She told me how much she weighed, now, and then she stopped, and she asked me, "How much did you weigh? At your heaviest."
"318 pounds," I told her, and then blurted, "You're not thinking about weight-loss surgery, are you?"
"So?" she said. "You did it. Look how it turned out for you."
"You can't," I told her. And that was the start of a fight in which I could not articulate why, exactly, it was okay for me to have gotten weight-loss surgery, to have assessed the possible complications and gone ahead and risked my life on an operating table anyway. Just as an adult of voting age should be permitted and in fact encouraged to do: consider all her options and make the decision that best works for and best pleases her. But no, I said, no you can't, you are not permitted to do this, it is too dangerous, I said. And then, I said, you're doing it for the wrong reasons, and that is where it all went to heck.
Gastric-bypass surgery may not be the weight-loss miracle you think it is.
Because she knows me. And she's always known that despite how I have talked about my health and my holy and noble intentions and how carefully I considered my decision to have weight-loss surgery and how long it took me to decide to go through with it, that I had, in truth, had my mind made up from the moment I saw a Before and After picture. That I equated happiness with thinness and weight-loss surgery--which made you thin in the blink of an eye--looked like a miracle to me. I say I did it for my health, but that is a lie. I did it to be thin, because I was unhappy as a fat girl. And that is what I risked my life for.
I knew it all along, and I knew it going into surgery. At my last doctor's appointment before being operated on, I cried in his office. "I'm afraid," I said. "I might die because I am selfish. It's selfish to want to be skinny and to do something dangerous and what if I die because I'm selfish?" (Read about Anne's recent trip to the hospital due to WLS complications.)
He ignored that. He told me I didn't have to do it, and it was never too late to back out. Obviously, I did it anyway.
Who are you to tell me what the right reasons are, my friend said. She didn't say: Who are you to tell me that I should try to be happy with myself? Who are you to sit there, all f*cking skinny, and tell me I should just learn to love my body? Who are you to tell me that surgery is not worth it? But she should have. Because really, who am I to say? Where do I get off? Why can't she make her own hasty, emotional decision and then reap the myriad and great rewards of not being obese in this f*cked-up culture, and deal with the drawbacks and the complications her own way? Why shouldn't she be allowed to risk her life in order to change her life for what she thinks is the better? Haven't I said all along that despite everything, this is the better side to be on?
I am being selfish again. I've said it before: I don't want to be the poster child for weight-loss surgery success, because I am hardly a success. I am as screwed up as I ever was, in the head and about food. The difference is that I fit into smaller pants. But I remember what an incredible, spectacular, I will say it again, miracle of a difference it makes even as it makes me angry that it has to be so, that that is the way it is. That is the way it is for my friend. (Let's admit that there are some magical rewards of WLS and being skinny.)
I apologized to her, and she apologized to me, and I don't know what she is going to do; South Beach or bypass, and I don't think I can ask, anymore. The idea of someone I love lying unconscious on an operating table for reasons that--suddenly, so very hypocritically--seem so petty scares the sh*t out of me, but who am I to say so?
MORE FROM ELASTIC WAIST AND SELF:
- Elastic Waist book club: Full-Frontal Feminism
- Sleep your way gorgeous!
- You're not dreaming—it is possible to get dewier skin and glossier hair while you snooze.
- Out of the groove, out of shape
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