January 2003

I am generally a man of many words, but I will try to keep it brief.  I have always been big.  I don’t remember ever feeling small.  I don’t remember ever feeling that I needed to be bigger either.  However, after 52 years of being big I decided that I had to do something different.

My reasons for the surgery were simple and probably selfish to most people.  I wanted to live longer, but most of all I wanted to be able to play with my grandchildren.  I knew I would not be able to go on much longer at 340 pounds.  I could not get down on the floor unless I was sure I could find something or someone to help me up.  Just plain walking was out of the question, because it caused so much pain in my feet, knees, and hips.

I was also smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, and had been smoking for over 35 years.  I stopped smoking one month before the surgery, even though I was told to quit four months earlier.

I am a truck driver and drive over-the-road.  I will leave Sunday night and come home on Friday night or Saturday morning.  I love to drive and I enjoy the freedom, however being on the road all the time makes it hard to exercise.

Then there is the food at truck stops, or fast food franchises.  If you have never eaten at a truck stop you owe it to your self to go in and see what is being served to the customers.  Some of them are really bad.  In fact, I started carrying more and more of my own food so that I wouldn’t have to eat on the road as much.

I think my problem with weight has always had something to do with depression “stress”, cause every time something bad would happen I would gain twenty to thirty pounds.   Then after gaining that amount I would stop and maintain, but seldom loose any of the weight I had gained.   Thank goodness I tried many diets throughout my life or I would have been 1000 pounds by graduation.   I could loose weight for awhile and then some thing would happen and back on it would come.

I am not sure that this surgery would have been a good idea for me when I was younger, but now I don’t much care what others think of me so I don’t get stressed like I used to.   My father passed away in July of 2002 and that made me think more about my health, and helped me to take control of my destructive behavior towards myself.   In a weird way he (my father) gave me the power to quit smoking, which was something that he was never able to do.

Then there are the grandchildren, Alexis 7, and Scott 6 which should have been enough for me to make the decisions I needed to make for my health.   Alexis was always telling me not to smoke cause it was bad for me, but I just couldn’t do it on my own.  That made me feel like I was doing it to hurt her personally, but I kept smoking.   Scott didn’t care.  He just wanted me to get on the floor and play with him.  He has cerebral palsy and can’t stand without a walker or the aide of something to hold himself up.  He has no balance and therefore he is less likely to get hurt if he is on the floor, but it was to hard for me to get down and then back up to play with him.

My wife has always wanted me to quit smoking since before we got married.  She has always loved me even though my health issues have led us down some hard difficult roads in our life together.  I developed high blood pressure and erectile dysfunction in the last 15 years.  Even with Viagra it was not an ideal setting between us.

I worked in a shop for 27 years and would have retired but they closed the shop.  Bought a small store and ended up closing that because I was involved in a misunderstanding surrounding another store owner in the same town.  Then I started a new career driving truck.

I am glad now that I had the surgery, even though I was not a happy camper for the first 6 days.  It just really bothered me that I was so tired all the time.  I couldn’t do anything without ending up sleeping for a couple of hours to recover.

I was never in any real pain, and only used one or two of the pain pills that I was sent home with.  Mostly I didn’t like the taste of them, so I went without them and decided that I didn’t need to take them.  My surgery was on November 13^th and most everything was going fine until Thanksgiving morning.  I woke up cause I was going to sneeze.  I had just enough time to put my hands on my incision before I sneezed, but it wasn’t enough.  The top 3 inches of my incision came open.  No pain just messy, and because it was Thanksgiving morning it meant no one would be in the clinic until Monday.  Don’t get me wrong, I went to the local hospital’s emergency room and had the hole taped shut, but that was all that was done.

Since the incision pulled open I have had to pack the hole with gauze pads and large dressing to absorb the drainage.  This is January 4, 2003 and it is almost ready to start closing itself.  It takes a long time to heal, and all those years of smoking makes it even take longer.  Hint:  When you leave the hospital they will give you abdominal dressing to absorb the drainage, however a plain old Kotex works better and is cheaper.

That was the down side for me, so lets look at the upside.

In less than two months I have lost 50 pounds and I am walking a mile a day.  I can get up off the floor in the middle of the room with no assistance.  I am wearing cloths that I haven’t been able to wear for years and can climb stairs with only mild discomfort.