Bummer

I'm not in the best of moods right now. Funny how everything can be going your way then one little thing messes it all up. I was talking to my business partner & friend today and I say to her "So you comin' to Brazil with me or not." She started giving me excuses, albeit valid ones about how she may not be able to go after all. Ugh. I can't help but be disappointed. Actually, I'll a little surprised at how disappointed at am. I was really excited that she said she would go with me and it just really elevated my spirits. I'm not one to ask for a lot of help and I usually resign myself to doing things on my own and to not really have high expectations of other people.

It's a good and a bad thing. It's good because I am pretty independent and I'm not inclined to let other people decide what I will and won't do. The bad part of it is that it's nearly impossible for me to really trust people and let them in. I'm guilty of having it in the back of my mind that people will fail me. It's a flaw of mine that I hate. But, I will say this. I am very forgiving and usually get over disappoints fairly easily. I don't tend to hold grudges so at least my disappointment is typically shortlived.

I feel like I'm really quick to be supportive for the people around me, but I don't get that it's reciprocated. I can't lie, I feel a little hurt and a little sad because it would have been really, really nice to have someone go with me, but if it can't happen then it can't happen. Don't get me wrong, I'm very excited about going and after having thought about it for awhile I think that maybe this is an opportunity for me to try to give back. My initial thoughts are to soldier through the surgery and discharge then during my last week there, offer my time and support to other people who might be travelling alone. I think it will be a good thing and again, maybe all this is happening for a reason. I will never assume that there isn't something in all of this that I need to learn.

What about my family? Well, I will just say this. Some of them just can not make it, others well, they're good at being supportive as long as it doesn't require them to do anything. I'll leave it at that.

I'm putting all of this is God's hands and just praying for him to give me the words and show me the steps and I'll be alright. I still haven't told all my friends so maybe one of them may go.

Woo-Hoo!

Great news! My PCP rocks. I’ve had a couple of phone calls with her secretary and they’ve both been very helpful in helping maneuver the healthcare system in order for me to get my labs and pre-op testing here. Monday I go in for bloodwork and she has arranged the endoscopy and the chest x-ray at the hospital for me. Goodness. This whole thing is slowly materializing. I also sent in my final loan paperwork today. I applied for 13,500 ‘cause I figure I could swing anything above that so assuming I get it, then I’m set, there won’t be any major obstacles to me getting the DS.

I’m trying not to fret too much about it and just trying to leave it in God’s hands.

Cool

So I went to see my PCP and although she wasn't overwhelmingly supportive, she seemed really receptive about me having the surgery and will even work with me to get all the tests done here that I need to have. So very cool. She even mentioned that she had some RNY patients which is even more comforting to know at least I know she isn't anti-WLS.

I left with her fax number in hand in order to fax her the pre-op tests that Dr. Marchesini requested as well as some info on the DS. I've already faxed her the info and I hope to hear from her so that I can schedule my labs at by late July/August.

There was some bad news, my blood pressure is pretty high, 152/80. Yikes, so I also left with a new prescription for blood pressure medication. Sucks, but I know this is a temporary thing. I only gotta do it for a few more months then I'll be on the losing side and won't need it anymore. My personal goal is to be super compliant after surgery, I know this whole ordeal will be a challenge and I have no intentions in screwing any of this up. I plan to use this tool to the best of my ability. I really am not trying to mess around. My goal is to have lost 100% of the excess weight by month 24, if not month 18.

Anyway, I have a ton of work to get done in the next two months, the biggest challenge is making sure the money is together. I really don't want to get any money from my parents because they've already supported me in many other ways so I'm really going to work on doing it myself, even if it includes starting up a side gig. I have to get this done -- by any means necessary -- my life depends on it.

PCP

Tomorrow I have an appointment with my Primary Care Physician and to be honest, I'm a little worried. I've heard the horror stories of many PCP's who don't know nor care to know about their patients who have had the DS. I really like my PCP, she's a really cool lady and I'm hoping that she will be supportive of my decision and be willing to help me do what I need to do. I'm definitely keeping my fingers crossed.

I plan to have a folder of information for her to peruse. I doubt she knows anything about the DS and I'm hoping she'll be supportive and willing.

As far as the money goes, I just applied for a home equity loan and realistically, I can get maybe $7000-$8000 out of it. I'll be lucky to get $10,000. I also applied for a credit card and I was approved, I just don't know for how much. I'm hoping for like $5000 or something, then I can cash out.

One other option I was thinking about was to start selling stuff on eBay or put a website to sell stuff. There are plenty of drop ship companies and I really only need to get things going for say the rest of the year. All I want is to pay for my surgery, that is all.

Real

So, I think I mentioned I already communicated with Dr. Marchesini and the cogs are in motion. I have put together a budget and will be working off of that. So far, with a good deal of padding, my total expenses should be around $15,200. When researching getting the surgery here in the US, I was approved for $11,500 however this was for a surgeon here. I will need to check to see if I can get that money to Brazil. We'll see, otherwise I will have to go the home equity route which could be a pain in the ass. First and foremost, I want to get the hospital & surgeon fees paid for by loans. Airfare, hotels, fees, etc. I can manage as I go along.

I'm looking to have surgery the first full week in September and I just realized that the the doc wants me to stay a full two weeks after the actual surgery, not just two weeks total so that means I could be there for almost 3 weeks. Yikes. I did talk to my busines partner (more on that later) and she agreed to go with me for at least part of the whole thing so that's awesome.

I still have a lot to get done beforehand, but I think this surgery is becoming more of a reality than just a notion.

Frustrated

Well that didn’t work too well. I came in today and was presented with a flurry of recent company updates, all of which I had no idea. I feel like a stranger in my own company. So incredibly frustrating that my so-called business partner doesn't even ... ugh....it's just pissing me off more and more to even think about it.... GRRRRR.

Mistake

I think I made a mistake with my business partner. I should have talked to her about how I really feel and let her know the things about her that frustrate. I am hoping to get the chance later today. I don't know that I'll tell her about the surgery. Maybe I'll wait til I have some definitive dates.

Beginning

I just sent off my initial email to Dr. Marchesini. Basically, I gave him a brief medical history of my life, in particular the last 10 or so years where I've developed high blood pressure, pre-diabetes and seemingly gained like 50 million lbs. I also went through the indignity of having to take front and side photos of myself in my skivvies. Not fun. Sucks, but a small price to pay to give the doctor all the information he needs to tell me "YES, I will be your doctor."

I have already talk to my mother (not my father just yet) and my two sisters about the change of plans (re: Brazil) and they have been incredibly supportive, well my sisters have....mom keeps rambling on about the people on TV who have lost so much weight selling their meal plans on QVC. Bless her heart. I know she means well, but she doesn't quite get it. She did say she'd go with me to Brazil if I couldn't find anyone else. Let's just say I'm trying to get someone else. Anyway, there are quite a few things I need to do that I've never done before, namely get a passport and a visa. That should be interesting.

Issues

I am having problems with my business partner. They've been festering for about 8 months now. She's a typical Type-A personality and I'm so not. She's also a pretty aggressive person who doesn't always listen which is actually ironic because I can tell that it is important to her that she if heard and fully understand, but she doesn't really tolerate the same. Anyway, she's been going through some things in her personal life that are incredibly stressful and a lot of that stress and frustration has been misdirected toward me.

Don't get me wrong, starting and running your own business is no walk in the park, it is a lot of work for everyone involved. Since we're in the technology field and I'm head of technology, a lot of the work and responsibility falls on me which I don't mind. I've worked in startups for all my adult career so it's not anything new to me. Lately she's taken to taking out all her frustrations on me and basically blaming me for her health problems. WTF? I'll be the first to admit that no, I'm not perfect and yes I get overwhelmed, but I know I am doing the best I can and I and my team are getting a lot accomplished. Sometimes I let little things slip when I think time could be better spent on more important things, but ultimately things get done and we are making great progress. She doesn't really see it that way. She feels it's okay to have these emotional episodes where she makes me feel guilty and useless and then really thinks nothing of it. I get upset about it, try to work harder and end up just wanting to drop kick her. I called her on it a couple of weeks ago and things have really cooled between us which is good and bad. I like that I don't have to deal with that BS, but our friendship suffers greatly and I feel like I can't even have a normal human relationship with her without getting my head bitten off.

At one point she said that we have three hats, CEO/employee hats, business partner hats and friendship hats. I made a decision a few weeks ago to put my friendship hat in storage. I don't think I can do "friends" with her while we are working together. I don't know how to make it work with her and I'd rather just get the work done. We have a long list of projects, IT projects, that need to get done this summer and it's my ultimate responsibility to get it done and the last thing I need is to feel demoralized by her whenever the whim hits so I decided that our friendship, specifically in regard to me coming to her about anything is on hold til all the projects are done. It sucks because when we first started this company we were really two peas in pod, we worked long and hard hours and although it was exhausting I did get some satisfaction out of it that we were building something together and that we were becoming good friends. Now, all that is mostly gone, especially in the last couple of months. I've helped her out with her personal stuff during this time when she has needed, but have felt she wasn't really interested in whatever I had going on, unless of course if it was about how fast I was going to have my surgery, a subject that now when she asks about it, I say "I don't want to talk about it."

As I write this, much of it seems very "junior high school" but it is important to me and has caused a lot of grief in the past several weeks. I've been working hard every single day, including weekends for 10-16 hours a day. I don't do anything beside work and it's a very lonely and soul-crunching kind of thing, especially when I feel like I have to go at it alone and my "partner" doesn't give a poo that I do. She has given me hints and practically told me as much that she would rather have me work than anything else.

Starting this business meant I had to make a lot of sacrifices, but I counted on the fact that I could at least have my business partner and other employees as a social circle and system of support, but now I am even more isolated because I can't even reach out to those people. To my business partner, nothing else matters but getting the work done and so that's what I have decided to do. As far as she is concerned, that's all she's getting out of me. My plan now is that I am going to do whatever I need to do to get these projects done by the end of August which is like 11 weeks away. Once all that is done, I can step away clean, take September off and have my surgery. I certainly will have earned the time off.

Negotiate

To be honest, I don't have any lofty plans for when I get skinny and lose all the weight. If hard pressed, I could probably come up with a list of 100 reasons to lose the weight, but when I think about it, and believe you me, I have thought about it a lot, the biggest thing for me that will give me the greatest joy is to not have to negotiate my way in the world. Anyone who is morbidly obese knows exactly what I am talking about.

Negotiating your way means constantly having to think about how you move spatially in life. It's not only whether or not every chair, seat, bench, sofa, booth will fit, but also will it creak, will it moan, will it break ... will it be comfortable, will it hurt, will it cut off circulation to my foot, will I look silly, will I have to shift positions every 5 minuts, will I be able to get out of it comfortably, when I do try to get up/out/off will it creak, will it moan, will it break, will my ass look big, will my shirt scrunch up, will my back fat show, will my pants, skirt be uncomfortabley scrunched up so that my leg fat shows, will I have to step out wide so that the bunched up clothes between my legs can fall down....on and on and on. Concerns about "do I look fat in these jeans" don't even matter because you're lucky to even find jeans that fit. Up until a few months ago, you didn't even know they made jeans that big.

You are so far from "are people looking at me" that you are in "I don't even look at people" mode. For me, I could care less what people think, I have long passed that concern. I don't notice or care if people are staring and pointing, it doesn't even register if there sneer or laugh. When I deal in the outside world, I have blinders on, it's like people are just moving objects that I pay no mind to. I'm afraid of what might happen if I do. Nevertheless, these objects have to be negotiated. It's a daily struggle of can I get past that object gracefully without touching it, will I knock something over and will anyone notice, will I be able to take up two seats on the airplane without someone interfering, will I remember to bring my seat belt extender and not have to ask the flight attendant, will I fit in the seat of a car I've never been in? Will I be able to fasten that seat belt? Or adjust the steering wheel? Will I be able to step on that deck? Will I be able to get on a elevator and not have it jump a little? On. And on. And on.

And that's only part of it. You find that you hate anything and everything that brings any attention to yourself. Anything, I mean mundane stuff. You hate shopping for clothes and you hate shopping for shoes and you'll be damned if you go and try anything on. You think "who wants to see a fat girl try on shoes or try on a skirt?" Not to mention that at the same time you're thinking "Is anyone staring at me while I'm trying on these Nikes? Is my ass showing?"

It is a brutal, unrelenting, pride-swallowing seige.

To let all of that go, to just exist in the world without excuse, would be absolutely divine.

Burden?

Early this year, I had a conversation with my business partner that I will never forget and to be completely honest, it is something that has plagued me for months. We always say we want our friends to be honest and truthful with us because we think/know that this is a true mark of friendship -- telling us things we don't always want to hear. Well, after a particularly tedious week of work and amid my growing frustration I approached her and wanted to talk to her about some of the problems we were having and as is typical, our conversation migrated from business to friendship. Among other things, she said that she often felt like she couldn't tell me how she truly feels because she feels my feelings will get hurt. Well, I said, then just say what you feel you need to say. I almost regret saying that...

After a slight pause, she said that she is very, very concerned about my weight. I nod. She says it concerns her greatly, she sees how I am struggling and failing to a certain extent and that if she knew that there was something she could do to help me she would. She says that being this overweight is obviously affecting my life and then she says that it is affecting our friendship as well. She says that it puts on burden on my friends to always have to work harder to find things for us to do, to figure out if I will be comfortable going, sitting, doing whatever, that all this affects our friendship. Needless to say, I was taken aback.

On one hand I understand her concern and was deeply moved that she would say that she is concerned about my weight because in 32 years of life, not one single friend of mine has ever said that. I'm sure the #1 reason why is because they don't want to hurt my feelings. On the other hand, though, I was a little offended because I wasn't quite sure what she was really telling me. To me she sounded like she was putting qualifiers on our friendship. She said that when I lose the weight we would be able to do more things and spend more time together. That we would be able to go to the beach, go shopping, hop in her sports car and go. Yeah that sounds nice and all, but what I was left with is this feeling that wait, are you telling me that our friendship is not as rich as it could be because I'm fat?

In all my life, I've never had any thoughts like that about any of my friends, regardless of their limitations. If we were friends, that's it, we were friends. We did stuff together and if there was something one of us couldn't do, then we found something we could do together. With her it seems like, unless I lose the weight there is no real friendship to be had. As business partners, yes we spend tons of time around each other, but as friends, we don't do squat and it bothers me that my weight could be the issue. It's not like I can't get around. I don't have problems walking, shopping, going places, I go to restaurants (maybe not in booths) and I go do stuff all the time so I don't really understand what the problem is.

In college, when like many college students my friends and I had zero money it never hindered us from being friends. Even with my friends that did have money, it was more important to be together than to do one thing versus another. If our friendship was important then we found time to be together. And all this ties into my greatest fear about this surgery, that what I know about myself and what I know and accept about my friends and family will change. I don't know how I will accept big changes in the people in my life in their relationships with me. I don't know how I will feel with my business partner starts wanting to be better friends with me, like all of a sudden our friendship will matter more...because somehow I can fit in a booth now? I understand it, but I don't understand it. I don't think I would ever put limits on a friendship like that. It's like she's saying to me "Let me know when you're skinny and we can be friends again. I can't hang with you when you're fat."

This really pokes a stick at one of my most painful wounds, that of not feeling good enough. I think many obese people feel this way, especially people who have been this way their whole life and who know nothing else. We always struggle with feeling adequate and with your friends you do feel a sense of relief because you trust that they like you for you and that you're always good enough. Yes, of course, you expect your friends to want the best for you and you want the best for them and you mutually want the best in life for each other. Friendship requires that you have to tell your friends stuff they don't always want to hear and that I accept, but to tell me that the very nature of our friendship hinges on whether or not I lose weight just bugs me and I can't reconcile it with her concern for me. I can't. It's been almost 6 months and I'm still struggling with it.

BPD/DS

Biliopancreatice Diversion with Duodenal Switch (BPD/DS or DS). Say that fast 3 times and try not to swear! Well, this the surgery I am having as I am sure it is the best one for me. Although I hate to put this out into the universe, I am 32 years old, weigh over 500 lbs, have high blood pressure, pre-diabetes and many systems that mimic Lupus. It doesn't get more mortifying than that.

The Roux-en-Y procedure, the most common weight loss surgery (WLS) is just not as effective for someone in my position and I know with my personal history that it wouldn't be as successful. The DS differs from the RNY in that the DS is both restrictive and malabsorptive meaning, not only can you not eat a lot of food, the food that you do eat is not absorbed as much. It's like a double whammy of sorts. With the DS, I know I am giving myself the best chance possible. I believe that in 2 years, I will be at my goal weight of 175lbs. I am 5'10" so that is a good weight for me. If you did the math that's like 325 lbs in two years. I believe it's totally doable.

My plans right now are to have the surgery in September and I definitely want to lose as much weight as I can beforehand and to be as healthy as I possibly can. I figure the healthier I am the better the whole situation is not only when it comes down to actually having the surgery, but also in recovery. My goal is to be super-compliant and to give myself the best possible chance. As soon as I wake up from surgery, it's going to on, no more playing around.

Just thinking about it makes me excited.

Lord..

It might be apropos to say that the catalyst for all this was a rude comment or an especially embarassing situation, but that's not the case. The truth of the matter is I have been fighting obesity my whole life, trying everything from grapefruit diets to Atkins to flat out starvation. I'm not a stupid person, I know I am fat, but how long am I suppose to fight a losing battle before I make the decision to freakin' do something about it and so I have.

I didn't reach this epiphany yesterday. It's been something I made up my mind I wanted to do for months, but like most morbidly obese people (and most Americans for that matter) I have shitty insurance and so my surgery -- Biliopancreatice Diversion w/ Duodenal Switch -- is not covered so I am faced with a huge financial obstacle. To tell you the truth, I could have overcome this sooner but there is a great lingering fear I have. It has nothing to do with the actual surgery or any potential complications, but it has a lot to do with the aftermath, what my life will be like, will I be the same person at my core, will my friends still be my friends, will my family still be the same and on and on.

I've been up and down on the whole issue and I am definitely trying to work my way through it all. I know life won't be the same, that is the point after all, but I don't want what I know of myself to be completely different, I want it to be better, but not unrecognizable. The turning point to actual making the commitment was a obesity surgery support meeting I went to Wednesday night. I had been to one before but had not really connected with anyone, this time I did however. I met two people in particular, one who was celebrating 11 months and another who had her surgery just 11 days prior! Both are amazing women. I had an opportunity to see the "after-life" from two different perspectives and it just really renewed my spirit and it was then that I decided that I met these women for a reason, God/the universe is trying to tell me something and I need to listen and stop thinking about it and start making moves!

I had been adamant about having a particular doctor (Dr. Smith) perform the surgery, but for me to have it in the here would cost me upwards of $35-$40,000. Instead, I've decided on Dr. Marchesini in Brazil. Including travel costs, I'd only be out around $15,000. That is a helluva lot more doable. I'll be contacting the good doctor via email today and will start scrounging the money together immediately. Because of work obligations, the earliest I will be able to have the surgery is in September which probably works out okay because that will leave ample time for me to do what I need to do before hand, make flight arrangements, have all my pre-op testing done and arrange all my post-op aftercare.

I'm really excited and scared at the same time, but ultimately I truly feel this is the best thing for me.