Thursday, May 29, 2008

And away we go......

This won't be fun. But it'll be exciting. It won't be easy. But it'll be interesting. I've never taken such a monumental step in my 44 years here on planet earth. I'm not even sure it's the right step, but desperate times call for desperate measures. And paying a surgeon a large sum of money to go into your abdomen and reroute your digestive system is a desperate measure. Why do such a thing? Easy - I want my life back.
For too long my weight has defined who I am. It's NOT who I am. But most of the souls I encounter try to make it so. For those of you who don't know, there are a surprisingly large number of idiots on this planet. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but it's so. Kind of like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." You could be sitting next to an idiot right now and not even know it!! The idiots I refer to are those that take notice when the big guy walks into a room and they stare and elbow the person next to them so that they won't miss the spectacle. They're the ones who point at me and laugh openly. The guy who walked up to me at the grocery store the day before Thanksgiving and said "Wow! I guess this is YOUR favorite holiday!" is an idiot. The cashier at the corner gas station who gave me my change and then, out of the blue, says "How do you ride on airplanes?" is an idiot. The guy who started to get on the elevator but stopped to say "Whoa! Is there room on here for me?" is an idiot. I'd like to tell you that these instances are the work of an overactive imagination. But I'd be lying. They all happened to me. In fact, they're just a few of the dozens of times idiots - total strangers mind you - that have gone out of their way to make me feel like I'd better serve humanity by jumping off a bridge somewhere. Just the prospect of weight-loss surgery gives me the opportunity to say this - I'm fat, but there's a surgery I can use as a tool to help me overcome that. You're an idiot - there's no surgery to cure that..
But it's not just the scorn of idiots that movitates me. As mentioned, I'm 44 years old. I know that, at this size, I'll never see 50. That's just not enough time to spend with the person who married me for who I am and gives me the courage to get up every morning. When she became my wife in 1997, we never knew it'd get this hard. We never knew all the "for better, for worse..." stuff would really happen so soon. But it has. And it's my fault. I'm robbing us of years that we can spend enjoying life. Because of my size we really aren't even living life at this point. I owe it to her to do everything in my power to make this surgery successful.
I'll give more details later..for now, suffice it to say it's going to be a "long, strange trip..."

1 comment:

Elisabeth said...

Yea! I'm so excited for you & look forward to watching and encouraging your journey. Congratulations on crossing the first big hurdle!