Gee, thanks, Mom

So, I told my mother last night about our plans to have the surgery and she was very supportive.  Which is a good thing, considering...

When I was probably in my late twenties, a little naive and before I had a computer, my mother made a comment to me.  It was "If you had diabetes, the weight would just fall off of you."

Now, at the time, I knew very little about diabetes, but I felt as if she had just given me some hope.  Diabetes?  How can I get it?  If the weight will just "fall off" sign me up!  I went out to have bloodwork done and was sorely disappointed that I was not diabetic, but I held out hope for several years that the magical diagnosis would happen for me.  I figured every fat person in the universe was probably praying for the same thing.

In 2002, my still un-diabetic self started working for a podiatrist and as it turns out, many of our patients were diabetic!  I was insanely jealous, until I started seeing a pattern.  Many of these patients were obese.  Were they not doing diabetes correctly?  Finally, with information and resources at hand, I started asking questions of the doctor and reading some books that were in the office.  It was there that I learned the truth about this disease and I was appalled that it had been wished on me years earlier, first by my mother and then by me.  Further horrors were revealed in seeing patients with horrible ulcers that could often lead to amputation.  Now, armed with information, this was no longer a desirable thing to have.

Ignorance is often a really bad way to go into wanting something, so when it comes to WLS, I am arming myself with knowledge, so that I know what nearly every possible scenario, complication and outcome could be.  Armed with the truth, I have been able to so far make informed decisions, even as I continue to explore my options.