This is the seventh (!) in a series of what I can now say with some (but not total) certainty will be an eight-part recounting of the gastric bypass operation that I underwent in 2006. I suggest reading the earlier chapters before you read this one: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6.
This installment starts with me waiting in a waiting room for the moment they would begin prepping me for Gastric Bypass Surgery. I was waiting there for a long time.
And I just realized I misspelled a word there. I meant to put about twenty-seven Ns in the word "long." It sure felt like forever but finally my name was called — mispronounced but called. I was led to a room where I took off my clothes and put on the first hospital gown I'd worn in many years that was not way too small on me. The Gastric Bypass Division knew their customers.
A few feet from me, being prepped for the same procedure, was a lady we'll call Anna who weighed about the same as I did but she was a foot shorter and ten years older. After being separately gowned, we wound up spending some time on adjoining gurneys — instant friends because of all we had in common. Her end of the conversation called to mind what my Dr. Preston had said about folks who have this kind of operation expecting it will change every single thing in their lives they could hope would change. What Anna hoped would change — immediately, if not sooner — was her marital status.
She wanted it to move A.S.A.P. from Divorced to Wed and I got the feeling one of the reasons she was talking to me was to see if I could be the reason for the changeover. Her divorce, she told me as she seemed to be telling everyone, had been because she'd "let herself go." If she'd kept herself at or about the poundage when she and Bill were married, there'd still be a Bill in her life.
Was all that true? Beats me. But she seemed charming and, particularly if she dropped 100+ pounds, probably a good catch for anyone seeking a mate in her age range. I tend to think that relationships rarely end for only one reason…unless, of course, they only happened for one reason in the first place. I hoped for her sake that Husband #2 came along as swiftly as she seemed to expect.
Our chat was interrupted by hospital officials sweeping in and out with forms we had to sign before we went under our respective knives…though mine and probably hers wouldn't employ knives. It was to be was laparoscopic surgery — tiny, quickly-disappearing scars, not huge forever ones. We did though have to consent to our procedures switching to the old-fashioned, filet-you-open method should our presiding surgeons suddenly deem it a necessity. I heard that when a patient awakens after the surgery, the first thing most of them ask is, "Were they able to do it laparoscopically?"
That's not what I asked. A nurse in the recovery room told me I asked, "Can we send out for pizza?" That sounds like me and I'm sure I meant it as a joke.
What happened from the moment I awoke in that room to the moment I left the hospital is blurry now and it was blurry then. I recall being transported to a wing of the hospital where patients who'd had done what I'd had done stayed, post-bypass, for a few days. Anna was across the hall from me and there were other rooms with oversized patients who'd probably be dwindling in girth in the months that followed.
We were encouraged to get up and walk as soon as we could and it somehow fell to me to be the drill sergeant for this activity. Every ninety minutes or so, I'd go door-to-door in that wing and round up a gang to go hike around our floor. All the other G.B.S. patients there at the time were women, all (still) very large and we were all wearing these huge, unsightly paisley gowns. We must have looked like quite the sideshow, marching about like that. Every time we passed a nurses' station, I'd announce something like, "We're going to all get into one elevator and see if we can make it buzz!" Or "We're making a break for Jerry's Deli across the street!"
Sunday morning, I was told to go home though some in our wing who'd been there as long or longer were not. Anna, for instance, was staying. Phone numbers and e-mail addresses were exchanged but I didn't stay in touch with anyone except Anna. My lovely friend Carolyn picked me up in a taxicab — remember taxicabs — and we drove not to my house but to my mother's.
My mother then was 84 years old, somewhat frail and was hospitalized for one thing or another about every four months. I had made the decision not to tell her of my elective surgery, though I did tell her personal physician. I figured it would just worry her so I made my usual daily phone calls to her every day and didn't mention that I was phoning from a hospital bed. Now that it was over, Carolyn and I went to tell her and she got a little emotional but thanked me for not telling her until I'd been discharged. She asked if there was any way she could help me and I said, "Yes!"
We had a little ritual. Every time I took her home from the hospital, she wouldn't consider herself officially "Home" until I'd cut the hospital's wristband off her wrist. Now, I pulled up my shirt cuff to expose mine, handed her the scissors I always used and asked her to cut mine off me. She laughed and cried and it was the moment I think I remember most vividly from the whole experience.
What I remember second-most-vividly was the weight loss. I'll tell you how that went in what will be our final chapter in this whole saga…unless it isn't.
