Why a biography? 

OK – this is hard.  I was asked to write a biography for another website on gastric bypass, so I figured I’d take my first stab at it here.  It’s going to be a painful process, so bear with me.  First decision–do I write it referring to myself in the third person?  I tried… I swear I did.  But it just felt so pretentious, so marketing-oriented.  Had to rewrite it to first person…

Just for your own visual info, even though it was not nearly as neat a process as this implies, I tend to think of my weight gain and loss as a bell curve, much like the one pictured at right.  But as you see in my illustration, there are two of them… as my weight went up and up toward the peak of the curve (which would see me at 303 pounds) my world became almost infinitely more painful, darker.  As the bell curve of my weight crested and then swooped back toward the asymptotic infinity of the horizontal line again, my world got better every day. 

Warning on what lies ahead; the only way I could be as successful as I have been was to be brutally honest about why and how I got fat.  Keep that in mind.

The Upswing on the Bell Curve of Obesity

My weight issues began in my mid-to-late teens–a fair bit of therapy after gastric bypass surgery, and a few epiphanies along the way led me to understand that I put on my security blanket of fat in a subconscious attempt to protect myself from my father’s sexual abuse.  I left home at 17 with a shotgun pointed at my head because I had finally called his bluff, and a year later, shed 60 pounds to enter the US Air Force.  This was just the beginning of a pattern of successful, short-term weight loss and then gaining the lost weight plus additional pounds that would last well into my 40s.

My abuser died in December 2004, and was buried shortly before the tsunami in Indonesia–family lore has it that the massive wave was the Earth trying to spit the old man back out the other side.  By July of 2005, after more than 25 years of marriage to my now-retired military husband, I weighed over 300 pounds (at 5′1″ tall), had tried every diet known to American culture, was pre-diabetic, had high cholesterol and sky-high triglycerides, sleep apnea, acid reflux, two badly damaged knees, and agonizing bone spurs in my feet.  I wore size 3x shirts and 36W jeans.  I walked like an 80-year-old woman, had lost nearly an inch in height, and was physically and mentally miserable.  Food was my drug of choice, helping me deal with the stress of a six-figure, high-profile communications consulting job, and  numb the humiliation of asking for seat belt extenders on my twice-monthly flights between Texas and California. 

McLightning Bolt

Driving home from the local burger joint in May of 2005, with yet another “heart attack in a sack” by my side, munching on the bag fries, I was rationalizing my weight to myself once more.

“You never see massively fat old women being forklifted into the grave,” I thought.  “Everyone loses weight naturally as they get older.”  And then the reality struck me.  “They don’t lose weight when they get older, because they don’t get older.  They die.  Fat people don’t get old.  They die. “ It was the beginning of the end of living as a fat person.  But I was no longer capable of losing 60 or 70 or 100 pounds the way I did when I was 19.  During this time, I was thinking and talking about what to have for lunch while I was snarfing my breakfast of two Egg McMuffins with Sausage and three hash browns from you-know-where…my eating was far beyond my control or anyone else’s.  I needed help.

Taking the Only Way Out

At 45, with my abuser finally shuffled off the mortal coil, and at the end of my own mental rope in terms of my weight, I was finally able to consider weight loss surgery.  I did an enormous amount of research, talked it over at length with family and friends whose relatives had gone through weight loss surgery.  After making the decision, I worked with my primary care doctors to document my last ten years of weight loss efforts, got approval through Tricare (the military retiree insurance program) and found myself counting backwards toward an anesthetic haze, about to undergo roux-en-y gastric bypass on September 26, 2005, at Park Plaza Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas.  Performing the surgery was Adam Smith, D.O.  He specializes in lapband surgeries, but also performs RNY  GBS, and was one of the few bariatric surgeons in the DFW Metroplex who was willing to work with Tricare insurance at the time.  His partner, Dr. Craig Ferrara, D.O., a vascular surgeon, performed most of my aftercare, and is a top-notch surgeon and a wonderful guy.   

Dr. Smith’s aftercare therapy group, mostly bandsters rather than GBS patients, helped a lot with my early post-op emotional needs, and I attended faithfully for nearly six months.  I also found an enormous amount of support in my first two years post-op at the Thinner Times online forum.  Begun by Dr. Charles Callery, a general surgeon specializing in bariatrics in California, Thinner Times is a lifeline for hundreds of pre- and post-op gastric bypass patients, both from his practice and from across the globe.

Roller Coasting Down the Weight Curve

Gastric bypass changed my life in both foreseen and unforeseen ways.  I knew it would make my physical life significantly easier–but the emotional rollercoaster of losing that security blanket of fat, and dealing with the massive personal and professional changes I have undergone since the surgery was and continues to be both exhilarating and terrifying. 

Professional Changes

I quit my high-pressure communications consulting career a few weeks before the surgery to concentrate on the early stages of my post-op recovery.  After moving to Illinois with my husband a year after the surgery, I became the fitness director at the Nautilus Fitness Center in Alton, IL.  I fired myself from that position (long story… told elsewhere), and before too long, took a flying leap and went through five weeks of training in the fall of 2007 to become a flight attendant.

I now work for Trans States Airlines, a company that flies regional jets for American, United and US Airways.  The life of a flight attendant is not all glitz and glamor, but for me, it’s the realization of a childhood dream and tremendously satisfying.  My communication degree and consulting experience come in very handy dealing with up to 300 people in any given day, and this new body can deal with the altitude changes and staying on my feet for up to 14 hours a day–something the old body would not have survived.  My smile’s wider than ever, and easier to come by.

Personal Changes

Losing a massive amount of weight changes everything in your personal life at profound levels–from marital, romantic and family relationships to how you tie your shoes.  Some of the changes I will admit to:

• My relationship with my Beloved Cheesehead Husband (BCH) continues to change.  I stopped allowing myself to be neglected, and he is doing his best to make sure that I don’t feel ignored and that I do feel loved and cherished.  I think, overall, it’s been good for both of us.
• I still tie my tennis shoes in a double knot, but now it’s in the middle of my shoe, instead of the inside edge. 
• I stand up straighter and taller, and got an inch of height back; I’m now nearly 5′2″ tall.  I look people in the eye, and am learning to accept compliments without demurrals.
• I look hot in my flight attendant’s uniform (that’s a quote straight from the BCH).
• Exercise is even more important–even though I was one of the “fit fat” and exercised regularly even at my heaviest, I now work out with much more intensity, and do my best to get in three workouts a week.
• My relationship with food is finally beginning to change–emotional dependence on food may be the hardest habit to break of all of them.  I am not perfect each and every day about food, and still find myself trying to turn to it in times of stress.  What’s different is that I cannot overeat now, and sugar continues to make me ill.  Two things I obviously still need help with in terms of behavior modification.  I am eternally grateful for the tools this surgery has given me.
• I quit smoking.
• I’m learning how to deal with men hitting on me–I just offer them my husband’s phone number, and tell them to call him first.  Nobody’s taken me up on it yet.
• I take my supplements every single, solitary day, without fail–I made a commitment to myself when I risked everything on that surgery table in order to save my own life, and I intend to keep that promise.  My last six-month labwork was absolutely perfect.
• I now wear size 8 pants–I can wear a size 6, but I like my breathing to be unobstructed.  I do have extra skin on my midsection and thighs (I know you’re wondering).  I am not planning on having surgery to correct it at this time.  Who knows what the future brings?
• I have dropped from a 44D requiring a fair bit of engineering to get the girls to point forward to a size 34 sports bra.  Which, by the way, I put on backward yesterday and it took me an hour to figure out why it was uncomfortable.  I do not miss my forward-facing accouterments much at all…but if I fold ‘em just right, they mimic a 34B pretty well.
• I get my fingernails done on a regular basis by a professional manicurist, and my hair cut and colored every six weeks by a professional hairdresser.  In other words, I am no longer “low maintenance.”  Caring about the way you look is expensive!  As the saying goes, “I’m worth it…”