The excitement and wonder of the trip around Ireland in 2013 faded quickly. I’d spent a lot on the trip and the amount of money I’d taken out of my 401K to survive on was getting pretty depleted. And I had no idea if I’d passed the bar or not. The night that I was supposed to find out (they post the results at midnight online for the exam takers a day before they post the results publicly) I checked as soon as the second hand hit 12am. It didn’t update. I refreshed the screen for about 40 minutes and was about to give up and go to sleep when I refreshed one more time. The big “PASSED” came up on the screen and I was so scared it was a mistake. I kept checking to see if it was really my name. I wanted to take a screen shot of the page because I was afraid that once I refreshed it, it would change. But It didn’t change. The relief was overwhelming. I was more thrilled that I never had to take the bar exam again if I didn’t want to, than I was that I could now get a job as a lawyer. That changed as I started putting out resumes. I spent hours every day just combing several websites trying to find a job. I spent three to four hours a day just looking for jobs. Originally I applied to only lawyer jobs for labor and employment law. Eventually, I started applying to any type of job that had to do with union representation, even if it didn’t require a Juris Doctor. I probably got one interview for every 20-30 resumes I sent out. Suddenly the reality of the economic downturn became crystal clear. I’d never not gotten a job that I wanted in my life. This was a whole new reality.
Meanwhile, I was so fat I was uncomfortable all the time. I couldn’t sleep more that a few hours a night. I had no energy. I began to research weight loss surgery. My best friend had done the sleeve gastrectomy in June and was losing weight quickly. I was considering the options. The sleeve was where they cut a part of the stomach out, leaving the remaining stomach in a kind of banana shape. But they just discarded the remaining part of the stomach. The other one I was considering was the gastric bypass. In the gastric bypass they snip the majority of the stomach away and sew it up, leaving a pouch about the size of an egg at that base of the esophagus that becomes the new stomach. They bring a part of the intestine up and hook it to the new stomach pouch. So there is no stomach acid in the stomach pouch, The stomach acid still comes out of the remainder of the stomach and goes down and meets up with the food in the intestines. This has three purposes. First, the food doesn’t begin to really digest until it hits the intestines so it has less time to leach into the system. This is good and bad because one doesn’t take on the fats as much, but one also doesn’t take on the value of the protein as much either. Second, one is able to eat much less food. Initially you can only eat a couple ounces of food. As time goes on it expands a bit, but never back to the same size. Third, for some reason separating the two makes the system release less ghrelin, which is the hormone that makes a person hungry. They don’t understand why this happens, but it does. Most people lose more weight with the gastric bypass than the sleeve, but they both worked pretty well.
I chose the gastric bypass for two reasons. One, there was a higher weight loss rate with the gastric bypass. Two, even more important to me was that the entire stomach remained in the body in the gastric bypass. In the sleeve they cut out 2/3 of the stomach and tossed it out. In the bypass they separated the stomach from the pouch, but it stayed in the body. All I kept thinking was, that if something went wrong, they could, potentially, go back in and reconnect the two parts and things would go back to the way they were. I kept thinking that if I got the sleeve, and later had some sort of reaction that was making me sick, I couldn’t reverse it, but with the bypass I could. That made the decision for me.
When you decide to have weight loss surgery there are many things that go into getting approval. First, you either have to have a BMI (Body Mass Index) of 40 or above to be approved automatically without other health issues for health insurance to pay for the surgery. Or if you have a BMI of 35-39 and a serious weight related health problem such as Type 2 diabetes, you can generally get approved to have insurance pay for your surgery. My BMI was 41. I was borderline diabetic, but with the BMI I didn’t have to have other health issues. The other requirements to get approved is physical and psychological testing. I wasn’t sure why they did the psychological testing until after I actually had the surgery. The surgery takes away your hunger, but it doesn’t take away your desire to eat. So, they need to know if you will be able to deal with that. I think it is very similar to alcoholics that are given Antabuse. It makes you sick when you drink. Eventually, it makes you so sick that it takes away your desire to drink. I learned quickly that the inability to eat, does not remove the appreciation of the taste of food. And, since most people who overeat use food as a drug, it doesn’t take away the desire to eat.
So, I had to go through psychological testing. And then I had to go through classes that explained all of the changes that I would have to deal with after the surgery. I had to see a nutritionist that explained exactly what and how we would be able to eat, how important it would be to chew food thoroughly. I spent a couple months doing testing, but then my insurance approved it. I was told that it would take several months to get in for the actual surgery. But then they told me that I could get in pretty quickly if I was willing to have the surgery on the day after Christmas. I grabbed it. Once I’d made the decision I just wanted to get it done. I had no idea how long I’d have to wait if I didn’t take the appointment, and I was still hoping to get a job. I need to have time to do the surgery, and then recover and relearn how to live after it was complete. I didn’t want to have to do that while learning how to do a new job.
So, I scheduled the surgery. The day after I left the last class on nutrition I went to Burger King and got a Whopper and Fries. I figured I was saying farewell to food. And I figured I couldn’t get a lot fatter at that point. The thought of never having that kind of meal again was what had stopped me from having the surgery earlier. I realized that I’d always gone on diets with the intent to start eating the same way as soon as I lost the weight. That was what had created the never ending cycle of weight loss and weight gain. As painful as it was, I was ready to get off of the roller coaster. So even the thought of a liquid diet on Christmas day wasn’t enough to dissuade me.