pumpkin77

Send Message

Block

Add Friend

So my name is Jennifer and I am originally from New Hampshire.  I am currently living in North Carolina working as an office manager at a chiropractors office.  I have been obese for most of my life.  When I was a kid I was very small one of the skinniest kids in school.  When I was 12 my mom decided that drugs were more important so she sent me to go live with my dad and that is when I started eating.  At the time I didn't know that I was using food to hide the emotion, by the time I got to high school I was the biggest of all my friends and I knew then that I was "fat".  None of my friends ever really cared how much I weighed but it was apparent that they would rather go to parties and go to the beach and such with our "skinnier" friends.  After high school I started eating more and it didn't really help that I worked at McDonald's LOL.  I got engaged to my wonderful husband in 1998, he asked me to marry him the night before he left for his six month cruise to the gulf (he was in the Navy).  We got married in 2001 just a few days after September 11th.  After he got out of the Navy we moved back home to New Hampshire where he had a really good job for about a year before they laid him off.  The company he worked for was not immune to the problems the country was having back then.  He found a job with a really great company here in North Carolina so after sending his resume through Monster.com they flew him down for an interview and a couple of weeks later offered him the job!  We had about 2 weeks to find a place to live in a place we had never been before.  We moved and started on a new life in a place where we knew no one.  I didn't work for a year so I sat home and ate because I was so depressed about leaving everyone we knew, family and friends, back in New Hampshire.  I finally decided to go to college, but I was scared to death so he enrolled with me.  I graduated in 2005 heavier than I have ever been.  At that point I decided that I needed to lose some weight.  I tried Nutri-system, weight watchers, chicken and rice, exercising, you name it I tried it (as long as it was free LOL).  I got a job three months after I graduated and ever since then I have gotten heavier and heavier.  In 2008 I noticed that I was nauseous all the time, I mean not just after eating something spicy or anything like that but all the time.  I went to the doctor and they ran a boatload of tests.  They found two things that my gallbladder didn't work, no stones but just didn't work and that my lower esophageal sphincter muscle didn't have any elasticity left in it.  So on September 5th, 2008 I had it removed.  Then on September 28th my husband was on his way to work when he was in a very severe motorcycle accident.  I think my brain told my all my ailments that I didn't have time to screw around with my problems anymore because I had to take care of my husband.  So for about a year and half I didn't have any medical issues other than migraines but I have had those since I was 12.  When things started to get back to normal my brain decided that it could work on my issues again and that is when I started vomiting everyday.  I went back to the doctor and they said it was because of the muscle issue in my stomach.  They told me of a procedure that would fix it but that I wasn't a good candidate because I was way too overweight.  I asked if I lost weight if I could have the procedure and they said that I would never be of the correct weight to have that procedure.  I didn't think that sounded right so I went to 3 other doctors, 1 private practice, one at the University of North Carolina and one at Duke Hospital, and they all said the same thing that the only surgery that would fix my problem would be a gastric bypass and that would solve the stomach issue and the weight issue at the same time.  So several appointments and many months of research I found Dr. Sudan at the Duke Metabolic Clinic.  So December 1st I'll start my new life of getting to a healthier weight without vomiting everyday and worrying about getting internal bleeding in my throat.  I'll update this blog as things progress but just wanted people to get a sense of me.