Well, I sort of gave an introduction already, but I thought I would follow Benson’s lead and tell a bit about my motivation to have WLS. In a word, paintball.
A lot of guys play golf, I play paintball. Nearly 10 years ago I was a founding member of a woodsball team that at one point had over 50 members.
Like Benson said, most of us “fat dudes”, we’ve been dealing with weight most of our lives. But while I’ve always been big… the 300# plus kind of big the last 12+ years… I’ve always been pretty active. Not your “running a marathon” active, but active enough I could get out on the paintball field and play all day. But in late 2007 that started to change.
I suppose age has a bit to do with it. I hit the 40 year mark that year. I was slowing down… either because of the extra weight or because I was slowing down my weight had been creeping up. April of 2008 I hit my heaviest recorded weight of 377#.I played very little paintball last year. I would get wiped out just walking out to the field.
Then there’s my niece and nephew. A couple of twins who are just… well, I adore them, they adore me. It’s a pretty good arrangement. And even at 40 I have no problem getting down on the floor and playing around with them. No, the problem started becoming how to get up after I was done playing.
My Aunt had RNY in May of 2008. By that fall she had lost 80+ pounds and was running in a 5k race. Before October of last year, I had …idley thought about WLS, but realizing that it was a life-long, life changing thing, I always told myself “I can make those changes without surgery”. And I would… for a while. Losing some weight… only to fall in to old patterns and all the weight I lost would find me again and bring some buddies to the party. So I started reading more and more about WLS, and by November I decided this was something I had to do. My doctor agreed with me.
I was lucky in a way… I didn’t suffer from a lot of the co-morbidities many morbidly obese people do, but I had my problems. High blood pressure that was under control with meds, occassional acid reflux issues, and while I wasn’t using my CPAP, I had been diagnosed with sleep apnea a few years earlier. (I couldn’t keep the damn mask on while sleeping!)
And while it took longer than I had expected and hoped, I actually had a pretty easy time with my insurance company… and after jumping through all the required hoops I had my surgery on April 8, 2009. I was 322# the day of surgery. Today I’m just under 280.
I guess technically I’m not quite a “former fat dude” just yet… but I’m getting there. Mentally, I’m in better shape for this than I’ve ever been. Physically… I’ve seen the differences already. I know it won’t be easy, there are and always will be challenges ahead.
But everything is coming together, and now I have the tools I need to pull this off. For good.
Dude that looks like fun! I have never played paintball but I used to dig playing with miles gear in the service. Looks like a kick in the tail. I am going to try it.