There's no set date for when it happens. When we're kids we're taught about the food pyramid while assaulted with images of Cookie Monster. When I was little, McDonald's was a special trip my grandma and I would make, where I could play in the vast labyrinth of unsanitary and unventilated plastic tunnels, only pausing to run over to her table every so often to shove a McNugget into my face. My whole family's fat--- in my grandma's wedding photo she was a svelte little minx, and my grandfather was in the Air Force.
My mom was chunky pretty much from birth, and it didn't take long for my grandma to lose her foxy figure and my grandpa to develop a beer belly. My uncle Steve was a total beanpole, and only now at 45 has he moved from a 32" waist in jeans. Fucker.
My mom's weight problem went past 'chunky' in high school, and she was wearing the 80s equivalent of a size 18/20. She still had plenty of boyfriends and was extremely popular because, well, she was my mom, but she battled her weight nonstop from about 1983 on. She had every weight loss program known to man--- Richard Simmons, Tony Little, Susan Powter, Denise Austin, you name it and she had the whole system. She attended Weight Watchers, went to Figure World (a women's-only gym), drank Slim-Fast, tried Nutri-System, owned every get-thin-quick piece of exercise equipment they could advertise on TV. Unfortunately, none of those schemes ever transferred into 'eating well' or 'regular exercise'.
When she was pregnant with me, my deadbeat dad got himself put in jail, and my mom cut off contact with him when she found out the wide variety of sins he'd been committing behind her back. She raised me with the help of her parents until I was eight, when my dad decided to resurface into my life to sprinkle a little chaos into my existence. After a few days of mind games and manipulation he was out of my life again, leaving me depressed and confused. Was I a
bad girl? Had my dad abandoned me (not once, but
twice) because I wasn't loveable? It didn't matter what my mom said about the subject, I was convinced that it was my fault that he'd run off again, and I became depressed. Of course, in hindsight it's easy to say 'I was depressed', but back then who could tell? I was eight. I was an only child who had
always taken solace in playing by myself; I didn't have many friends and I liked it that way because most of the other kids my age weren't into the same things I was. I was a reader who never went anywhere without a book or two on my person, and I didn't play video games or watch TV much. I spent a lot of time at the amusement park that my grandmother managed, climbing on the wonderland of rusting scaffolding under the huge metal slide (which served a dual purpose as a 'storage area' for construction equipment, rolls of unused chainlink fence, and a huge colony of feral cats that led to dozens of kittens to chase and catch every spring and summer). I wrote stories, first longhand and then on the electric typewriter where my grandmother taught me to type, and when I was nine my grandfather bought our first PC, equipped with Windows 95, and he and I taught ourselves how to navigate its intricacies.
If I sat at that typewriter or computer for four or five hours, idly munching on chips or cookies or drinking sodas while working on a story, no one thought anything of it. I simply wasn't a sporty kid, and I'm from a Southern family born and raised. My grandfather's side is strict Pennsylvania Dutch and German, only a few generations off the boat, and he was raised up north in a land of hot pretzels and Philly cheesesteaks and beer. My grandma's family owned a small farm in Bellmead, just outside of Waco, and she was from a long line of fried chicken and grits and buttermilk. Together they had united in a sort of sense where food was an adaptable resource--- food could be a salve (there wasn't a bad day that a cookie couldn't cure), a celebration (my grandmother took up cake decorating when I was an infant and my first birthday cake was pillowy with peaks of whipped frosting at least an inch deep), mourning (you haven't seen food until you've seen the spread at a Southern wake), respect (we made fruitcake or muffins for the mailman and neighbors every year on the holidays), or an excuse to get people together. Our family used to have vast Thanksgivings and Christmas, without a 'lean' item in sight, and seconds weren't only encouraged, they were mandatory. If you only took a moderate spoonful of Uncle David's cornbread stuffing (made with roughly a dozen egg yolks per pan) or a single slice of Mom's trademark cheesecake (cream cheese and powdered sugar blended with an entire tub of Cool Whip, to list a few of the ingredients), you were bound to hurt someone's feelings. If you finished your plate at dinner, Grandma would eagerly remind you that there was more on the stove, not to be shy, and if you didn't give in, she'd send you home with enough leftovers to feed the whole block.
Do I blame my family for my problems with food? Yes and no. I think that, when I was a child, it would've been very different if I'd grown up in a home that valued things like fresh fruits and vegetables over more typical trappings like doughnuts, boxed macaroni and cheese, and frozen fish-sticks. My mom worked two jobs sometimes to keep ahead of the bills, so meals with her usually came from a box one way or the other--- we'd order pizza or grab fast food, or we'd make Tuna Helper or a frozen pizza. There was no thought given to salads, or healthier alternatives, or even portion control. We didn't eat many leftovers; usually if there were two or three pieces of pizza left, Mom would just say "Oh, let's just finish it"; the same with a box of Tuna Helper, and I'm not sure when it happened but soon the two of us were polishing off an entire box of Kraft Mac 'n Cheese plus twenty or so frozen fish sticks or chicken nuggets between the two of us, servings that could've fed four or five people.
By the time I was in middle school it was apparent to everyone that I'd gone from pudgy to full-blown chub, and my mom enrolled me in Little League to play softball. Because I was bigger than most of the girls not only in width but in height, I was actually decent; once I got the hang of the game I was pretty fair shakes as an outfielder. But I still hated the physicality of the sport; running laps at practice in the Texas sun was about as appealing to me as wandering barefoot through the Sahara and I wanted to go home and curl up in the cool, dark house with a new book from the library and a cold soda more than ever. I played softball for three years, even making it to some kind of regional championship level that last year I played, but my heart wasn't in it and I hadn't shed any weight because the minute I was off the field I was heading for the concession stand for a hot dog. Add to that that when kids finish a ball game, the parents are eager for things like celebratory pizza parties, the team descending like locusts on a restaurant where the kids can go wild; the other, skinny girls were allowed to shovel pizza and cinnamon sticks into their mouths like animals, so why should I sit there picking at a salad and wishing enviously for a piece of garlic bread? Clearly it was a flawed plan, but in eighth grade Mom tried to get me to enroll in volleyball as well as basketball with my school just to be 'sure' that there wasn't secretly an athlete hiding under all the blubber.
There wasn't.
Cue high school, and I was the 'weird' fat chick by now. I was pretty savvy and wise beyond my years in terms of pop culture thanks to the Internet, which meant my favorite music consisted of Tom Waits, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and The Cure. Try being fourteen and explaining to your friends why "Tom Traubert's Blues" will always be better than "Independent Women" by Destiny's Child. Not to mention I had a penchant for black nail polish, watching "The Craft" and "The Broken Hearts Club" (mostly for the male makeout scenes, which I was fascinated with, and my enormous crush on Timothy Olyphant in that film), and wearing huge-soled platform sneakers made by Soda. I was definitely a weirdo, and this was before the whole emo-thing was cool. I was in Waco fucking Texas. Luckily for me I didn't go to one of the posh high schools, I went to a school that needed metal detectors and security guards, so there I found a little pack of weirdos. We congregated in the courtyard like grackles, all jelly bracelets and ironic pins on our backpacks and trading eyeliner and putting on glitter before glass, weird goth-raver-punk kids who wore mismatched Converse and shoplifted for attention and smoked cigarettes they stole from their older siblings. There I met My People--- waifish goths who knew the beauty of listening to Robert Smith during a thunderstorm, a fey gay boy who fulfilled all of my Placebo-driven nancy boy obsessions and gave me copious amounts of public affection (and later served as my prom date, resplendent in a foot-tall mohawk and a floor-length trenchcoat), punks with ball-chain necklaces who thought Fred Durst was the second coming. These were My People and now, seeing all of the kids who worship bands like My Chemical Romance and The Used and Blood on the Dance Floor and Tokio Hotel, seeing all of the 'No H8' propaganda and the gay kids on 'Glee' and the TV shows where weird outcast characters are actually cool, I'm jealous of modern high school freshmen. The iGeneration has a built-in sense of community because it's chic to be a rebel, a weirdo, an outcast. When I was younger we got milk cartons thrown at us and got called into the principal's office for wearing black lipstick.
Still, I was surprisingly well-adjusted. I made straight As and much to my surprise I ended up befriending a decent selection of our school's population, even though I think some of them just wanted homework help. There were jocks, cheerleaders, nerds, thugs, and everyone in between who crossed paths with me for one reason or another and we all became friendly. It wasn't until my sophomore year, when I became involved in theater, that I really 'found' myself, though. I was writing for the local newspaper, a monthly column, and my then-best friend convinced me to cut off my shoulder-length, curly hair. I went to a
barber shop to get this done. We bleached everything that was left and dyed it neon pink. My school was less than enthused, so I kept it as unnatural as possible for the next two years, fluctuating from brown to black to red to purple to the most obnoxious cherry-cola reddish-purple I could find, treading the line between breaking the dress code daily. I even got a nose ring and since I was a good student and never made trouble, they let it slide. I think they were just counting the days until me and my heathen ilk graduated.
Finally came college, and I had earned some scholarships for a school called Concord University all the way in West Virginia. People were shocked that I was going so far away, especially given how close I was to my family, but I desperately needed to escape Texas and spread my wings a little. In the fall of 2004 I moved to Athens, WV, which is tiny, gorgeous, and almost utterly secluded. It was about a half-hour drive to the nearest WalMart, mall or movie theater--- it was a one-horse town with very little for students to do.
It ended up being paradise.
For one, I met my boyfriend John pretty damn quick out of the gate. I was unaccustomed to the northeastern weather, and by September it was already freezing. One rainy day in the valley beside the girls' dorm I occupied I saw a group of costumed people running around hitting each other with what looked like pool noodles. I couldn't make out what they were doing but I ventured closer and wound up talking to a girl who'd been sidelined and was eagerly following the game. She explained the basics of Amtgard to me, and I noticed a handsome, burly boy with purple hair and a kilt running around, barefoot despite the ridiculous weather and wet grass, his face smeared with blue paint.
"Ah. That's Kuma," she said. I didn't even question the fact that the guy was dressed like Braveheart incarnate and barefoot while I wore a sweater and was wrapped in a flannel blanket. He was
adorable and considering his height of well over six feet and his sturdy build, he was freakishly graceful when it came to evading other people's pool noodle swords.
Our courtship started with
Shaolin Soccer on DVD in the basement of the boys' dorm, us sharing a blanket, and we dated for months. I can honestly say that John was the first love of my life and will always remain one of my nearest and dearest friends. We were both impulsive, outgoing, and gregarious Geminis, prone to spontaneity, silliness, and adventure. We treasured intelligence and we'd spend hours just lying in bed curled up together, each reading separate books, not talking until someone needed food or a bathroom break or came across a particularly good line they wanted to share from their reading material. He hosted a campus radio show and I would come and harass him sometimes while he was on-air; he would make me mix CDs full of eclectic, wonderful music ranging from old punk to Celtic songs and he was absurdly romantic in the most off-handed way. Through John I met wonderful friends, friends unlike any I'd ever had before.
It's funny to think about, and you can't really tell in that picture, but my time in college was the thinnest I'd been in years. I didn't have a car, and if you saw John's calf muscles you'd understand; we walked
everywhere. We walked up the hill/mountain into town to go to the bank or the convenience store or the pizza parlor; our dorms were at the top of hills while our classroom buildings were on tops of other hills. The cafeteria alone was down a steep-grade slope from my dorm. I was involved in Amtgard with John and spent my weekends running around with a pool noodle sword of my own (covered in pink leopard print fabric, naturally) and, while I was pretty awful at it, I was having a blast. I was also with someone who made me feel good and confident; John would get mad at me if I said self-deprecating things, and he would do things like pull me onto his lap (something that always made me protest that I was too heavy, etc until I realized it only made him do it more often). I wasn't eating for boredom because I was busy; between school and my social life and my active relationship, I was genuinely happy and while I wasn't going to be skinny anytime soon, I felt
good.
Of course, after the spring semester, things changed. My mom got diagnosed with severe vertigo and the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with her; she had long dizzy spells and was having a lot of neuropathy. I withdrew from Concord and told John that I would be moving back to Texas and wasn't sure if I'd get to come back. I think deep down I knew I wouldn't be coming back to West Virginia, but I didn't want to admit it to him or our other friends or myself.
My mom's diagnosis was multiple sclerosis, and pretty much right away I fell back into a routine. I got my old job back at the used bookstore where I'd worked since high school and quickly moved to full-time; I pushed college out of my brain altogether because I needed to work to help Mom make the bills. I paid rent and my share of the groceries and bills, and started saving up for things like getting a driver's license.
In 2006 I ended up making a new group of friends, ones who turned out not to be so good for me, and I fell back into old patterns. I was eating out a lot or eating complete junk, and my mom started dating a guy who was flat-out abusive but she wouldn't listen to any of us who tried to warn her away from him. She invited him to move into our house in 2008, and since he was a convicted child molester, I didn't want to be sharing a roof with him. I moved out and got a loft with two friends and a guy I'd been casually seeing. The guy was named Matt and he was pretty great at a time; he seemed like what I needed. He was smart and funny, romantic; he sent flowers to my work frequently and liked to take me out to dinner or concerts. He told me how beautiful I was and made me feel special. At one point, around the six-month mark, we were even discussing rings. However, Matt had begun to change by month eight; he started drinking heavily and staying out late, coming in well after two or three in the morning most nights. He was spending hundreds of dollars at the local pool hall, and I found a receipt while doing his laundry that showed a bar tab of over two hundred dollars for one night. I finally called him out about his drinking and he admitted that he had a problem and wanted to get sober. Two nights later, I came home to find our other two roommates sitting in the living room, obviously uncomfortable. They told me that Matt had come home with another girl and they were currently in the room that Matt and I slept in. (I had my own room, but spent most nights in his.) I knocked on his door in disbelief and was told drunkenly that he was busy. This led to an ugly scene, and it eventually came out that he'd been cheating on me for several weeks with a girl he'd been going out drinking with. Her name was Rhonda and she'd had weight-loss surgery, for which Matt had visited her in the hospital while she was recovering, and she had convinced him to buy a Coach bag for her for her birthday a few weeks prior. She was a major drinker and his party buddy at the pool hall each night. This led to a huge screaming match between Matt and I, and he became spiteful and abusive toward me, even sending me a picture of Rhonda in lingerie from his phone before texting 'oops, sorry, that wasn't meant for you' a few seconds later. After that, our lease was almost up; Matt moved in with Rhonda, my other two roommates went their own way, and I moved back home. Matt and Rhonda are now happily married and have a beautiful little girl together.
All in all, it was easy to see why my life was starting to fall apart. In 2010 I was completely devoid of ambition, working in a retail job that felt like it was going nowhere, barely making enough money to scrape by, and I had just ended another long-term relationship. I had put on quite a bit of weight through stress-eating and depression, and I decided that I just did not fucking care anymore. The only friends I had left were people I'd met through a Dallas horror convention I'd become involved with, Texas Frightmare Weekend, and while I loved these friends dearly, they couldn't pull me out of the dark place I was sinking into. I was involved in two other relationships, both semi-long term, and I ended both of them; it wasn't anyone's fault but mine. My head was just everywhere but with those people, and I couldn't handle the idea of leading someone on or going along with a situation where I wasn't getting what I needed. I was 'needier' then than I'd ever been in my life and I knew that even if it hurt me and the people who loved me, I needed to be honest about what I needed.
In 2011 my grandfather, who had always been my only male role model and who had been the man that taught me dirty jokes, blackjack and dominoes, and the thrill of a good roller coaster, was diagnosed with COPD and emphysema. His health wavered for a few months, with him going in and out of hospital care and assisted living.
In May of 2011 my mom was applying deodorant when she called me into her bedroom, her voice shaking. I came in, wondering what was wrong with her, and she made me feel a lump under her arm that hadn't been there before. I begged her to call the doctor right away. By the time they got her in for a mammogram a week later, the lump had grown in size and become more firm. The mammogram showed that it was cancerous, and they officially diagnosed her with HER2 breast cancer--- one of the most aggressive forms. They scheduled her for a mastectomy in June. Two weeks before it was set to happen, a pipe broke in our house, flooding half of the house in several inches of water and destroying a lot of our belongings. We were relocated, with our pets, to an extended-stay motel in town.
My mother lost both her breasts and eleven lymph nodes in one day; the cancer had already spread through most of her torso within three weeks of diagnosis. They began aggressive radiation and chemotherapy on her, and I was her primary caregiver. She was stuck in that motel all day every day, so I revolved my life around her; I worked full-time and resumed classes at the local community college, finally determined to get a job where I could make more than retail wage, but I was eating fast food several times a day and the minute I was 'free' I was going back to the motel to spend the nights with her. I stayed with her, watching TV or movies or just sitting in bed talking, determined to keep her from being lonely. As a result I got little to no exercise, and the weight that had been creeping on was suddenly full-on shoveling itself onto my body. By November, when my grandfather died, I had put on forty pounds.
My mom's fight with cancer wasn't long, but it was fierce. She passed away in July of 2012 and I was completely lost. I had been fortunate enough to make incredible friends--- incredible, beautiful friends who were adults for the first time in my life, friends who understood what the real world was like and didn't get hung up on gossip or bullshit or petty drama. These friends stood by me and loved me; I had friends who called several times a day, friends who sent me stupid pictures on the Internet, friends who told me silly jokes or referred good movies to me or made me mixtapes. I had friends who taught me how to breathe and friends who pulled me against their chests without saying a word. I lost myself in those friends, and they saved my life. There were nights where anything but survival would've been so fucking easy I could taste it; I had cabinets full of morphine and everything ending in 'codone' you could imagine, I had sedatives out the wazoo, I had knives and razors and a car that could really pick up speed if I floored it. I had every kind of 'out' I needed except that my friends would never have forgiven me. Friends like Brandy, who always knew how to make me laugh even when I was crying so hard I couldn't breathe; Shawn, who I'm convinced was a brother of mine in a past life because there's no other reason I should feel like someone 'gets' me that fucking much; Jeff, who is such a rock and doesn't even realize how amazing he is sometimes; Burt, who was full of advice and strength for me any time I needed him; Matt, my platonic husband, who gives hugs that make you feel like there are no monsters under the bed when he's around, and all of the others who were there for me building a cocoon around me when I felt so fragile that I thought a good wind would make me crumble. I gave myself over to that feeling of safety, of being loved and protected and looked-after, and I threw myself into my schoolwork because it was easy and familiar and didn't force me to do anything I had to reach out of that comfort zone to do.
I finally realized in November of 2012 that something had to change. I was so completely miserable with who I was that I had given up on becoming who I wanted to be. I was enthusiastic about school--- I had a 4.0 GPA since restarting college and I was looking forward to entering the workforce with an actual career in a subject I was in love with. I was helping friends make horror movies, something I'd loved since I was a kid. But I wasn't dating, and when we took pictures I was self-conscious of how I looked around my friends, all of whom seemed beautiful and vibrant like exotic birds. I was smiling on the outside but inside I was incredibly sad and hollow and aching for something else. I gave my notice at work after 11 years of serving there, deciding that in the spring I'd throw myself even more wholly into school so that I could finish early.
And then, while reading some research done on my mom's particular diagnosis, I saw that obesity is a leading cause for aggressive strains of cancer like that, and it's also been linked in some cases to the development of MS. Given our copious family history of diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer and thyroid problems, I knew what had to be done.
I've done it the 'hard way' before, trust me. I've spent thousands of dollars at various gyms, the most recent Gold's Gym experiment clocking in at a cool four grand when all was said and done. Membership fees, workout clothes, intense sessions with personal trainers, and enrollment in boot camps; I did it all. I quit sodas cold-turkey, gave up fast food, and busted my ass for months on end in various programs only to lose five, ten pounds, one jeans size. I might feel better physically but the weight wasn't coming off. It was determined that I was insulin-resistant and my body processed sugar differently than some people's, resulting in a harder time losing weight; my doctor pushed amphetamines and glucose medications on me, promising pharmaceutical miracles.
I stepped on the scale and almost had a heart attack.
After a lot of research, and only talking to a few dear friends about it for a month or so, I booked a consultation with the Barker Bariatric Center in Dallas. Their high customer service rating and clean, cutting-edge facility put me at ease, and I really felt safe with the doctors there. Since I was self-pay, my process was pretty quick, and within a few weeks we'd set a date and I was starting my liquid diet.
I was having the gastric sleeve surgery.
For those who don't know, a gastric sleeve is sort of the 'middle step' between a Lap Band and a full gastric bypass. In a Lap Band, they insert a ring around your stomach, which can be tightened or loosened, to help control your hunger. However, these have tons of side effects and are deemed very, very ineffective for most people. They also have a very high complication rate. Gastric bypass, on the other hand, involves the removal of parts and the re-routing of others; you have to take a lot of vitamins and supplements after to get the nutrition you need, and you drop weight at a very rapid pace.
Gastric sleeving, on the other hand, is where they reduce the size of your stomach from a fist to about the width of two fingers. They don't re-route anything and it doesn't change
how you digest. They remove the part of your stomach that produces the 'hunger' hormone, however, which makes it easier for you to control cravings. Most people who have the procedure lose about 60-65% of their excess weight in the first year or so, and it has only about a 2% reported rate for serious complications later. It's also permanent, which makes it a better option than the Lap Band for yet another reason.
On January 9 I went for my final weigh-in at Barker Clinic and clocked in at 348.1 pounds. I
know. Holy
shit. My home scale won't even weigh me because it tops out at like 325. I stood there almost in tears as the doctors checked my vitals, recording everything so that we can take note of how my body changes. The whole time I just kept thinking
348, 348, 348, Jesus Christ, who weighs that much? Zoo animals? People on the Discovery Channel on those shows where they have to remove a doorframe to get them out of their houses and into an ambulance? That's higher than the weight limit on most things--- think about it. Lawn chairs, ladders, trampolines, porch swings. All of those and more are in danger of becoming kindling when my fat ass comes near them. I began lathering myself in self-loathing and anger, remembering the pictures from our recent Christmas party where I was sitting down and
not photographed from a flattering Myspace-friendly angle.
Shawn's not a tiny guy, but I
dwarf him in this. I'm like the Stay-Puft Man next to him, ready to stomp on a village or something.
So I went on the pre-op liquid diet for a week, and on January 16 I was checked into the Forest Park Medical Center for my surgery. We found out the fun way that my veins are teeny and deep and thus can't accomodate an IV, after
ten tries, and so they had to insert a PICC line through my torso to keep me on a fluid drip. I also reacted badly to the morphine
and got delirious and feverish on the hydrocodone, proving once and for all that me paying attention in D.A.R.E classes when I was a kid was just good karma since I make a terrible drug addict.
I'm now six days post-surgery, and people are asking how I feel. How do I feel? I don't know. I'm sore, but every day gets easier. When I first did it, I was convinced someone had hit me with a Mack truck. They pump CO2 into your abdomen through those little laproscopic cuts so that your organs will float or something, I didn't pay much attention to
why but all I knew was that it made me feel like I had the bends. But about two hours post-op the nurses are urging you get up and walk around the ward, and I felt like asking "Are you high? I'm
hurting, leave me alone." But that soreness is minor now, just a cramp in my right side when I move from a lying-to-sitting or sitting-to-standing position or do something stupid like cough or try to put on my own shoes. The cuts are all little-bitty and after I got over my initial hipochondriac rendition of "OMG does this look infected to you?", they stopped bugging me and I don't even think they're really going to scar. The hardest part has been staying hydrated; they want you to drink about four or five bottles of water a day and that's hard when you're A) battling lots of nausea, and B) can only take teeny little baby sips when you want to chug the whole bottle down because you're
so damn thirsty.
But you know what? Tomorrow I go back to Dallas for my one-week weigh-in and check-up as well as the staple-removal, and I'm kind of excited. My jeans already feel looser and today I managed to get totally full--- like, chicken-fried-steak-with-mashed-taters-and-cornbread-and-pie full--- off of a Powerade Zero and about a measuring cup full of tomato-basil soup.
Pretty soon, if things go according to plan, I won't have to worry about fitting on roller coasters or airplane seats or wondering why that adorable dress doesn't come in a 3X or having to apologize for my size or mark myself as 'Full-figured' on the dating sites I'm a member of. I won't have to feel winded walking up a flight of stairs or worry about if I'm going to get diabetes by thirty. And I won't feel that impulse to
eat when I'm lonely or sad or bored or thinking about my mom or my grandpa or my life or anything else, because I won't be hungry for food. I'm hungry for something else now.
I'm hungry to find out who I am under all of this weight.
So let's dig in and find out together.
