How I Decided: Part 2

So, they answered.

"I need help", I said. "I need to lose weight and I can't do it without help."

This would be the part of my story where I tell you that I have tried every..single..diet..EVER. South Beach. Atkins. Weight Watchers. HCG (aka starvation). If there was a book, a commercial or a free trial sample, I signed up. I tried it, I succeeded for a few weeks and then, I failed. What weight I'd lose over the course of a few weeks, I'd gain back in days. Over and over, the pattern repeated itself for 15 years.

When I was 19 years old, I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. PCOS is a hormonal disorder that effects 1 out of 10 women. There is a lot of literature out there about it, but the gist is: Women with PCOS have a hormonal imbalance which causes a lot of not-fun-symptoms, including infertility. Women with PCOS often produce too much insulin, or the insulin produced doesn't function as it should, which means losing weight with PCOS is darn-near impossible.

"We can help you! You can do this."

The first step, I learned, was to attend a mandatory seminar at the hospital. They are held once a month, and wouldn't you know it - the next meeting was 2 days away. I took it as a sign and I enrolled.

I had a boyfriend, a boyfriend who thought I was smoking hot. We'd never once talked about my weight in the year and a half we'd been together. He never heard me call myself "fat". When he looked at me, he saw the woman he loved - and she was freaking beautiful.

{that's why i married the guy!}

I decided not to tell him my plans for that Saturday. In fact, I told nobody; not even my mom or my sisters or my closest friends. I quietly slipped into a cold auditorium on a Saturday morning anonymously and nobody knew I was there. I fully anticipated that I would chicken out and make a mad dash for the door, but as I found a seat in the very back of the room, I realized that I felt safe.

As I browsed through the packet of paperwork they gave me at the door, I wondered obsessively where I would go for lunch when the seminar was over. It was 8:45 in the morning.

"Good grief, Chelsey. This is EXACTLY why you're here."

I'm not sure if there's a secret code for Weight Loss Seminars where the information given is supposed to stay within those walls. If so, I'm about to spill the beans. Here's what happens:

• A surgeon gives a very dry PowerPoint presentation about various methods through their office to lose weight. There's some diagrams, a lot of abbreviations and statistics. You'll also hear the word "protein" more in 30 minutes than you've ever heard before in your life.
• You'll meet a person or two who has undergone weight loss surgery. In my seminar, they were two elderly patients who had great success after having weight loss surgery. They were very fond of water aerobics.
• If you're me, you'll wonder if going to Chick-Fil-A for a Chicken Sandwich AND a 8-Piece Nugget for lunch is excessive. 
• Then you'll start craving Orange Leaf, which is across the street from Chick-Fil-A. The people at Orange Leaf will never know you were just at Chick-Fil-A.
• Finally, someone with a bit of pep-in-her-step will appear at the podium & catch your attention. She's the Patient Coordinator and she will instantly feel like your best friend. She'll tell you you're brave for being there and to not get discouraged by the 4000 pages of paperwork that you'll have to complete.

And there you have it. I'm more of a self-learner so when I reached my car in the parking garage, I began to read the brochures. Did you know there is more than one type of weight loss surgery? Based on my weight and my Body Mass Index (BMI), along with my health conditions (also called "co-morbidities" - which should terrify you, because it sounds like death. It sounds like death because if you don't treat them, you'll die), I was a good candidate for either Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypass (RNY) or Vertical Sleeve Gastrectomy (VSG). I was more familiar with RNY (hello, "My 600 Pound Life" on TLC!) and so I put a star next to it.

The paperwork I filled out was, in sorts, an "application". I had to provide my complete medical history, including a lifetime's record of weight, any diet I had tried, the results of that diet and how long I kept the weight off. Once I completed the paperwork, I'd mail it to the surgeon's office, they would review it and 2 weeks later call me if I appeared to be a good candidate for weight loss surgery. I mailed my life-packet on Monday.

On Friday, my phone rang. 

"We believe you would be an excellent candidate for our program! Is there a particular surgeon you would like to meet with?"

Umm ... *frantic google search while on the phone with Peppy-Patient-Coordinator*: ... I told her I didn't care.

I didn't know it then, but God was back at it, saving my life and all. My surgeon is a saint. I got the best.

You know when you have a horrible cold and you're pretty sure it's a sinus infection and you desperately need a Z-Pack or you're going to curl into a hole and die but your doctor can't get you in for like 47 more weeks so you prepare to search for your hole and at the last minute cave and pay $100 to go to the Urgent Care for medicine?

That's what I expected with my Specialty Surgeon. That's not what I got. 

A week later I was face to face with my surgeon. She walked into the examination room, sat down on her wheely-doctor-stool, my life-packet in hand, looked me in the eye and said:

"Is this your handwriting?!?"

{if you know me, you know - my handwriting has been compared to a computer font.}

This was the moment I knew that my surgeon was going to be one of the best things to ever happen to me.