dory
My story is kind of weird. I was skinny all my life. After my third child, I dropped back down to 103 lbs within two weeks. I could eat what I wanted, when I wanted, any time I wanted. Then, when I was just over 40, I got a really serious case of adult onset asthma. Any cold, I was in the hospital, on big steroids, fighting to breathe. Each time, I'd gain about 10 lbs while on the steroids and lose 5 of them when the attack was over. And for the next 13 years, with more than 30 hospitalizations behind me I gained over 100 lbs that were just impossible to get rid of. My doctor's take on it was blunt if nothing else.... "you have a choice between being "f-t" or being dead, take your pick" Ok, that was a pretty easy one.
Eventually, they found a drug that worked well for me and the hospital visits stopped. Now that the cycle was over, I tried so hard to lose that weight. I'd diet to the point of silliness. And I'd lose a pound or two.
There were times my heavy-set husband would go on the same diet and drop 30 lbs! Very, very frustrating. And I'd cry because I KNEW there was a skinny me under there somewhere. What made it worse was that I still could eat what I wanted, when I wanted and not GAIN weight (I tried it as an experiment) but not eating wasn't losing me any weight. I'd just about gotten used to the idea of just being big for the rest of my life, but my bone structure wasn't standing up to it well. I'd fall a lot, tripping over some small stone or other, and the older I got, the harder it was to get up. And the bones were going to break sooner or later.
A friend suggested RNY as a solution on the principle that if you don't eat any food, you have to lose weight. Made sense, but they wouldn't do it acct the danger of the asthma coming back and not being able to use oral steroids if I needed to. So, I bought a treadmill, started walking and started losing a little of the weight I'd picked up over the years. I actually thought I might be able to lose a good bit of it if the asthma didn't come back.
At the same time, my seriously overweight husband heard about Lapband. Although he was interested, he's never been able to follow a diet unless I was on it also. Obviously, the only way to do that was for me to have Lapband also. So, here I am, the guinea pig of the two of us, he's scheduled for Sept. 21, just exactly 3 wks after me.
Of course, I had swelling right off the bat and couldn't get anything down until this afternoon, so he's saying maybe he'll rethink having it done. Fortunately, he's only kidding, (I think) I'd have to shorten his life expectancy if he did something like that to me at this point! ;^D
So, that's my story. I'm on the way back to the real me who's hiding in here somewhere, waiting to be rescued.
