Message board

I have been on a parenting website for a long time. I think I started reading the board when I was just trying to get pregnant with Kaleb. I started on that path in 2001. I have found a small group of women (well like 100) that have kept in close contact with, especially in the last 4 yrs. Anyway I was posting about my desire to look into a WLS and one of the ladies on my board had some great things to say. Her screen name is YAM. I know her real name, but figured I would keep her identity a secret. She deserves some privacy. Her words are so powerful and really put into perspective why lots of people myself included consider WLS. Here is her post:

I agree about the morbid obesity catching up with you. We don't have MO in our family, but we have dear family friends, extreme MO. He was 500 or so. They were mostly healthy fat people, you know active and otherwise fine just really fat. But the instant they got into their 50s, it all just started to catch up. THAT's why it's called MORBID obesity, you basically are blowing your good years twice or even three times as fast so that you don't have a long healthy middle age into old age. We were shocked. Sure, in his 30s he was like a 40to 50 year old but that's not that much different. But in his 50s he was like a 70 or 80 year old. By 60 he was dying, and it wasnt pretty. Horrible. Dh saw him in the hospital the week he died and he looked....oh I can't even explain it. The body can't handle the load, literally and figuratively, for that long. It is morbid, plain and simple. It's just not acutely morbid And easily ignored while your body is still tolerating it fairly well. But you just don't see MO 80 year olds. You just don't.

As wls was gaining in popularity, it seemed like an obviousnchoice for them but they were dismissive. This is how we've always been we're in good health, i don't want surgery. The methods aren't perfected yet, it's too disruptive and permanent, we're doing fine, just fat like we've always been. By the time it was obvious that their approach was flawed (i.e. the obesity was having far more broad disruptive effects on their life and lifespan than any post-surgery eating restrictions), he was too sick and fragile to handle it. He cried at one point, to my mom, about waiting too long to take things seriously. My mom was devastated. They were all lifelong friends. Teenage beach road trips, groomsmen and bridesmaids, seders together every year, through thick and thin. All along my parents were never judgmental or pushy, if this month they were down about it and on a diet, my parents were down about the fatness and on board with the diet. When they were "hey, look it's fine, I'm fat and happy and sick of trying to be something i'm not" then my parents were on board. I think once my mom had a talk with her alone about being concerned in recent years, and dropped it when she got no traction. And my dad had a word with him about it, in more forceful terms as men can be, and he shrugged my dad off, at which point they went back to following their cues again.

After he died, I think it was 6 weeks before she was in surgery for weight loss. She had the lap band.

She lost a lot of weight, of course. Still fat, but not MO. She looks, size-wise, like she did at my parents' wedding, which is certainly still fat, but not devastatingly so. And I just hate to think about how we'd still have Joey around if it didn't take them so long to realize that MO extracts its toll one way or another. And she's not happy, either. She's bitter and angry and widowed younger than she ever imagined. She's tried dating again (it's been two years) but she's freaked out that her jdate profile is this haggard woman in her 60s, and complained to my mom about the kinds of people who end up wanting to meet her. They had a fight last week about it. My mom was telling her to stop rejecting everybody out of hand, and she was pissed that my mom took such a dim view of her prospects and my mom told me last night she was dumbfounded that she thought that these 45 year old men were going to be knocking down her door. She wanted to say it, but didn't, that, uh, they can still snag someone in her 20s and 30s and you're no prize at 67. Harsh, but true. It's like all the joy was sucked out of their family the instant he died. It broke something. I SO wish they'd done something ten years ago. Hell, I wish there had been something like this back in the 70s and 80s because if ever there were candidates for it, they were them. They were so right for each other. That couple in your circle of friends everybody knew would "make it."

I don't know if that's where you are, but I just wanted to share that story in light of what you had said about your aunt. I think it's hard to see what it's doing because when you're still "otherwise" in perfect health, it's hard to take the problem too seriously. How can it be that big of a problem? It's easy to say that the only adjustment needs to be your own mind about just accepting it, and not feeling bad about yourself (which is a good thing of course, to not feel BAD about yourself because nobody should, fat or thin) but when the body ultimately has blown its lifetime reserves on keeping you non-diabetic and non-disabled and non-heart diseased through your 20s, 30s and 40s, it's a fast and steep dropoff. Just not the kind of medical issue you leave to your "personal resolution" to fix. If you are MO, and have been for a good long time without any real chance of it changing anytime soon, it seems to me you fix it like the medical issue it is (even if it's hard to see that angle of it when you're still relatively young and healthy) and then if you're still into it, fix the personal issues that got you there. The weight doesn't have to wait until your head is where it should be. Why should it? So you can make your body take another 5-10 years (10-20 in effect) of abuse while you work on your "personal resolve?" Frankly, I bet fixing the medical issue will SHOW you the kind of mental resolve you have, and one fixes the other, like it should, but just the other way around, if that makes sense.

And fuck the judgment, the "easy way out" people. Fuck them. Fix yourself. It's your body, and your life, and you don't owe them shit. Either own your decision and let them think what they want, or lie about it. Whatever is easiest for you, because they're not you.

Wow, I guess I'm angrier than I thought. My mom and I just had the latest conversation about her last night, so I guess it's fresh.

*sigh* I miss him. Seders are not the same.