Designated Fat Girl (23 page)

I’d made up my mind to put a stop to the whole thing when the radiologist walked in the door. He looked at me and knew I was in pain and was very kind. He told me he was sorry that things were taking so long, that he’d been conferencing with my surgeon and wanted to make sure he had all he needed before the procedure. He promised it wouldn’t be long before he was finished and I could have something for the pain.

It was the worst experience of my life. It hurt so much, and it made me nauseous. I lay on that table, begging for it to be over. The nurse who’d been so unkind to me held my hand and looked a bit remorseful. Finally the procedure was complete. The doctor would later tell my husband that they took out more than a liter of fluid.

The radiologist made sure I got pain medication as soon as the procedure was over. They brought Michael in, and I told him what the nurse said about my leaving the hospital. He was as mad as I was, and he went to find my doctor. As I lay on the cot, I started to shiver uncontrollably, and the previously unkind nurse went to get me more blankets. When my doctor came in, I was shaking so hard it was difficult to talk. But he assured me I had a room and that I wasn’t going anywhere.
Had I felt any better, I would have smirked at the nurse when I was wheeled away.

The hope was that I would start to improve right away once the liquid had been drained. But my fever came back, and my oxygen levels were not great. Also, I was starting to have difficulty breathing—shortness of breath when I got up to go to the bathroom and some pain when I was asked to breathe deeply. The doctor ordered a chest X-ray, and a pulmonologist was called.

I also had trouble with my IV. That came as no surprise to me; in addition to my earlier problems, I was sure I was quite dehydrated at this point. This was now the weekend, and another doctor instead of my surgeon was on call. He told me they would have to put in a central line because my IV kept blowing out. Honestly, I felt so crummy at that point, I didn’t really care. Michael stepped out of the room while the doctor tried to put in the line, but he was having trouble. It hurt so much, but I tried not to cry—I could feel this doctor’s unease, and I didn’t want to shake his confidence. He said he was taking a break and would be back in a minute to try the other side. The nurse said she was going to change my bedding, and she wanted me not to look down at my sheets. Michael, who came to be with me while the doctor was out, told me later that my bed had been full of blood.

The doctor was finally able to establish the central line, and I suppose that was one less thing I had to worry about. Of course, I had blood in my hair—and no prospects of a shower anytime soon—but I really didn’t care. I was so demoralized at that point; it was difficult for me to get upset about anything.

The pulmonologist said my left lung was filled with fluid and that I had to do around-the-clock breathing treatments to get it under control. I couldn’t be bothered. I lived to take the pain medicine every four hours. That pain medicine made me sleepy, and sleep helped me escape the situation. All I wanted was to not be conscious, not have to live this nightmare. Michael was by my side, trying to force me to do what the doctor said. I gave it a halfhearted try, but I really didn’t care. Michael was starting to feel guilty. He was blaming himself for what was happening to me, wondering if he hadn’t raised the idea of gastric bypass surgery, would we even be in this situation. I tried to reassure him, but honestly I was too sick. I couldn’t do much of anything.

On Monday my doctor was back, and he told me I’d have to have a chest tube inserted. My lung was partially collapsed from all the fluid underneath. All I could think about was that it sounded like another painful procedure; if it was anything like the CT-guided drain of the abscess, then I didn’t think I’d survive. The doctor said I did, in fact, have to be awake for the chest tube insertion. I just started bawling. I couldn’t face it, couldn’t take any more pain. My doctor assured Michael that I would be fine—and he was right. They gave me something that left me with no memory of the procedure. Michael said I came back, loopy and happy. I also had a tube coming out of my side, attached to a ten-pound box that would carry the drainage. It made getting out of bed very tricky, and painful. Over the next few days, I learned to time my visits to the bathroom around my pain medication. And I had to make sure the nurse also gave me nausea medicine with the pain meds, because I certainly
wasn’t eating. Every mealtime a tray of food was delivered to my room, and every time it sat, untouched. The doctor asked how I was eating, and I told him I was fine. I certainly wasn’t hungry, and now, almost twenty days after the surgery, I was almost used to not eating. Michael kept gently reminding me that I would never get better if my body didn’t have nourishment, but he didn’t push too hard. He knew I felt like crap, and he still felt guilty. I just figured I’d eat eventually … or … not. I still didn’t care.

At one point the kids came back. My mother-in-law snuck Eli into the hospital to see me, but I was wracked with pain and could barely enjoy the visit. Michael had to go back to work, and my mother-in-law took the kids to school, picked them up, and stayed with them at my house until Michael got home. I felt as though life was going on without me, and that just added fuel to my self-pity fire. It was hard to get better when I felt so miserable.

I’m pretty sure I was a difficult patient, and I couldn’t have been that much fun to be around. But I must say, the way some of the nurses treated me was appalling. I’d heard this was the case with gastric bypass patients, and I have to admit, in my experience, it was true. For the most part I found them to be unsympathetic and sometimes downright rude. My chest tube was inserted on my left side, but I had to get out of bed on the right. When I had to go to the bathroom, I had to call a nurse in and have her hold both of my hands while I pulled myself up, slowly. I then had the nurse stay while I swung my legs around and lifted myself out of bed, negotiating the ten-pound box attached to the tube, plus all my surgical wounds. It was an
ordeal. I had one nurse say to me, “I can’t help you. I’m sorry, but I can’t risk hurting myself.”
What?
I wasn’t asking her to lift me out of bed, for goodness’ sake! Plus, could she have told me this before I was half hanging off the bed? I struggled to get up without her help, in incredible pain. It was a nightmare.

There were a couple of exceptions—mostly nursing assistants whose job it was to take my blood pressure, temperature, and so on. There was one in particular who always took the time to ask how I was doing, to see if she could get anything for me. One day, while I was asleep, she left me some shampoo that can be used without water. She knew it had been a week since I’d bathed, and I still had blood stuck in my hair from when they had to establish the central line for my IV. I later found out that this nursing assistant had gone to the drugstore on her own time to get me that shampoo. That meant a lot.

Finally, after eight days, it was time to go home. My lung had reinflated, and all the follow-up testing said the abscess had abated. I was scared to death of having the chest tube taken out, and my doctor’s physician’s assistant made no bones about it when she told me it was going to hurt. But she looked at my orders and discovered my doctor had authorized morphine. With my central line still in place, it was no time before the nurse had given me a morphine shot, on top of the pain meds I had just taken. The chest tube came out with little discomfort, and I was finally ready to go home.

I had mixed feelings. I missed my children so much; they’d never spent a night away from home, and Michael and I both felt bad that they’d had to go live with their grandparents for a week. Of course they had a blast, and that certainly made me
feel better. I wanted to touch them and hug them and let them know that Mommy was home and going to be better. But was I? I was so weak, I not only had to wait for the wheelchair to take me out of the hospital, I had trouble getting into the car. My muscles had atrophied, and I had no strength whatsoever. And of course that wasn’t helped by the fact that I still wasn’t eating. When I was discharged, the physician’s assistant gave me the go-ahead to slowly introduce soft solids into my diet. Little did she know I still wasn’t past the liquid stage! No vitamins, no protein shakes, and very little water. I was a mess.

As we walked in the front door and my children ran over to me, I closed my eyes and took in their smell. “Mommy’s home,” I said to them, getting gentle hugs and kisses.
But will I ever feel the same?
I wondered.

I spend my thirty-sixth birthday in a ratty old recliner in our
den, wearing the same pajamas from two days before and not bothering to brush my hair or wash my face. Beside me is my son’s Lego table, which has become my medical nightstand: It holds all my pills, a barely touched bottle of water, and a fan to help me deal with the crippling nausea. May 3 has always been the perfect time of year to me: The yard is bursting with signs of spring, and it’s warm but not hot or humid. In the air you smell the respite from a long, cold winter, and the time is filled with hope. But on May 3, 2008, I don’t see any of the hope, any of the promise. Sure my den chair sits beside the French doors that open into our backyard, and my two small kids scamper in and out of those doors at least a hundred times a day. Most of the time they beg me to come with them, to look at the gardenia bush about to bloom or to check out the cool bubble launcher their grandmother has brought them. Each time, I tell them I’ll join them in a minute, never intending to make good on the promise. Eventually they stop asking, and I’m left to sit in the recliner, watching movies on Lifetime, dozing in and out of the fog of painkillers, listening to my children’s laughter as they play outside.

Mom is visiting for my birthday, and she tries several times to talk me into coming out into the backyard to enjoy the day. I
don’t even try to fake it with her; I tell her I don’t feel like it and that it should be my choice how I spend my birthday. She eventually gives up, too. Michael doesn’t even really try. He’s spent the last week or so working to get me out of my funk, to no avail. He is done. My husband, my mom, and my kids celebrate my birthday without me.

It has been about seven weeks since my gastric bypass surgery. I should be well on my way to finding a new normal in terms of how to eat. But the complications have set me back, both physically and psychologically. Here I am almost two months out, and I’m barely consuming two hundred calories a day. Nothing tastes right. Nothing sounds good. And I don’t even want to deal with it, so I usually just don’t. Because of that, I’m not getting any better. My body is weak and malnourished, and my soul needs feeding like nobody’s business. I desperately need to know that one day I will feel better again, but no matter how many times my family and friends try to tell me that, I can’t hear it. I won’t believe it. I am as miserable as I’ve ever been.

I was constantly reminded of what bad shape my body was in. My muscles were so weak, I quickly learned to avoid steps. Our sunken den only has two steps into the kitchen, but in order to climb them, I had to hang on to the wall and go one at a time. Once, I decided a soak in the tub sounded nice, and it did feel good, until I realized I couldn’t climb out of it! I was unable to put my weight on my legs and pull myself out. Imagine my embarrassment when I had to call Michael in to help me.

My wounds from the gastric bypass had long healed, and my recovery from the complications should have been concluded. But my reliance on prescription pain medicine was as heightened as ever. I took those pills around the clock. If I missed a dose, I became antsy until I got my medication. I began to rely upon, and actually look forward to, the familiar haze that descended on me once the pills kicked in. My failures weren’t quite so clear. My doubts weren’t quite so real. I could deal with taking care of the kids and doing my job and going about all the mundane tasks we all have to each day, even when our very world is coming apart at the seams. The medication got me through each day … and I knew it was wrong. I knew there was no physical reason to continue taking painkillers; my body no longer ached. I was also constantly reminded about the toll the medication was taking on my body; the pills made me terribly nauseous, and the Zofran my doctor had prescribed no longer helped. I felt sick most of the time, but I didn’t want to stop taking the Percocet. I told my doctor about the nausea and just let him assume it was left over from my surgery. He prescribed a nausea patch, and it worked wonders. I could now take the pain medicine and not feel so sick. I also knew, deep down, this was not a good thing, but I didn’t want to stop. At that point it was the only thing that made me feel any better, the only way I felt anything even close to joy.

I had been warned about the potential pitfalls of post–gastric bypass surgery. Most of the time people overeat for a reason, and once they are physically unable to do so, they often find other forms of destructive behavior. Some become alcoholics, some develop gambling problems, others abuse drugs or cheat on
their spouses. I knew that I was trying to find something to fill the void that food used to fill for me, but this was new territory. I had always thought of my overeating as a way to self-destruct. It never occurred to me that I also used food to cope, to bring about relief or happiness, even if it was just for the short term. Once bingeing wasn’t an option for me, it became very clear that food had also served as a coping mechanism, and I was desperate to find something to take its place. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, as much as it made me feel like the biggest cliché in the world, I started to realize that I was using prescription pain medicine to make me feel better.

Because I work in the news industry, I know the desperate lengths people will go to in order to get their hands on drugs. Stealing prescription pads, calling in phony orders to pharmacies, rummaging through the medicine cabinets of sick relatives—I knew several different (illegal) ways in which I could get more pills. It also occurred to me that I could probably get them by simply asking my doctor; hadn’t I been through a lot? Would it be a big stretch to go to my surgeon and tell him I was still feeling pain and needed more medicine? I probably would have been able to pull it off, but I started to feel guilty about what I was doing. Taking the medicine and being in a constant fog was one thing; lying or at least stretching the truth to get more pills would mean I really had a problem. I was already trying to get rid of one heck of an addiction—did I really need another? No, I decided that if I went to extraordinary methods to get more pills, it would only mean that I was becoming reliant on the medicine, and I didn’t need one more problem to get over. I still had plenty on my plate.

Of course this brave decision was easily made knowing what was waiting for me in my medicine cabinet. Having had two C-sections, I had a stash of painkillers left over from those surgeries. It’s funny—I hadn’t wanted to take those painkillers after giving birth because I thought they were bad news, and I didn’t want to become dependent on them. I suppose that’s an easy goal to carry out when you have a pretty newborn to take care of. Now it was just me, and I was miserable. I knew I didn’t have to ask my doctor for more medicine because I already had some. Of course, I had a plan: I figured that as soon as those pills ran out, I would have to find my way around without them. Problem solved!

Some things never change.

I did stop taking the pills around the clock, just not completely; I knew that I could never get back to any sort of regular routine if I was doped up all the time. Slowly a skeleton of a life started to emerge. I got up in the morning and did my radio newscasts. I dressed the kids and took them to preschool. I worked during the day and did the bare minimum required to keep the house running. I picked up the kids from school, gave them a snack, and put them down for their naps. Then I took two pills and spent the rest of the afternoon zonked, sitting in my old chair with my table for my fan and my meds—unattached to my world and not feeling much of anything. It was nice; it felt good. And I justified it by telling myself I only did it once a day, that I was slowly getting better. I didn’t return phone calls from friends. I avoided talking much to family members, other than the perfunctory “I’m fine” answers to their inquiries. I barely paid attention to my children. I just
got through each day with the bare minimum. It was all I was capable of doing.

This went on for several weeks, and then Michael let me know he was sick of it. He knew I was taking Percocet and told me outright I should stop. I agreed, but then I ignored his pleas. I needed something to make me feel good, to make it seem as though everything was going to be okay. I still couldn’t eat, and I was scared to try. I felt so abnormal and just … sick. The pills were the only thing that made it better.

I knew the medication was not a long-term solution, and I did want to find a way to get back to normal. I knew in my heart that not eating was no way to live; somehow I would have to find a way to find foods that I liked and could hold down. Before then I was too sick and too tired to take on what seemed like a monumental task; now I knew that the only way to recovery was to start nourishing my body.

And so it was almost two-and-a-half months after my surgery that I set about trying to eat. It was ridiculous that it took me that long, I know, but when I was feeling generous, I told myself that I’d been through a hard time and it was understandable. When I was beating myself up, I thought of how I could never do anything the “normal” way; there always had to be a glitch, some sort of obstacle to overcome. Still, I was finally determined to find a way to eat and feel better.

At first I decided it was best to buy what had been my favorite foods and just eat smaller portions. I went to my old favorite barbecue place and got a plate of vinegar-based barbecue, french fries, and hush puppies. I thought the barbecue would provide good protein, and I could just eat a couple of
fries, just to satisfy my taste buds. After all, if I had a dollar for every french fry I’d eaten in my lifetime, I was sure I could find my place on the
Forbes
moneymakers list. I actually thought this fried-filled meal was a good first attempt.

Seeing all that food laid out on my plate made me want to hurl into oblivion. I tried the pork, ate two bites, and pushed away the plate. I thought maybe I could eat it later, but it was waiting for Michael when he came home, otherwise untouched. Back in my prime bingeing days, such a meal would have been merely a snack—an appetizer to a day’s worth of gorging. Now I couldn’t even stomach the idea of eating a third of the plate.

There were many other such attempts. I bought some spaghetti and meatballs from my favorite Italian place. I knew carbs were a big no-no for gastric bypass patients, but I figured I would eat mostly meat and some pasta. I couldn’t even eat one whole meatball—more food left untouched. I went to a fast-food place and bought one single hamburger, thinking I could ditch the bun and just eat the patty. I barely ate half. And french fries? Ugh … they were so greasy and unappealing, I couldn’t even bother. What a weird, new experience.

I slowly found things I could keep down. Mashed potatoes. Eggs. Cheese. I craved all kinds of high-carb foods, and I would go out and buy them, only to leave them virtually untouched. I guess it’s true: The body does crave what it doesn’t get, even if it can’t tolerate it.

I learned this lesson with Doritos. I like the chips just as much as the next person, but I was never a huge fan before I had the surgery—I never went out of my way to eat them. But a few months after the gastric bypass, I found myself craving
those nacho-flavored triangles. Again, I knew they were too high in carbs and too spicy for me, but I decided I had to have them anyway. I bought an individual bag and took them home. Michael was in the den with the kids, and I went into our bedroom with the Doritos and locked the door, as if I were doing something bad, or at least, something I knew I shouldn’t be doing. I ate one chip. It tasted heavenly. I ate another, and another, and another. The flavors were so good, my taste buds were rejoicing. I guess all the dull foods I’d eaten for so long were getting kind of tiresome; I wanted flavor! I kept eating and eating, and soon I’d finished the entire bag. As I crunched on the last chip, a feeling of foreboding washed over me. What had I done? Was I crazy? I couldn’t eat a whole bag of chips, even a small bag! What was going to happen to me? As I wiped my mouth, I waited.

I became so, so sick. Not the throwing up kind of sick; actually, that would have provided some sort of relief, I think. No, my belly just ached, and it was quite clear my body could not tolerate so many carbs, no matter how good they tasted. I disgustedly threw the bag in the trash and vowed never to eat them again.

Until the next day. Yes, the very next day. I remembered how flavorful the chips were and longed for that taste again. I bought another bag, promising myself this time I would not eat the whole thing. And I didn’t; instead I ate only three-fourths of the bag. And once again I was so very sick, and just disgusted with myself. What had I expected? Was I a complete moron?

This happened several more times, with several different types of high-carb foods, before my mind finally got the
message that my body was so desperately trying to convey: I can’t eat a lot of carbs! They make me sick! As this realization finally sunk in, I couldn’t help but shake my head at how long it took for me to learn the lesson, and then I had an epiphany: That’s what it means to be a food addict. You know you are hurting yourself. You know what you are doing is not good. And you do it anyway. Over and over again. Because I had the gastric bypass surgery, I was finally physically unable to carry out my food addiction tendencies. But that didn’t mean I didn’t still want to, that I wouldn’t try to. The instincts were still there, the drive to self-destruct was very much alive. And now that I was learning that I couldn’t do it with food, I was looking for other ways to self-sabotage.