Tonight was my first meeting in awhile regarding the WLS. It was a group intro session… they had a staff person from Unity talk… and she is 7 years post-op herself. BTW, I realize these posts are getting long and maybe boring… but what do you want me to do? I’ll try to start finding some sort of inspirational or maybe at least humorous images to go along with these posts in the future.

I got there just in time for the meeting. I don’t think all the people there were possible patients… folks are encouraged to bring a support person with them. There were maybe 9-10 guys out of the over 50 there… including myself. The presenter mentioned knowing what it was like to be “here”, to be sitting in this room, all nervous. I’m not though.

I think I’ve learned a lot about this whole deal, but I started getting more details I haven’t found elsewhere… gonna run through them here… now, if you are reading this cause you are looking in to this, one thing I should mention that I discovered tonight - different hospitals will do things slightly different. What I list here may not be how the hospital you check out does certain things.

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“You’ve made a decision.”

That’s what my doctor told me this afternoon. I went to see him because I had a couple last questions (and to get a flu shot) before my initial consult with the bariatric surgeon tomorrow. He gave me a letter to verify some things for my insurance company. And when I told him that in a number of ways, just looking in to this whole process has given me some motivation. That’s when he told me “You’ve made a decision.”

He’s right. And it kinda sucks.

Why couldn’t I make this decision, the decision to radically alter my life-style, without surgery? Course, if I could answer that, I wouldn’t be at this point. So this is where I am… I made a decision, I’m moving forward.

We’ll see how things are after tomorrow.

Ok, as I posted yesterday… I’m looking in to bariatric surgery, or as folks around the net seem to refer to it as “weight loss surgery” or WLS. The pros of doing something like this are pretty much self-evident. What about the cons? What about the risks? I haven’t been blowing sunshine up my own skirt on this, I’ve been trying to find out about the downside to doing this as well.

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I had a doctor’s appointment last Thursday. I have them every few months to check my blood pressure and get my prescriptions refilled. But this time, I also went in wanting to discuss something specific with him.

See, thing is.. I am fat. I’ve been overweight for as long as I can remember. I was going to Weight Watchers when I was in grade school, and again when I was high school. I did the no-carb “Mayo Clinic Diet” about 10 years ago… managed to lose about 35-40 pounds before plateauing and deciding I liked potatoes too much.. and missed having toast with my eggs.  Last time I had any luck losing weight was the 30+ pounds I lost during a fit of depression over a broken relationship about five years ago. Not something I want to go through again just to lose weight.

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