Lauren Argott
9/11/2007 Wow. 9/11. This day is so signifigant for so many of us. My thoughts and prayers go out to the hearts and souls of those in our nation who were affected by what happened on 9/11, which includes everyone. Do you remember where you were, the instant you became aware of what was going on? I know I will never forget. I was 5 months pregnant with my twin daughters, who are now 5 1/2, driving in to work, and at 8:30 am I was on a conference call. They told us what happened and we were stunned. We could not fathom what was going on. I made it in to work and it was literally HOURS before everyone in my 46-story building could GRASP what it was that actually happened.
But now, 6 years later, here I am, a brand-new woman. Reborn. Reprieved. In every sense of the Word. (Yes, I MEANT to capitalize that word!) On the 20th of this month I will celebrate my 2nd anniversary of my surgery, but even more so, I am celebrating the movement into a new chapter of my life. I have chosen a new life of service and servitude. This community, the WLS community, has been so key in helping me be the woman I am--not just the thinner woman, no, much more than that. When folks look at me, those who do not know that I had WLS, and I tell them I have had it, the reaction I get is one of amazement, and the comment is that I do not look like I 1) ever had a weight problem, and 2) HAD weight loss surgery, I KNOW it is because of the knowledge gained from the folks that have gone before me in the WLS community, that I learned from. I listened to them when they told me about the different proteins and where to get samples, I listened when they talked about the importance of vitamins and calcium and iron and so on. True, you could say it was because I listened, but if they were not there, who would I have gone to if they had not BEEN THERE? So now, out of this intense sense of gratitude, and the realization that there are so many more out there that need the education and constant drumming of information into their head, I have become a Support Group Leader. I have realized that for me, it means more than an hour and a half a month. To me, it means a daily committment to gathering knowledge, talking to people, being there for my group, dispensing information, and whatever else it takes to bring success to the lives of the people I touch. I am thrilled to have taken on this role, and am excited to see where it leads me next.
7/24/2007 well it has been nearly 2 years now. I have been BAD about keeping up with this, but GOOD about following my program. I hit my Doctor's goal weight for me at 15 months, and I feel great there. I work out 3-5 times a week, and am very pleased. As thry say, though, the "Honeymoon" period has ended, and the "head" issues are definitely there. I am so passionate about dealing with them that I started a blog to talk about just that, http://wlsinsideout.blogspot.com/
please join me and add your insights!! The saying that everyone tells you about the surgery being a tool, and it not being brain surgery are SOOOO true!!
Hope to talk to you soon!
Lauren
Getting really depressed about my size. The more depressed I get, the more I eat. Never-ending cycle.
5/20/03 Well today I FINALLY (after 3 days) got a call back from the doctor's office I am thinking about using (Dr. Titus Duncan). Seems they have a free seminar that goes over all the info. When I asked the woman about "program fees" she was a bit confused, and I clarified that some surgeon's offices had told me there was a $4500 or so "Program Fee" above and beyond what the insurance company pays. She told me there was only the insurance co-pay that I would be responsible for. I will let you know more after the seminar on June 23. (I found Dr. Duncan on this site and cross-referenced him in my provider directory to make sure he is in-network).
9/27/04 Well, it's been a while since I updated this...I went to Dr. Duncan's seminar, and have now completed the paperwork, and with great anticipation am waiting on my first meeting with him, which will be in October. In the meanwhile, I wanted to put the "essay" I wrote as part of the application process on here. I hope someone might find it useful.
I consider myself an intelligent person. I consider myself a relatively well-educated person. However, I still seem to be finding myself living out Einstein’s Theory of Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. Throughout my 28 year career as a Professional Dieter, I have tried it all. And you know what I got for all my effort? Fatter. Yup, that’s right, the more I lost, the more I gained. In addition, the more I gained, the more I beat myself up about it, saying, “If I just had more willpower,” or “If I just tried harder.” Well, all that got me was depressed. So now here I am, the largest I have ever been all my life, and at the “I’ve given up” stage. Let me tell you how I got here:
As a young child (even at 3 or 4) my mother constantly was on me about my weight. I look back at pictures and see a healthy, normal sized child. But what I remember was the double-edged sword: my mother constantly withholding food from me, but then offering it as a comfort and replacement for her nurturing. I recall feeling DRIVEN to sneak down to the kitchen at night to get the peanut butter sandwiches, cookies, and other things that I had been expressly told I was not allowed to have. There was a hunger in me that I could not seem to satisfy. This was between the ages of 6 and 11 or 12, mind you. All day long all I was allowed to eat was carrots and celery, rice, dry baked potatoes, skinless dry chicken breast, broth, and water. My body CRAVED carbohydrates. And then to add insult to injury, since my mother isolated me because of her “perceived” idea that I was overweight, so did the rest of my siblings. So I hid away from them, their taunts and the hurtful way they would never include me. Books became my escape. Well, at a period of time when, if I had not read so much and would have just gone outside and played like a normal 6-12 year old, the 5 or so pounds would have come off naturally. Instead, I hid in my room with a book, and ate whatever I could sneak past my hyper-vigilant mother.
I remember so well my first introduction to diet sodas at the age of 12. Tab. Everyone said it was so awful, but at least I was ALLOWED to drink something besides water, plus it tasted somewhat sweet. I also recall my first diet that I went on willingly. I prepared the food and sat down to it all by myself, because it was different from what everyone else was eating. It was supposed to be a 1200 calorie a day diet. It was HELL. I was 12 years old, maybe needed to lose 10-15 pounds, which at that time, to me (not to mention my mother) was a TON. This was in 1979, the era of Twiggy-thin models. If your thighs so much as TOUCHED, you were considered a blimp. I was miserable. I was always hungry (the diets then proposed very little meat, as it was a calorie-dense food). I was always tired. I tried to exercise, but my chest always hurt if I exerted myself too much. My coaches and my mother told me that the reason my lungs burned when I ran was simply because I was “overweight and out of shape”. (At the age of 35, after my twin daughters were diagnosed with asthma, it was discovered that I, too, have asthma.) So needless to say, the harder I tried, the worse I felt. That diet lasted maybe two to three months, whereupon I quickly put the weight right back on, plus about 10 pounds. After that I tried the Cabbage diet, the Grapefruit diet, and even the “starve yourself” (less than 1500 calories a day) diet again. Each attempt was rewarded with my gaining MORE weight.
By the time I was in high school, I was definitely overweight. I recall in my junior year, weighing myself and was aghast that I weighed 180 pounds, at 5’8”! (Oh, how I wish I weighed that now!!) In those days, a woman that height was supposed to weigh about 120 pounds. I was so daunted at the thought of losing 60 pounds. It seemed impossible to me. But I started to go to a gym, and worked out religiously every day after school my entire junior year. I ran 5-6 miles a day, 6 days a week, and went to the gym for 2 hours M-F after school. I was REALLY hungry all the time then, but I tried to eat healthy (I do not recall specifically being on a diet during that time). One would think that I would have been skin and bones after that, right? Nope. Didn’t lose one pound, not one inch. I recall that I could do 1,000 sit ups in a row, on an incline bench. What did it get me? A bikini that I had bought as an incentive that only got worn twice…once when no one saw me at our pool at home, and the second time, one of my brothers saw me and called me “a beached whale.” I never wore it again, and shoved it in the back of a drawer, too ashamed to look at the reminder of what I would never be. Honestly, I see pictures of myself from then, and I guess I was wearing a size12 or 14. I could never find any nice clothes to wear, and I felt badly enough that I didn’t look good, but then I felt even worse because my mother made sure I knew it was my own fault that I looked the way I did. My brothers followed suit, and made sure to taunt me and tease me, and made sure their friends did, too.
My senior year, I got mononucleosis. There went the exercising. All the muscle I had built up turned to flab, and my weight went close to 200 pounds. I met the man who would become my husband late that year, and for the first time, was happy and loved for me, regardless of my size. I gained a little weight during the year before he went into boot camp (about 10-15 pounds) and my mother-in-law pointed it out. While he was in boot camp I decided to surprise him and went to the Diet Center. It seemed reasonable, and they had me eating all day, which at least kept me from being hungry. But the cravings for carbohydrates were still there! I did manage to lose 45 pounds in about 3-4 months, and my husband, his friends, and my in-laws acted as though I had created diamonds out of coal. How I wanted to continue to be successful, and lose more and more weight. But part of me wanted to be at the “finish line,” to eat like a normal person (meaning whatever I wanted), and be SATISFIED for once. Well, I should have known by then that where it comes to food, I am never satisfied.
The first year of my marriage was tough, my husband was in training camp in Biloxi, Ms., and I knew no one. I was used to working full time, had been doing so since I was 11. So all of the sudden sitting home by myself, and having nothing to really do when my husband was not home, opened the flood gates. I went on what I call “The Potato Chip Diet.” Yeah, right. I ate those things until not only had I regained those 45 pounds, I had added another 15. Gaining 60 pounds in about 4 months is very hard on your body, not to mention your self-esteem. Within another year, my marriage broke up (we both had our issues, mine being that great big hole I could not fill with either food or love, and when the love was taken away, the food was never enough).
During the years of 1988 through 1997, I was a full-blown binge-eater. All I could think about those years was food. I would start obsessing about lunch the second I sat down at my desk for work, and start thinking about what I would eat when I got home as soon as I finished lunch. I did not go out. I stayed home all weekend long, only getting out of bed to get food or go to the bathroom. I only got up again to go to work on Monday. I never weighed myself unless I had to go to the doctor, which I did only if I had to. I started therapy in 1989, and spent the first two years lying to my therapist. All I wanted to do was go home and eat. I hated myself because of how I looked, felt trapped in a body that nowhere resembled my picture of myself, and believed that all my problems in life stemmed from my inability to lose weight. I knew I had a problem, and started attending Overeaters Anonymous sometime in 1991. I went for many years off and on, as best as I can remember until about 1997. I just drifted away from it then, feeling like the problems everyone else had were so far removed from mine. I still am not sure why I felt that way, I probably hated the constant reminder that I DID look like that and could not pretend otherwise.
During that time, around 1994, my weight was up past 250. As obsessed as I was still with food, I got it down to around 200 after exercising at Bally’s 5 days a week for almost 2 years. Lots of cardio, some weight training. But I felt very isolated, very stigmatized there. I wanted to run home to my comfort, my food. The trainers and sales people acted encouraging, but when it came right down to it, I would look around and when other people would see me look at then they would turn away quickly, as though I had caught them staring at me. I was very strong then, could leg-press 450+ pounds, and could do 45-60 minutes in the Stairmaster. I would do crunches on the Horse, as well as back exercises. I would occasionally bring a couple of my friends to work out, but it just seemed weird to me that my “thin” friends could not keep up with me in the gym. I thought that since they were thin, they were in better shape than me. I also could never do aerobics (the “burning lungs”/asthma thing) which was the “big thing” back then. I also got looks the few times I did try to do them—my flab flopping around under my t-shirt while the rest of the women wore their spandex. I felt like a big fat slob on those days.
Slowly, I dropped out of the “gym” thing. It was shortly after I stopped going to the gym that I started doing Atkins. That was supposed to be the best thing going! You could eat all you want, never be hungry, never exercise, and lose tons of weight! And at 280 pounds, it seemed like just what I needed. That was in late 1998. I lost about 60 pounds over 6 months or so (I never hit my 75 pound loss goal), took “one month off,” and within about 3 months, put it all right back on again. It did not help much with my food obsession, being able to eat all the time, which is what drew me back to try Atkins once again in both 2003 and 2004 -- the idea of losing all that weight, while eating all the food you want. Those didn’t work, and pretty much since about 2002 every diet I have tried has been just a half-hearted attempt. The Zone, the South Beach, yada, yada, yada.
I just had accepted that I was this big fat person (which really kills me). It was like something inside me all of the sudden just gave up, just said no diet will ever work for me, I will always be this heavy. I will always be uncomfortable on airplanes, I will always feel looked at sideways on the street, I will always feel like the largest person in any room. And when I see anyone larger than me, I feel like that will just be me in a few years. I will always feel self-conscious at any function involving food, I will always feel self-conscious with every bite I put in my mouth.
Oddly enough, I have become AFRAID to diet anymore—I cannot afford to gain any more weight!
I was so very glad when I saw In the book “The Patient’s Guide to WLS” the line regarding people who are over 100 pounds overweight. About how it is statistically unlikely that through diet alone will they lose the weight. That woke me up. All my efforts had not been necessarily failures, but attempts in the wrong direction. After nearly 2 years of research, I know better now.
The Gastric-Bypass surgery is truly a “Last-Chance” effort for me. The path I am going down is a tough one: I have had moderate to severe back problems since 1989; I have had moderate to severe knee problems since 1998 (left knee operated on in Feb 2004, right knee scheduled for Aug 2004); I had severe gallbladder issues (Open, NOT laparoscopic, surgery to remove stones from the gallbladder, common bile duct, AND intestine) that came close to killing me, and now hypertension. Congenital heart disease killed my maternal grandmother, my mother is currently suffering from congenital heart failure, (and they were/are not very overweight, 20 pounds at the most! How does that bode for me?!) a disease that is hereditary. I know the excess weight aggravates my asthma. I know that I am most likely looking at double knee replacement surgery sometime in my fifties, if not before. I also know, that if I can get this weight off, that nearly ALL of these will go away. I will do all the things that I miss so much: I will be able to exercise as much as I want, ride my bike the 35 miles a day as I once did, garden all day long as I used to, hike in the northern Georgia mountains without losing my breath before I go ¼ mile. I know I will no longer try to be invisible when someone cracks a “fat” joke, will no longer worry what people are thinking or saying about me. I will no longer have to worry about what I feel about me, I will have been given the proper tool that will finally allow me to succeed in the one area I have not been able to, because I was trying to empty an ocean with a fork. I now see that the ocean does not need to be emptied (the ocean being my inner emptiness), for it is already on its way to healing, and a fork shall no longer be a deadly weapon to me.
I hope that my "essay" might help anyone who reads it. It took me 2 1/2 years to get to this point--the point where I am actually seeing the surgeon. It took me A LOT OF STRENGTH to get here. I have been thinking constantly about what the future holds for me, and I sometimes find myself analyzing every moment, "once I have WLS, what will the difference be?" And honestly, almost every single answer is a positive one. My love affair with food simply needs to end. It is a dangerous relationship, a deadly relationship. In this battle, I am determined to come out ahead. I ask anyone who reads this to send up a silent prayer for me, as I do all of you, that my surgery date comes quickly and with success.
I sign off today, a bit more resolved, a bit afraid, but very hopeful!
8/23/05 As I look at my past entries, I realize that I have been on this journey for quite some time. I researched it for a couple of years until I even first put my profile online here. It has been nearly a year since I attended Dr. Duncan's seminar. Wow! But today is the day I go to get my surgery date. When I had the visit at Dr. Duncan's office, they weighed me and told me I needed to lose 20 pounds to help get me ready for the surgery. Well, since all the paperwork (and the work I have been doing on my head!) took so long, the usual thing happened: I dropped almost 30 pounds, and now I have nearly put it all back on again. I HAVE been more active, so hopefully the scale will show a gain of muscle and loss of fat. I put it in God's hands anyway, that is where it has always been (even back when I didn't realize it!). I have to tell you, the approval was very quick, once the insurance company recieved the packet of info from the dr's office. I could say that the reason they were so fast was that there was an error in recieving the packet on their end on 7/22, so when Jackie from Dr. Duncan's office called they really went out of their way to help, but that is just how it happened when you look at the facts. The TRUTH od the matter is, that the day I called Jackie to see where my case was, I woke up from a dream where God revealed to me that He had indeed covered me with His Holy Spririt, and that help was on its way. That afternoon, after 10 months (literally) of faxes not being recieved, documents being lost, etc etc (I could really go on and on!) suddenly the person at the insurance company went out of her way to sit on the phone with Jackie while the whole packet was faxed and recieved, then she marked it to be looked at asap. Then first thing the next morning, it was approved and I recieved the call from Jackie at 11:59am on 8/18! That night I had a dream about the surgery, and I recall vividly trying to tell where the incisions were, and could not tell by feeling, I had to actually look for the bandages to see where they were. I know that God will be with me through the surgery and afterwards; part of the reason He has made this happen for me is to enable me to do His work kere on earth. My favorite Psalm is Psalm 2, you should look it up. Who can be against us when God is for us?
Wednesday, August 24, 2005:
WooHoo!! I got my date: September 20, 2005. I am so excited, and so very BLESSED! Praise GOD!!!
My Pastor will be setting aside 3 days where he, his wife, and I will have day-long prayer sessions. Additionally, I have requested a CD (or two, depending on how long the surgery goes) to play during the surgery: The Message, which is a contemporary language version of the Bible, on CD. I am not sure which Book I will choose to play, but I am sure He will guide me.
I just told my brother about the surgery. (funny, he was like, "Wow!" like it was so sudden. I have been looking into, and then preparing for, this surgery for a couple of years now. It feels like a part of my life already, and it seems so sudden to me. It is similar to being Born Again, where once you pass through that door, there is no going back. Once God told me I had His covering and He seemingly moved His Hand over the entire process and put it in place, I feel as though it is done (it is, really). Amen, Halleluiah!!) I will get him to sign the documents for the person who will be supporting me throughout this, even though it will be my Pastor and his family who will actually be there for me. I wonder how that relationship might change afterwards? That is about all the thought I can give it right now, because I am right now too busy praising God and thinking of all the things I have to finish in a month. I will post again as things of importance come up, but if you would like to read (or listen to!) the Scriptures I have been in this miraculous journey, I have been listening to The Message on CD, the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and now John. God Bless you all!
9/22/05 Two days post op, came home yesterday. Feeling pretty good, just sipping sipping sipping! I had a pain in my calf and the doctor's office was great about it, no hesitation at all, they immediately said, come in and we will look at it. Turned out to be nothing. (yeah!) I brought my little "liquids log" with me, and the doctor was happy to see that. (Nothing fancy, just date, time, amount, and type...helps to see how much I am getting in!). No nausea, no vomiting, only a little gas (and that was cleared up my mylicon!). I almost wonder if I had the surgery at all! The power of prayer is AWESOME!!! Anyone reading this who wants to know what we did, feel free to write to me and ask. All I can say is that GOD is good, and He answered every one of my prayers in seeing me through this surgery. Even the nurses at the hospital were amazed at how well I was doing---after they walked with me the second time, I was asking them to come and let me walk....which I did every time the pain (not bad, just uncomfortable) woke me. Honestly, my wanting my ice chips woke me more than anything!! Amazing how much a little cup of ice chips makes a difference. Rinsing my mouth with water (and spitting it out--no swallowing!!) helped a lot, too. My mouth was really dry, so I would have to say that was the worst part! Not really much to complain about if that is the worst of it!! :-)
Insurer Info:
Blue Cross Blue Shield, POS
About Me
Before & After
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