply chose not to believe her. I went in every month to talk about my “progress,” giving excuses for why I hadn’t brought in my blood sugar numbers. No worries, she told me, she would just perform blood tests to see how I was doing. And the news wasn’t good, not at all. The various oral medications she’d put me on were not working, my blood sugar was way too high. Of course I wasn’t helping things out with what I was eating and drinking—I was up to more than a two-liter of soda a day, plus all the high-carb, sugary foods on which I’d always binged. Each month she set out a new plan of action, and every single month, it failed. I was getting much, much worse.

Enter Sign One. In December of that year, I attended a seminar held by two local doctors who performed gastric bypass surgery. I’d promised Michael I would look into the procedure, and even though I still very much felt as though it was not the
solution for me, I knew that I at least owed Michael the effort of finding out more. Truly, I believed I would go to the meeting and gather enough evidence that this was not something that would work for me, and I would be able to take that proof to Michael, getting rid of the idea once and for all. To me, the thought of having the surgery was out of the question. And sitting in the lobby of the health center, looking at all the others waiting for the seminar to start, my beliefs were reinforced, at least in my mind. There were easily a hundred people there, and for once, I was not the largest one in the room! Sad to say, but that was a habit I’d picked up in recent years: scanning whatever public place I was in to see if I outweighed everyone else. Increasingly I found that I was indeed the largest person, and I would use that realization to further beat myself up. But leave it to a gastric bypass seminar to show me that there were, in fact, people worse off than I was. Heck, one person was even brought in on a rolling hospital bed! I couldn’t help but eavesdrop as one of the coordinators explained to the man’s loved ones that you have to be relatively well, physically, in order to undergo gastric bypass surgery, and perhaps now was not the best time for that person to be there. Yikes!

I was pretty nonchalant as I waited for the seminar to start, leafing through the literature, only half interested, really. I wanted to hurry up and get it over with so I could put the whole idea behind me. One of the doctors took the podium and gave a brief, generic welcome. And then he threw out a statistic that stopped me cold in my lined-with-denial tracks.

Ninety-five percent of those with type 2 diabetes who have gastric bypass surgery are cured.

I gulped. He had my attention.

The doctor continued with more impressive information about how a gastric bypass can improve one’s life, and it was all well and good, but nothing spoke to me like that first bit of information. Cured! No finger sticks, no glucose monitors, no medication. I was now thirty-five, and I could be free of diabetes, seemingly for the rest of my life. I could hardly breathe, I was so excited by the possibility.

I opened my ears, and my heart, and really listened to the doctor, really read the charts on the PowerPoint monitor. It was mostly stuff I already knew, having read a lot about the surgery over the years. When he came to the part about the patient’s responsibilities after the surgery, I perked up once again. If I were going to even entertain the idea of having this procedure—and I still wasn’t sure I was—I definitely needed to know in what ways it could go wrong, what would cause it to be unsuccessful. I’d started to hear about people having the surgery, losing their weight, and then years later starting to gain the weight back. This was unfathomable to me. Why go through all of that—the risks of surgery, the expense—if only for it not to work? To me, it made no sense.

And then came the second stat that would stop me cold: The number one reason gastric bypass patients regain their weight is because they don’t give up carbonated drinks.

That piece of news was every bit as breathtaking for me as the diabetic cure. No more soft drinks? Ever? Talk about unfathomable. There was no way I could envision my life without Mountain Dew. That sounds like a ridiculous statement, I know, but please understand: I didn’t drink coffee. Soft
drinks were how I got my get-up-and-go in the morning, how I relaxed in the evening, and what I used to drink in all the hours in between. I didn’t drink alcohol, I rarely enjoyed fruit juice—it was all soda, all the time. I knew it had a lot to do with my weight problems, and it certainly had everything to do with my inability to get my diabetes under control. But I just figured one day, when I was finally able to get a handle on my weight, I would switch to, and grow to love, diet soda. I knew plenty of people who said once they made the change, and really stuck with it, they hardly noticed the difference. I just always figured that would be my story, too. But no, the doctor said carbonation of any kind stretches the stomach and a small stomach pouch is what allows gastric patients to consume less food. Years of drinking sodas could stretch it back to where it was before, a fate that I couldn’t imagine living after possibly going through with the surgery.

I almost got up and walked out right then. Remember: To me, there was no way I could go through with having the surgery with any sort of thought that I would fail. And I couldn’t imagine my life without soft drinks, period. As excited as I was about the news for diabetics, I really thought the no-soda rule sealed the deal for me as far as not having the surgery.

I stayed for the rest of the meeting, and at the conclusion I signed my name and phone number on the sheet for a possible appointment. But as I left the seminar, I felt resigned to the fact that this surgery was not for me, just as I had thought when I arrived. I had the evidence I needed to show Michael that it just wouldn’t work. But I wasn’t nearly as happy as I thought I would be. I left the health center and hit the first fast-food
restaurant I could find. I ate the double cheeseburger, fries, and onion rings as quickly as I could. I didn’t care if I smelled like fried food when I got home. Who was I trying to kid anyway? I was now hopeless and sad, convinced that the one ace I had in my back pocket, gastric bypass surgery, was now gone to me forever. Sure, I’d been looking for any sort of sign not to have the surgery, but I always kept the idea as a last resort. Now I was convinced my last straw was spent.

That night, as I once again stuffed food down my throat, barely tasting it, I didn’t care what happened to me. And that was happening more and more in my everyday life. As another Christmas approached, I did my usual obsessing about trying to look my best for family gatherings and wondering what I would wear. Usually I would hatch some grand scheme of only eating ice pops and lettuce leaves for twenty-six days in a desperate effort to lose weight fast. Certainly not the healthiest thing in the world, but at least it was an effort, at least I still had some sort of hope of getting over this overwhelming problem. But this year was different. This time I didn’t even bother. I ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. Sure, for some meals I would try to abstain, try to make better choices. But I couldn’t manage even a couple hours of doing the right thing, I was so far gone. I was bigger than I had ever been in my life, although I didn’t really know how big that was. I had long ago stopped weighing myself at home, once I found that I had maxed out the scale that we had in our bathroom. Yes, I was too big for a normal bathroom scale. When I stopped to really consider that fact, I was terribly depressed and embarrassed, so I didn’t allow myself to think of it that often. When I went to see my diabetic nurse every
month, she did in fact weigh me. But I explained that I didn’t want to know how much I weighed, and she simply recorded it without saying the number aloud. My belly was too big for me to look down and see the numbers on the scale.

The news from the nurse practitioner that January was not good: She wanted to put me on daily insulin shots. My numbers were not improving (shockingly), and she feared for my health if we didn’t do something to stop the blood sugar free fall right away. She tried to make me feel better about the situation by suggesting it may be temporary: Perhaps I could do the shots for just a few months to get my numbers back in line and then slowly wean off to oral medication. With good maintenance and a healthy diet, perhaps I wouldn’t be on the shots for the rest of my life.

To say I was devastated is a huge understatement. When I was pregnant with Eli, I’d had to give myself shots twice a day. I found it demoralizing and depressing. Still, I did then what I had to do because my baby’s health was at stake; that was not the case this time. It was just me my nurse was worried about, and I clearly couldn’t be bothered enough to worry about myself. I recoiled immediately at the thought of going back on insulin; there was no way I could agree to that. My nurse, a warm, kind woman whom I’d gotten to know quite well, was quiet but adamant. Something had to be done, and this, she felt, was the only way. I left her office with instructions to come in for another blood test in a couple of weeks.

I pulled out of the parking lot and headed straight for McDonald’s. The kids were having a playdate for the next few hours, so I did what I always did when I had some time and the house to myself: I got two double cheeseburger combos with two large Cokes. I ate one combo on the way home, and as soon as I’d let myself in the door of my house, I ate the other sandwich and fries. I then set the oven to preheat, already knowing the temperature needed to cook the frozen pepperoni and sausage pizza I would devour in one sitting. While it cooked, I checked the freezer, confirming what I already knew: There was ice cream left over from the night before. I’d top off my afternoon binge with chocolate chocolate chip.

As I threw the now-empty ice-cream box in the trash, the tears started, as if on cue. I was so, so scared. I couldn’t allow myself to go on insulin, even if it was just temporary. And I didn’t believe for a second that it was a short-term solution; that would mean that I would be able to get my diet in line and eat the proper foods. I hadn’t been able to do that yet, had I? How would I manage to eat well when faced with the humiliating task of injecting myself twice, possibly three times, a day in order to stave off disease, to stay alive? Sometimes I thought,
I’d rather be dead.