shenacat
My mom was a skinny diabetic. I was her only child born after her diagnosis and they took me three weeks early to avoid what at that time was mysterious late-term fetal death in diabetics. I was very jaundiced and spent days in an incubator before I could go home. My mother was very ill after my birth with a uterine infection and I was formula fed from birth on.
I was not an overweight child. I was extremely active, a tomboy. I rode bikes, climbed trees, spent all day outside playing. Regardless, I was ill constantly with allergies, chronic bronchitis and asthma, and a recurrent strep throat infection which would never quite go away. I was the youngest in a house full of older people who chainsmoked. I was dreadfully allergic to cigarette smoke and I blame a lot of my health problems on that.
My mom was very adherant to her diabetic diet, but it was oldschool, with no nutritional information on what "good" or "bad" carbs were. She fed us all, and tried to teach me good eating habits, but the decks were stacked against me from the get-go.
As soon as I hit puberty I started putting on weight. As I got fatter and exercise got more uncomfortable and I fell farther behind my peers, I started to avoid sports. I stopped bike riding and turned inward to more sedentary activities. This only contributed to the problem. When I started menstruating at age 11, my periods never regulated. At first they seemed semi-normal but as time went on, they got farther and farther apart and longer when they did show. By the time I was 15, I would go 8 months to a year between periods.
Periods of overwhelming lethargy would hit me, followed my periods of hyperactivity. I missed a lot of school because I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. No one could explain what was wrong with me, if anything. I was a good student, so why couldn't I make it to school every day? My mom would tell me, "If you just get up and get dressed, you'll feel better." I could sleep 12 hours at a time, get up, eat breakfast, read a book for an hour, and go back to sleep for another 4. Then I'd be up all night bouncing off the walls before crashing again in the morning.
When I was 17 I was hit by the strep throat from hell. I could not get rid of it. The doctors tried to get my tonsils removed, saying that the strep had lodged into my pitted and enlarged tonsils and that if they were removed, it would go away. Unfortunately, I was on state medicaid due to my mom's low-income, and they would not approve the surgery. I was told "this won't kill you because you don't have any mitigating circumstances like chronic ear infections". So the doctors put me on rotating antibiotic therapy which I took for an entire year before they weaned me off it.
By the time I was 18 and graduating high school, I weighed 232 lbs. I thought I was just big. Girls in my family had a tendency to put on some weight, but I was the biggest.
It wasn't until I was 24 years old, married, and looking to start a family that I found out what was wrong with me. I had good health insurance through my husband's work and I found a new doctor to do some routine bloodwork. I thought I was just going in for a regular checkup, and instead I found out that I had Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (a pre-diabetic condition), Thyroid disease (hashimoto's) and sleep apnea. I had quite severe sleep apnea as a matter of fact, mostly due to my enlarged and still infected tonsils.
I got my tonsils removed at age 25, and it cleared up my sleep apnea by 96%. Finally! it felt so good to get rid of them. I went on medication for my thyroid disease and for my PCOS, and for the first time ever I was able to lose weight. I went from 268 lbs to 245 in 3 months. I was ecstatic.
After several years of managing my health strictly-- eating right, taking my huge vitamin cocktail in addition to my medications-- I achieved normal menstruation and got pregnant with my first son. I was so happy and had a great, easy pregnancy.
After my son was born, I had a severe hormone rebound that damaged my thyroid further. Due to this and the huge life-change of a new baby, I completely backslid. I stopped all my vitamins and my PCOS meds. I felt horrible and I gained weight up to 275.
Randomly a couple of years later just as I was starting to put myself back together again with meds and vitamins, I got pregnant again. This time, the pregnancy was devestating physically. I ended up diagnosed with chronic hypertension after the doctor noticed a resting pulse of 100bpm. I was swollen, sick, in chronic pain, and horribly fatigued. At my son's birth I was 325 lbs.
Now I am holding at around 290, but I feel dreadful. My thyroid is not healthy. I need to re-evaluate all of my vitamins, my medications, and I need to lose weight. I cannot gain any more weight and continue to function daily. I am practically a recluse because I have not been able to bring myself to get dressed in the morning and go out and see other people. I feel awful every time I look in the mirror at how my body has changed since having babies, and how the weight has piled on. I feel like a huge monster. It is negatively impacting my relationship with my husband because I don't feel pretty, let alone sexy.
I'm considering bariatric surgery but I am not currently insured, nor independently wealthy. I am looking into alternatives such as liquid diets and severe caloric restriction. I am willing to give a serious try to diet and lifestyle change before I go into surgery, but first I want to line up some health insurance and a new doctor, so I can document it all in case I end up needing surgery. I want to do this right from the start, so that if I do decide I need this surgery, I can have all the documentation I need in place in order to convince the insurance company.
Wish me luck!
