SueMiller
I didn’t have much of a weight problem till several years after college. Up to then I was a typical female with weight ‘issues’ but not really a weight ‘problem’. I had never been more than 20 pounds overweight as I stayed on it from middle school through college. But I was a little obsessed with it. Eventually I burned out and started gaining weight when I turned to food for comfort during a difficult time in my life.
Within a year I was about 50 pounds overweight. But I got out of the difficult situation and worked on myself again. I eventually lost 40 pounds. Being only 10 pounds heavier than I was in high school, 12 years after graduating from high school, was good enough for me.
I got married around this time to a strong Christian while I was a growing Christian. Soon after the wedding he turned away from Christ and nearly destroyed me in the process. After two years of complete hell I had to leave him as my health and spiritual well being were declining rapidly. I had gained 40 pounds during the marriage, once again going to food for comfort. After the divorce I recovered well, I was thriving and I lost 30 pounds. I felt great.
But then I was sexually harassed at my job. It brought up some old feelings from my childhood and overall I felt backed into a corner. I went off the deep end and never quite recovered. I stopped working in August of 2002, going on short-term disability through my employer.
Eventually I was terminated because I simply could not return to work. I now had more than mental issues I was dealing with. The stress of my marriage and the stress of my job situation had wreaked havoc on my body. I started to become physically ill. It got worse and worse over a period of about a year. I just couldn’t see how I was going to go back to working again when I was so sick.
In early 2004 I applied and was approved for Social Security Disability benefits. I had run through my savings, stocks, and 401(k) by then and was living on food stamps and other government and church assistance. I came to a point that I couldn’t pay my mortgage so I had to sell my house and move in with my parents. Here I was in my mid-30’s living with Mom and Dad. As you can imagine, the stress/depression/illness, etc., contributed to another weight gain. I was back up to 50 pounds overweight.
The summer of 2004 I tried to get my body in shape again. But the diets I had tried before and been successful with no longer worked. I could lose the initial few pounds of water weight, but no fat. And I was getting exercise for several months during this period (despite my illness). I seemed to gain more weight every month regardless of my diet.
During the Fall of 2004 I was finally given a diagnosis for my two year sickness: POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome). It’s a dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system, or ‘dysautonomia’. Essentially, my body can’t handle being upright and thinks it’s running a marathon when I stand. Around this time I was put on beta blockers to combat the symptoms. It helped somewhat, but not enough.
My weight continued to rise and my POTS doc (cardiologist) suggested I go to an endocrinologist since I was not getting true relief from the beta blockers. He thought something else was going on in addition to the POTS. The endo suggested testing for Cushing’s. Unfortunately my COBRA coverage ran out a few days later and I couldn’t get tested. I had to wait another month until my Medicare coverage kicked in. Once it did, I was tested. I was gaining an average of 10 pounds a month regardless of food intake or exercise. But I didn’t have Cushing’s. There was no explanation for the rapid weight gain and I now was about 85 pounds overweight.
During this time I had moved with my parents to Alabama. I was able to buy a house with the profit I made from selling my previous house. My new POTS doc sent me to another endo (who was considered 'the' specialist to go to) and he said I was probably prematurely peri-menopausal or had PCOS. My gyno had mentioned the peri-menopause possibility 3 years earlier. I waited a few months and finally went on HRT. For a couple of months during all this I did start to feel good enough to exercise and I went crazy landscaping my new home by myself. I was able to lose about 15 or 20 pounds. After I started the HRT my weight loss ceased. I spent the entire summer of 2005 working my butt off in the yard and eating less than I was used to. I didn’t lose a pound. My primary care physician prescribed Xenical. It wasn’t covered by insurance so I couldn’t get it. But I didn’t want to anyway. I knew it was just a quick fix, if it worked at all. I would either have to stay on it for the rest of my life or face gaining the weight back after going off the medication.
Eventually I switched to natural HRT in hopes that it would take me off the plateau. But it didn’t. By then I had gained the lost weight back…again. Then a church friend told me about the ‘Makers Diet’. It’s a Biblical based eating plan that relies on organic foods and avoiding all preservatives, pesticides, synthetic hormones, etc. It also was a Kosher diet (for the most part) as it cut out the animals that were forbidden to be eaten in the old Testament (pork, shrimp, etc). The diet is a 40 day detox, with a maintenance plan after that. I started it in January of 2006 and got through the 40 days and more, and felt pretty good. The problem was that I couldn’t afford to live organically anymore. It was so expensive and living on disability made it impossible to keep up. I did lose 22 pounds in the process. I kept it up the best I could (non-organically) but it was so strict I eventually gave up. Guess what? I gained the 22 back, and then some. My PCP said that she had a friend that ate well and exercised a lot but couldn’t lose weight either. She said some bodies just ‘hold’ onto weight. How depressing is that? Work hard, eat right, lose little. Tough.
So here I was, at my highest weight, lugging around an extra 95 pounds. I went through a severe depression during the summer of 2006 due to medication issues. I eventually got it straightened out and felt better mentally than I ever had, but I had gained another 10-15 pounds in the process. The struggle to get the weight off had finally beaten me. I came to the realization that I could no longer lose weight like I used to and that I would never lose down to anything less than ‘obese’. I was still sick, still on disability, and I finally resigned myself to being fat forever. To me this meant my life was never going to get much better than it was right then. I had lost so much in my life over the years and I just felt like my life had become the complete opposite of what it used to be. And now it felt permanent. But there was a little relief in the resignation. I didn’t have to fight so hard anymore. Giving up felt somewhat good.
A few days later, in early November, I mentioned to my Mom that I was at least one hundred pounds overweight. She said that that was one of the qualifications for WLS. [She had RNY surgery in February 2004.] She asked me if I had ever considered the surgery. My first response was to recoil. Gastric Bypass for me? Surely not. I wasn't that bad off…was I?
The Lord started speaking to me about it and I realized that WLS was more than a viable option. It was possibly the key to unlock me out of this prison of disability. I first had to find out if Medicare would cover WLS. Well, it just so happens that Medicare started covering it in February 2006, just a few months earlier. Also, Medicare requires that the patient be treated by a “Center of Excellence”. At the time there were only three in Alabama. One of which was in my area, that had just been approved as a COE the month before, in October. It all started to come together. I could plainly see God’s perfect timing.
I researched the heck out of WLS. Even though my mom had already had the surgery, I wanted to know everything I could about it. It only took me a few days to come to the decision to get the surgery. My journey to WLS had begun.
