before & after pics, and a long ramble...

these photos are going to be on tv soon, so i better get used to people seeing them..... air date is now set for february 7th, 11pm on channel 3. (there will be a link to the story, so anyone can see it after it airs and i can post the link on my blog.)

me at my heaviest in 2001 (300 pounds.) the pic on the left is a week before surgery, and the one on the right is me right after surgery.

yeah, anyone who says gastric bypass is "the easy way out" can kiss my ass. being cut open from bellybutton to breast bone is not "easy". coming home with a foot long gash on your abdomen is not "easy".

my "pretty woman" dress trying on phase. i kept the tags on them, thankfully.....much easier to return!

these are my favorite skinny pics. more so because miles and maggie are in them with me. but i liked the outfit and the haircut wasn't so bad... i wasn't at my actual thinnest here, but close. probably weighing about 150.

i can't decide which is worse, seeing the before or after pics. i am uncomfortable with all of them. when dan & i started dating, i didn't want him to see the pics of me at my thinnest. i guess i thought he might see them and think, "hey, i got ripped off! i want to date the skinnier version!" (thankfully, that was not the case and groundcat likes me for me.)

it was interesting, seeing the reporter's reaction to my photos. she said neither set looked like me! and she pointed out how confusing it must have been for me, looking so drastically different in such a short span of time. during the interview she asked me about that. i tried to explain how i felt almost "alien", that my body didn't feel like it belonged to me, and how i didn't recognize myself in the mirror.

losing weight is a positive experience. losing 150 pounds in a year was.... amazing and exhilarating. but it was also confusing as hell. the attention i got was nice, but after a while it hurt my feelings. was i so hideous before?

at one point i saw some coworkers i hadn't seen in a year. when they saw me (after surgery & at my thinnest) some of them actually cried! they ran up and hugged me and cried. i didn't know how to take that.

going from 300 pounds to 150 in a year..... i've tried to explain the feeling...... i ended up feeling not only physically vulnerable, but emotionally as well. i was just very fragile and raw. and then, when i was not at my strongest, life hit me below the belt. here's a list of a few of the things that i dealt with:

1. i went through 2 very messy and painful relationships
2. i put my dog miles to sleep
3. i helped a friend's husband get into the surgical program and he died having the surgery
4. david (who had been my roommate when i had the surgery) moved out
5. then rachel moved out of the house and the tenants who moved in were....difficult
6. i had major surgery to have a large hernia repaired and 15 pounds of skin removed from my abdomen (that surgery was incredibly grueling and painful and i had a horrible recovery.)

the other thing going on was "malabsorption". they bypass up to 5 feet of intestine so that if you eat fatty foods, you don't absorb them as much. but this also leads to problems absorbing things your body needs, like vitamins and calcium. people were starting to show signs of early osteoporosis after WLS! we were lectured on taking additional vitamins and calcium supplements.

they didn't talk about prescription medication as much. the low dose of antidepressants i had taken for years suddenly stopped working. and my sleeping pill, that had worked for years, now only allowed me to sleep for 4 hours instead of 8.

so, somewhere in that difficult mix, i started drinking wine. no one had warned us about the strange effects of alcohol. i was 32 yrs old, and all of a sudden a single glass of wine gave me an amazing "buzz". this was new and never happened prior to surgery. something about the bypassed intestine triggers a strange effect with folks... plus, a few glasses of red wine along with an ambien helped me sleep.

(this is going to be part of the news story, & the reporter has details on a recent study regarding WLS patients and the odd effects of alcohol...)

i spent almost 2 years in a state of deep pain, a severe depression. no one knew what to do with me. i had succeeded at WLS and was thin, so why was i so miserable? my family, friends, even my doctor, were at a loss.

so how did i heal? how did i finally get out of this depression? i finally found a good therapist, and my doctor found a medication that helped with anxiety and depression. that's the short answer. more on that another time......