lesley G.
I was a normal sized baby at birth & never struggled with weight at all until after I had my first pregnancy.
Women on both sides of my family had been known to carry some extra weight from time to time. My older sister had gained quite a bit of weight over time during 5 pregnancies.
When I first became pregnant, I weighed somewhere in the area of 140lbs. I gained 90 lbs during that pregnancy (in retrospect I can see why - poor diet & exercise!). About 4 months after my daughter's birth, I weighed in at 200lbs. My daughter died at 7 months of age. The same year I suffered a miscarriage.
Five years later my second daughter was born. During this pregnancy I gained about 50 lbs. A bit better, but still a gain. I struggled afterward to diet & exercise and sometimes made progress. However ultimately it all came back and more. After a while I maintained a weight in the mid 200s. At some point the weight began creeping upward. The world saw me as a fat woman and so I gave up and began eating more like they thought I did. In reality, instead of overeating, I had become obese as a result of not eating enough or frequently enough. I would go the entire day without eating, just drinking coffee at work, and then come home to dinner. I didn't overeat - most people commented on how they ate much more than me.
I didn't consciously decide to begin eating more, it just happened over time. At one point I did meet with a WLS surgeon for a consult, but he seemed uninterested and didn't offer me any hope. Eventually after surfacing from a bout of severe clinical depression, post traumatic stress & anxiety that lasted approximately 6 years, I found myself looking at a scale that told me I was 460 lbs. And my daughter was getting married. It was November 2007 and I was not happy to be in that body at that time.
I realized after the wedding the logical next step for my daughter & her husband would be that they would start a family. My mother had died when I was 15 years old & I desperately wanted to be around to watch her family grow & be there to love my grandchildren. So I decided it was time to do something. I made immediate changes to my diet, reducing my soda & carb intake and trying to get more exercise, though at that weight even walking short distances was extremely difficult. I needed to do something drastic.
I did my research on and offline, and came across a surgeon who had done a Grand Rounds presentation at UBC on the topic of weight loss surgery, encouraging medical students to consider entering that field as obesity was of epidemic proportions in Canadian society. On a whim I emailed him and to my amazement he not only responded, but responded quickly. And he gave me his cell number & asked me to call him. I did just that, told him my story .. my journey & how committed I was to making the changed needed to save my life. He asked me to make an appointment to see him, which I did in late fall 2008. The following May he did my laporoscopic RNY.
This spring I found out my daughter is pregnant and is having twins. At the time I write this I am down 117 lbs since her wedding and am on track to be much lighter & fitter by the time they are born late this year. Miracles might happen, but in this case it took a team of people, their skills & hard work to make the difference. I am a significant part of the team & proud of our accomplishments!
