It begins

I went to my very first orientation meeting last night.  This is the meeting you must attend before even considering starting into the process of having Gastric Bypass Surgery.

The surgeon (we'll call him Dr. Jones) is a healthy looking, thin, athletic 40 something with an unnatural tan and overly confident smile.  I walk into the meeting 20 minutes late and he is already launched into a full, fast talking speech about the thrills and benefits of Gastric Bypass Surgery.  I instantly distrust him.  He speaks about this surgery like a used car salesman trying to get me to drive off the lot in a 89 Ford Taurus. 

Dr. Jones is slick and he knows what the purpose of this meeting is.  Rather than an overview of the surgery and its risks and benefits, he is making this meeting a one man pitch for serious weight-loss surgery.  He is unabashed in his preference of Gastric Bypass surgery over the less-invasive Lap Band surgery, although he offers both at his practice.  I have been to two of these meetings before and after a few minutes I generally tune out Dr. Jones and begin to observe the room.

I am sitting in a large conference room/waiting area that should seat around 40-50 people, but tonight it is filled over capacity with overweight individuals seeking information about weight loss surgery.  There are probably 65 individuals there, sitting in the specially designed, extra wide, plastic chairs.  Having arrived late, I am seated on a love seat which was pulled in from the hallway and many are standing in the back of the room.

As I glance around at my fellow prospective patients I strange thought occurs to me that is both new and unsettling.  I am the thinnest person in the room (besides Dr. Jones, of course).  Now, thin is not a word I have ever referred to myself as, but in this case a very unusual and awkward feeling steals over me. The notion that other people in the room might look at me and say to themselves, "Why is SHE here".

At 285 pounds I am what an average person (and the medical community) would call Morbidly Obese. And yet, the chairs around me are filled with people who are much more morbidly obese than I am.  I glance at the man sitting right next to me. In his hand he is holding a form we are meant to fill out before leaving. At the top, after his name, it asks his weight. It reads 437 pounds. 

You might think this sudden realization that I am the lightest person in this room would be exciting, even exhilarating, but instead I feel extremely uncomfortable. I am suddenly acutely self conscious. "So this is what it must feel like to be an average sized person in today's world", I think to myself and then it dawns on me that, if I go through with this surgery, I may find myself the smallest person in the room in the future.  This thought is so foreign to me that I feel panic set in, instead of relief.

I have always considered taking the weight loss surgery step to be something that must go hand in hand with psychological counseling.  After all, food is not the enemy. Everyone needs food and everyone eats food.  My unhealthy relationship with food is the enemy I am trying to strike at.  And my unhealthy relationship with food is all in my head.  I eat when I am sad, anxious, bored, happy, depressed, tired, elated, lonely.  But plenty of healthy, thin individuals feel those emotions too. The difference is they don't medicate those feelings with food. 

Feeling so uncomfortable emotionally while sitting among my overweight peers is a glimpse into the psychological journey ahead that terrifies me more than any surgery could.  I leave the meeting with information packet in hand, feeling very unsettled indeed.