The Internal Struggle

Weight loss surgery, “no way, it’s not for me, it’s too invasive, a lifetime commitment, it’s for people who need to lose a lot more than 75-100 pounds”.  I was determined that I could lose the weight that I had slowly gained over the past 25 years on my own.   A friend at work approached me in October of 2019 and asked if I have ever considered weight loss surgery, she had made the decision and had just had her procedure scheduled.   I listened carefully to the details and told her I was going to keep trying to do it on my own.  I was almost angry whenever I felt someone was trying to convince me otherwise.  As a pre-op nurse I would see patients all day who were scheduled for their procedures, it wasn’t a “hidden taboo” to me as it is to most, but it still had such a negative connotation associated with it. 

In February 2020, my weight peaked at 221, I decided to do a juice cleanse, followed by a few weeks of Weight Watchers and lost 13 pounds…then COVID came.  Thinking it would be a few week quarantine I stocked the house with all the foods we love to eat during snow storms and we hatched down.  The two weeks passed and another and another, this wasn’t going away.  I quickly gained back ten of the pounds I had lost and struggled to maintain the weight of 218.  At that weight my work scrubs begin to feel tight and my jeans will button, but not comfortably.  I refused to buy a larger pair of scrub pants and managed to maintain that weight for another eight months.  Again, more and more stories of weight loss success were in front of me every day at my job.   Patients coming back six-twelve months later with 75-100 pounds lost. 

During this same time my A1C continued to creep up between 5.9 and 6.2 in the pre-diabetic/diabetic range.  The inflammation in my right knee had gotten so bad that I started to have to have steroid injections every 5 months.  I had just celebrated my 50^th birthday in April and I felt as if my body was giving up on me one organ at a time.  “There has to be some way to do this on my own”, I pondered over and over.