Post-surgery purgatory…BRUTAL HONESTY!

I had weightloss surgery (gastric sleeve) in September this year, so today I’m currently sitting at almost 3 months post-surgery. I would like to state that having weight loss surgery absolutely & magically fixed my life…NOT! 

Here is what has happened to date…

When I was in the process of deciding for sure if I wanted to have surgery or continue losing weight without it (I lost a lot of weight pre-surgery), I sourced information from ALOT of blogs/vlogs from people who had already had surgery.

A common theme I noticed amongst the bloggers is that most people document what’s going on extensively (myself included) in the lead up to surgery day and then they kind of disappear for some time, only to pick back up again once they have lost 100+ pounds.

I found this extremely frustrating as I wanted more information on that “space in between”. From MY perspective, I totally understand why this happens now, why people withdraw (I will try to summarize from my point view, and expand on the points later):

• EMOTIONS: Even though I had my anatomy SUCCESSFULLY arranged with surgery to maximize weightloss, my head was (perhaps is) still f*cked as far as self-esteem & all that shite. Surgery did not wipe out years of eating disorders & the rest of it! FACING THE EMOTIONAL CRAP IS HARD! 
• FEELING LIKE SHITE: I woke up from my surgery feeling beyond sick. I’ve been through sea-sickness & morning sickness and the nausea I felt after the surgery was not even comparable. I felt like I was being punished!
• THINGS DIDNT GO AS PLANNED: The nausea & dry heaving actually extended my hospital stay, which resulted in unforeseen medical expenses. Because of this & the fact that I couldn’t stop dry heaving I felt intense guilt & regret (SIDE NOTE: My period arrived 30 minutes before I ended up going into the OR…so there was that to deal with also!)
• REGRET: for the entire first month post surgery I COMPLETELY regretted having the surgery. I felt betrayed by anyone who claimed weight loss surgery was wonderful & I HATED being around food because I still wanted to eat shite! And I felt f*cking hungry!
• REALIZING THERE IS NO INSTANT GRATIFICATION FROM SURGERY! I did not wake up from surgery skinny & even though logically I knew this wouldn’t be the case it was disappointing to accept that there was still a lot of work to do. 

So here I am tonight, just a little bit further along from that apocalyptic first month. I am pleased to be able to report that I no longer regret having the surgery and I am starting to really see & feel the benefits of this surgical weightloss tool.

I feel very exposed posting my stats, but here they are anyway: I’m just shy of 5’10 & I currently weigh 194 pounds (size 12/L). Getting under 200 pounds was a HUGE milestone for me!!!

I need to double check but I think my weight on the day of surgery was 218 pounds? My health insurance required 6 months of documented weightloss PRIOR to having surgery and my first weigh in with my surgeon was 271 pounds…yep.

Things got much worse before they started to get better for me, but I am hopeful things will continue in the right direction.