Ten Years of Adventure
It will be ten years in May since my RnY WLS. I started at 315, lost to 150, losing a lot the first years and more slowly during the next year. As soon as I hit the low, I bounced back about ten lbs and stayed there for another year or so. I became very active using water fitness as being the easiest and most fun. At about a little over three years, I experienced a bowel obstruction with emergency surgery. Following that, I believe I picked up a case of CDiff in the hospital and suffered from extreme intestinal pain. We went to Hawaii that year for an extended winter stay and by the time I got off the plane, I wasn't eating at all. After a few days, I tried a Papaya... ate almost nothing else for a few weeks, then gradually added back in fish, protien, veggies and healthy foods. Over the last six years I have leveled off at 50 lbs above my lowest weight but I've stayed steady for years. I still eat according to the rules but if I want chocolate I eat it... One piece, not a whole bag. I have a farm. I'm 62 and I still do most of the work caring for a large herd of goats, making cheese, lifting bales of hay and sacks of grain, wrangling goats, catching kids, climbing a ladder into the barn loft.... I have a hip that hurts at the end of the day but still I am very active. I work long hours doing farmers markets and come home to do milking chores and bring in firewood at the end of that long day. I chop kindling and heat my cabin with wood and only wood.
Weight Loss Surgery changed my life. I'm not with my husband any longer but I will always be grateful to him for the part he played in my recovery from obesity. He had the job that supplied the insurance that paid for it all. It's hard work. No matter HOW you lose weight, it's hard work, worthy of praise. WLS is just a tool, a very powerful tool but there are extreme costs too. You are forever hybridized, forever changed and you will have to educate your healthcare givers about what you need because you are now different than all of their other patients. I would be dead now if I had not had WLS. Now I am alive, active and living a completely reinvented life.
