Che Sheds the Shadows

I’m alive!

Seems like a strange way to start a blog but I totally stand by the statement. Leading up to the surgery was close to the lead up to Christmas day…until the morning of. I was Queen of Optifast, living La Vida Liquid. I didn’t want to be late so I made my mother get up at 4.30am to drive from Whangaparaoua to Flat bush…we got there at 5.15am and check in wasn’t till 7. Whoops.

So we sat and waited. We googled. Side effects and complications mostly, possibly not a good idea. I started to panic. I panicked, while mum had a coffee. I continued to panic, while mum had a muffin. I panicked more, while mum slept, only pausing to video the funny snoring noises she was making.

By 7am I was out of the car and waiving Mum off as I set out toward the elevator. I was greeted by a lovely nurse and an equally smiley receptionist. I am guessing that I looked like a possum in headlights as the nurse took my arm instead of leading me to the consultation rooms. The panic only deepened. I saw a nurse, then the Anesthetist, Nutritionist, Physiologist and finally my surgeon. By this time the nurse had taken away my phone, my only connection to my partner and kids. So when the surgeon walked in I started to leak from my face. I hoped that her surgery skills were better than her bedside manner, as she was so uncomfortable with my emotion that she was in and out in what seemed like seconds. What did they say? In surgery by 8am? In for 4hrs? I couldn’t remember a single word. Clothes off, hospital gown on, and I am heading to surgery…on shaking legs.

“Climb up on the bed please.” It is so bright, there are so many people in here. My leaking turns to sobs. I start wondering if I can get out of this? Go home, eat a Big Mac and forget this traumatic ordeal. But they are trying to calm me down, have given me a sedative. I am still doubting everything, but in more of an ‘I’m too calm to really give a shit’ kind of way.

And then I am awake.

Is it over? OMG the pain. I swear they have punctured my lung. I would have bet money on it, with all of my medical nothingness. I am wheeled into a room and am reminded of when I had my daughter. But this is nothing like that. I am in agony and there is no squishy deliciousness sleeping in my arm. There is no euphoria of the fairy tale future I have ahead of me. There is only pain and nausea. I won’t go on about it. No one wants to hear about it. I had to look into the face of one of my closest friends, while having a particularly bad episode, and see the fear and helplessness on her face.  But I will say that, on the following day when they removed the drainage tube from my stomach, I realised what had been resting on my lung and preventing painless breathing.

I slept, man did I sleep. Shannon spent a lot of time with me and Mum came, albeit to steel my sickly limelight. My nurse was taking my blood pressure and Mum jumped in with a request, as she wasn’t feeling so flash. Sure enough, my readings are fine and the nurse suggests, firmly, that Mum needs to go to a Dr…soon! Long story slightly shortened, I spent my first night at the apartment alone while Mum had to race to the North Shore hospital with a suspected Heart Attack.

The nausea continued, as did the pain. But what I wasn’t prepared for was the emotion. I could not stop crying. Why did I do this to myself? Did I hate myself this much? Fast forward to day 7, post op, and those doubts are mostly all gone. I have kicked the nausea. The pain is panadol manageable. I am now eating pureed deliciousness and I have lost  6.5kg since surgery. That is 13kg in total. I am still tired and have to rest after any activity, but who cares, I am again feeling positive and looking forward to what is to come.

If I think about it too much, I still feel sad for the little girl in me that has never believed that I was good enough, pretty enough, smart enough or thin enough. I don’t think this surgery has fixed that, but I am proud of how I have gotten through this. I was overwhelmed by the love and cuddles I got from my kids when I finally got home.  And for now, that makes me good enough.

And I’m alive x

19 days of Optifast down and I am sitting here 6.7kg lighter.

I faced this challenge as I face any other, I turned to Dr Google, to see how others felt about their Optifast. Man people can moan. I came across a lot of blogs about how awful it was, disgusting, vile, almost unbearable! I was terrified. I wondered what I had signed up for.

Thankfully, much like the brain tumors that I have often self diagnosed, Dr Google was actually a bit dramatic and actually quite wrong. Optifast was more than palatable and I have barely struggled at all. Aside from the morning tea and subway shouts in the staff room, I have rarely felt sorry for myself or the food that I was unable to enjoy. I was, a few times, reminded of a saying that my mother is fond of, “Food doesn’t taste as good as skinny feels.” I still think that this is a crock of shit, but I needed to find ways to keep myself honest. I sit on 800 calories a day and, although I am fine now, for the first few days I was pretty hungry.

MyFitnessPal has been a lifesaver. Having to account for everything that I put in my mouth has stopped me from making any drastic decisions that could have thrown me off the proverbial wagon. But googling blogs was also super helpful….in a crazy kind of way. Any time I wanted to cheat I would look for bloggers who had talked about cheating and then learn from their mistakes. Or actually if I am honest, I would tell myself that I was better than those cheaters and I would push through my cravings. I am proud to say that I did not cheat. Not even once.

I bought a treadmill, and we lugged it up the stairs to my bedroom. I am so excited about this as I needed a place to hang clothes at the end of the day…only kidding. I have used it multiple times now and am so pleased with my purchase. I particularly love the fact that my Fitbit syncs with MyFitnessPal and it adds calories to my daily quota. I don’t eat these calories, but again, it makes me feel like I am somehow beating my own personal score. I am quite competitive, obviously.

So now comes the weekend, the last hurdle, the final countdown (did you sing it too?). On Monday Mum and I are flying to Auckland and on Tuesday I go under the knife. I have heard horror stories and successes but no one knows which mine will be. I know to stay away from alcohol, as my Dr told me of a patient that formed ulcerations due to his continual consumption of liquor. I know to make sure that they give me anti nausea medication, from my best friend’s mum and her tale of being so sick, and therefore so dehydrated, that the sides of her stomach stuck together. I know to take it easy, when introducing foods to my new stomach, from a success patient who told me that some foods will come straight out without much warning. From either end.

So I am heading for a mix of the known and the unknown, but I go forth in anticipation and not trepidation. I anticipate winning the war I have with my brain and/over my body. I anticipate feeling less pain and more energy. I anticipate having less boob luggage, although I am not looking forward to them turning into used teabag titties. If I win lotto I will get an augmentation, but until then I will roll them up into my much smaller bra and be proud of them and myself.

So world, watch this space!

I can remember looking into the mirror, before I even had the language to articulate the why, and hating what I saw in my reflection.

I am no different to all the other girls (and boys) who have struggled with their body image and used fat jokes to cover the hurt. Fat Amy put it beautifully, in Pitch Perfect, when she said that she called herself Fat Amy “so that twig bitches like you don’t do it behind my back.” I have always determined what people thought of me, when they look at me, walk past me in the street or are even on the other side of the street. Am I vain or narcissistic? To assume that everyone has enough free time or thought in their day, to form an opinion of the self conscious stranger walking the other way. No, but it has become a habit to think the absolute worst thoughts of myself so that no one else has the chance to surprise and ultimately hurt me.

When I was a preteen there was a family gathering. The women, as women often do, clucked about the way a cousin’s bottom half was grossly disproportionate to her top half. I had looked up to this cousin but recall feeling that she surely must have been less than my previous adoration, as the comments were not made as matter of fact or even with sympathy, but with total distaste. I made the naive mistake of asking if my bottom half was larger than my top….this was met with “No you are evenly spread!” and a snicker. I instantly knew what was meant and came to the fast conclusion that ‘evenly spread’ was far more grotesque than bottom heavy.

I guess I must have always seemed larger than I ought to have been. At the ripe old age of 13 my Mother’s boyfriend, at the time, arrived and excitedly told me to look out the window as he had seen my male double. Not seeing the joke in his eyes I ran to the window, curious as to what a boy version of me might look like. K laughed as he joined me at the window and pointed out a fairly obese man sitting in the passenger seat of a van. K would also make “boom boom boom” sounds if he ever walked behind me up the stairs to our apartment.

I do not know why food has become an addiction for me. My father had a drug and alcohol addiction and my mother is addicted to her business. Maybe it is a hereditary predicament? I often think that I would have rather kept the cigarette crutch, even though I am happy to be free of ciggies I still see fat as worse than a disease. How messed up is that?

My mum hates “FAT”. I guess this comes from her own ideal of what beauty is, or is not. I suppose this is where some of my anxiety of what it means to be fat comes from. She hates fat, I am fat = she hates me. I know that this isn’t true, but sometimes those inner demons can make any nonsense believable. Mum has never been fat. She has always been active. Skydiving, scuba diving, aerobics, body sculpting, race car driving, you name it, she has probably done it. Then she got sick. Cancer. But worse than that, the cancer (through a long explanation about lymphoma and depression) made her less active and put on a little weight. My mother has always triumphed in everything that she did, and cancer was no exception. But the weight, the fat that had invaded her body and her mind, was harder to beat. She has beaten it. But the power of that inner demon will probably always tell her that she should look better.

Over the years I have lost weight. When I lived in Auckland, in my late 20’s, I weighed less than I did when I was 13. I felt confident, I looked confident and I knew that everyone celebrated in my achievement. But it wasn’t an achievement. I lived on black coffee and cigarettes. I drank straight whiskey and went dancing 3 nights of the week. I was unhealthy and there was no way that I would be able to maintain this lifestyle. And I didn’t.  So I began the familiar pattern of feast and famine….and that has lead me to this point.

To be a little fair on myself, and perhaps the excuse that I have hidden behind is that I had a bit of turbulence along the way. I was diagnosed with a disease called Sarcoidosis. This debilitated me for almost a year. I had to quit my job, I was on steroids for over 6 months and I learned what it was like to develop a love/hate relationship with prescription pain medication. I have Rheumatoid Arthritis and was later diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. Pain had become as natural as every mouthful of glorious food I shoveled into my mouth.

I became a natural mother. I already had a beautiful teenager but I experienced my first pregnancy and the changes that come with being a middle aged mother. My daughter was NEVER going to hate her body! She was going to see every perfection that I saw as I gazed at the single most incredible thing I had ever created.

I got fatter. And fatter. And fatter.

I feel like I am broken. How can I have such an amazing life and keep ‘punishing’ myself with food. I felt that sooner or later my Body hatred was going to penetrate my beautiful daughter’s thoughts. She would hear my insecurities and start to measure herself by them. She would think that I hated fat, wonder if she was fat and then….wonder if I hated her. Not F#@ken happening!!!!!

3 years ago I made the decision that I wanted to have Gastric Bypass Surgery. I did the research, I asked around and I spoke to my Doctor. To be honest there was still a part of me that hoped that he would seem shocked at my decision and say that I was not a qualifying candidate for such a procedure. Alas he nodded his head and told me that it was probably a good idea but that I would not be able to have it under the Public Health System. $25,000. I had never before longed to have diabetes, so that I qualified for the subsidised surgery. $25,000. More than I would ever spend on a car. Was I being selfish? Was it fair to expect my partner and children to go without, so that I didn’t have to feel ugly? 3 years ago. It was 3 years ago because I felt guilty. It was 3 years ago because I felt that I did not deserve that kind of money spent on me, just because I can not get a grip on my self control. It was 3 years ago because it took 3 years of my partner telling me that I was worth it to finally make the decision to go for it. So here goes.

I have booked it in. 3 weeks of Optifast torture…pffft, nothing compared to the abuse that I have put myself through with fade dieting and binge eating. I am one week into this Optifast thing and I see it, a little, as buy in. Is it hard? YES! Is it the start of my journey? YES! So I am not about to moan about something that will change my life in such a positive way. I think this is right for me. I am okay with what it means, in my head and in my heart. I am also grateful that I have the love and support of my family and friends.

I am scared. But I also do this knowing that I do not hate fat. I do this knowing that it will make my joints ache a little less. I do this knowing that I will be better at teaching my daughter to love herself (whatever her shape and size). This may not sit well with some people, but I am confident in my decision and I am excited about my future.

 

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