hannie’s spot. all hannie.

Maybe two days ago, I was at urgent care in Port Orchard due to pain related or not so related to all the surgeries I’ve had. We still can’t come up with conclusive results on this, but that’s how my life is. You know, we’re not really sure but we’re here and alive, and good enough.

I don’t like medical places. I even cringe about dentist visits. I’m done, I’m tired of explaining myself and either getting summarily dismissed or told that no one can really take care of me and I have to drive somewhere else for that care. Why I waste my time with any of this? I know if I feel pain I cannot control, it might be something super bad. Death isn’t on my agenda yesterday, today or tomorrow. And again, the chant of “No inpatient time in 09″. I’m sticking to those and I want to enjoy every moment of life as long as I can. Once you’ve been in a position where it could potentially have been ripped from you, I think you gain a greater appreciation for it.

So I’m hanging out and yes, as always, let’s start talking to people around me. Contestant number one *loved* my nerd sweatshirt and told me about how he worked on servers and such. Straight up sir, although I understand everything you’re saying, I’m still the eternal student in the jedi knight training school. Ask any of my friends and they will tell you this. But it’s good, and yes, I’d rather take something like network security over say, webpage construction. I have this yen for seeing how things work as opposed to actually using them sometimes. I told him about my speedtest app I have running on my iPod touch and my cable connection is quicker than my other half’s dsl. We laughed.

Moving right along, I encounter this woman in the back corner. She inquires as to why I’m hanging out at urgent care and I start telling her. OOOOH, you’ve had weight loss surgery too? Great. I’m always up for a good discussion on this. She tells me that she’s a couple years out and has had absolutely no problems and that’s because she had her surgery done laparoscopically. I bite my tongue, honestly, I tried to, but then it just came out.

“You know,” I say sort of timidly, “It doesn’t matter how a surgeon accesses your parts but rather what they’re doing while in there. You and I have had the same surgery, but it comes down to different directions in accessing your digestive system to reroute it. You may be fine now, and that’s great, but wait a couple more years.”

She stares at me in disbelief. See, there’s something about people who have had weight loss surgery, and that is that if you’re anywhere up to two years post-op, you know it all. All those people who are what, anything over five years out, have no clue whatsoever as to what they’re talking about. I can even say this about myself, in that yea, one or two years out, I had a complete handle on everything and I was up to date all the time on the freshest information and don’t you dare dispute anything I have to say on it. People further out than me would shake their head and tell me that I’d best lose that attitude, and honestly, how correct they were. I learned in my own personal experience “the agony of defeat” and I learned it in a rather physically and emotionally painful lesson. Without friends and family, I don’t think I could have really made it this far. Totally disregard the husband out of this picture, because he stopped caring long ago. I don’t consider him anywhere in the realm of friend of family, because he’s left me to fend for myself many a time and here I was thinking I had a good relationship there. It’s hard for me to even read my original surgery blog, because I can read and see the pattern of verbal abuse he was dishing to me and I was missing it as I originally wrote it. My friends, even my kids, saw it and told me about it over and over and I thought they were nuts. They weren’t.

So the lady in the waiting room was telling me horror stories of her friends who had also had wls, and no, this is not going to happen to her, and it’s because she had her surgery done lap. Wish I could make that same sort of statement, I do, because the first and last time I had lap anything done, I almost died because of a perforated bowel. We make mistakes yes we do but I know that each time I’ve been under the knife, I’ve been with surgeons who would do anything within their power to ensure I live. I am quite blessed like that.

Moving along in this conversation, she asks me if I carry the little card to present at restaurants. You know, the one that states you’ve had weight loss surgery and you need the little portion. Sure I do. I show her my card, and I tell her that I don’t bother with it anymore, because then it opens an entire Pandora’s box of questions and I’m not going out to eat to discuss my medical history for hours on end. She tells me that oh well, the card is pretty self explanatory and really, no one should question it. Sure it is, but when you give any server your card, they’re going to ask and question, because they want to know about your experience. People have that inquisitive nature to them. Plus, do I honestly look to *them* like I’ve lost any amount of weight whatsoever? I don’t. In fact, although I weigh what I do, I’m still considered “obese” by governmental standards and any shallow person who doesn’t know the full story. It’s not until I lift my shirt and show the collection of scars, or I let anyone peruse my HUGE collection of inpatient files for the last three years that people get a real sense of what’s going on and why it is. I don’t have time for all that, and as for those files, they make me cry when I look through them because there’s a huge section where life saving decisions were left to my mother. I neither wanted or intended to ever put her in that position, but she’s been there, and thank heavens she was batting for me.

My company continues on with her outlook and tells me that oh yes, should something go wrong, she’s flying directly to Reno to her surgeon. To me, that’s probably the best way to handle things should they go wacky, but not all of us have that option. My surgeon, my original surgeon, retired from the military and probably isn’t even doing private practice. My bet is that he’s on a golf course somewhere playing golf, and you know, he deserves that. He’s saved countless lives, both here in the US and in any combat theater, and has even spoken about that from said combat theater on CNN. He’s entitled to any and all golf games he wants to play, because he’s brought our injured military back from death, he’s enabled them to come home to loved ones, and he was dedicated to that for quite a long time. Truly, it’s great that this girl has her original surgeon to consult and meet with. People like me don’t have that option. I have to sit and explain the drama and then hope and pray that said doctor believes me or is taking a good gander at my medical records.

Honestly, I’m glad that some things are better as far as the weight loss surgery world goes. If I was to analyze it down, I’d say that although it doesn’t really help or apply to me at this point, I’m glad that others who choose to have weight loss surgery have better information than what was given me way back when. However, I’m going to say this one more time, and that’s to not expect it to be peaches and cream for the rest of your life. If it is, and I have actually met and spoken with people who are doing well as far out if not further than myself, then congrats to you and may it stay that way for you. That “agony of defeat” thing is not a good road to be traveling on, and I wouldn’t wish it to anyone else in this world. Ever. Crying with your surgeon because you’ve gained a ton of weight and you don’t know why and you emotionally feel like a failure is not a good experience. Beating yourself up about this only to find out a couple years later that no, it wasn’t you but in fact your surgery deciding to exit stage left is one heck of a self esteem nightmare. You went into this surgery with little to no self esteem to begin with. It comes back, years later, and slaps you across the face one more time. You’ve worked so hard to lose the weight, develop a better attitude about yourself because truly, this is crucial to success on any weight loss expedition, whether it be surgical, exercise and food modification or even magic pills like hydroxycut or slim-fast shakes. Even Weight Watchers encourages you to get a better attitude about yourself. And when you fail at that, I think the self esteem drop is even harder than when you weighed, well, in my case 417 lbs.

Be proud of who you are and what you’ve done, indeed. Be happy about losing weight. But don’t think that it’s an instant cakewalk for the rest of your life, or you have a magic “get out of jail” card that keeps you far away from things that can and will go wrong in that journey. It doesn’t work that way, not now, not ever, because if it did, I’d be eating tons of cake and picking up as many of those cards at my local Toys ‘R Us. Neither of those are things I could ever do.