Honey, I shrunk myself

I’ve been big my whole life. In elementary, that just meant that I towered over everyone and kids thought twice about picking on me. I was the last pick for pretty much everything except kickball, where my leg power shined. I was the shy, quiet kid, so no one really talked to me, but seeing them back up when I approached the plate was all the communication I needed. We actually had to stop playing when I was in the fifth grade because too many of the school’s balls were on the roof and at least half of them were because of me.

In middle school, I developed confidence crushing man-boobs. They were bigger than most girls at the school and a few adults as well. While I didn’t draw attention to myself, my size did and eyes always fell to my chest. I hated it, but around this time in my life, I developed a defense mechanism. I became the nicest person I knew. My mother always told me to reach out to those who seemed lonely, but as isolated as I was, I took it a step further. I befriended everyone who would talk to me and never ridiculed anyone. In my mind, I believed no one would make fun of someone who was nice to everyone.

Unfortunately, middle school children will always clique up and marginalize outcasts. I was taller than most adults, so physical bullying wasn’t a problem. Instead, my ridicule occurred behind my back, the evidence laying in the snickering whenever I walked. I knew it was happening, but chose my peace and ignored it. I leaned on the fact that all my friends would come with football, but that’s another story. In high school, the football team appreciated my size. I was more than decent, but not even becoming one of the Team Captains got me much play with the girls. I found a girlfriend senior year, but she moved to France before prom. So, guess who went to prom solo?

After high school, I played one year of Division-One football, but after seeing those dreams die in the desert of my laziness, my serious pursuit of playing football professionally retired. Of course, who could admit to themselves that the only future they envisioned since the third grade was not their future? I never even imagined life without football, but there I was, playing semi-professional football, fooling myself into believing that I had the discipline to get another scholarship.

And yet, playing semi-professional football was perfect for me. I didn’t have to wake up early, work out, or even practice in order to play the game. It removed everything hard about football, so it was the lynchpin of my wavering self-identity. I will forever appreciate the times I could feel like my best self once a week in the spring, but in all reality, we were just a bunch of guys trying to see if we still had it or even had it all. That spark, the drive to be better than anyone you come across with the ability to prove it. Some players still had it, others discovered it, and the rest developed it. None of that mattered, because we were brothers, on and off the field. That camaraderie was the real reason we played. At one point or another, we all were a part of something bigger and the semi-pro team allowed us to have that again.

My eating habits were central to my obesity and my weight ballooned with the steep decline in physical activity. When I left the house, I felt like I was in middle school again, with people whispering as soon as I passed. As a 6 ’5 black man, I’m sure more than a few people actually stared, but there were nowhere near as many eyes on my back as I felt. I ignored it as best I could, but nothing helped that feeling of exhibitionism.

I was still living at home and my older brother came to live with us to help with the bills. A few months after he moved in, a relative had gastric sleeve surgery. She struggled with her weight for years and she took the plunge after hearing the success of one of our cousins. To me, the surgery was basically giving up on losing weight naturally, but I understood that weight loss was a simple issue with complex solutions. So if a person wanted to have the surgery, then more power to them and God bless them.

At this point in my life, I’d ballooned to over four hundred pounds. When I was doing literally anything, sometimes when I was doing nothing, my chest would start hurting. Nothing serious, but I knew any chest pain is a bad thing. Like mortally bad. Self-conscious about my weight, I remained silent. Around this time, my knees would suddenly give out. I was a former athlete, so I caught myself before hitting the ground, but I always felt a tingling sensation above my shin immediately afterwards. Sometimes the sensation would come while I was just sitting. Either way, I knew my body was breaking down under my weight.

Knowing I had to do something, I remained stuck in a fog of apathy clinging to me since I stopped playing football seriously. I thought the fog was the weight of adulthood, but I later figured out it was depression. At the time, I just went along with the surrounding currents, sure everything would fall in place. I wasn’t working toward my future in any meaningful way, and my family became worried. They kept on talking to me about solving these problems, but the fog made their words just sound like nagging.

‘Of course I’m going to lose weight. I just don’t know when.’

The definition of a terrible goal, but it was the one I stuck to like Jesus himself gave it to me. I procrastinated, which developed the arresting syndrome. Eventually, my older brother had had enough and stepped in. He came to me and my mother and said I need to save because I was going to have gastric sleeve surgery. She loved the idea, but worried about my school payments that semester. A hiccup in the payment schedule and suddenly I’m taking the semester off, freeing up my extremely limited funds to pay for this procedure.

I had no reason, but was hesitant. I then grew resentful towards my brother for forcing it and then feeling justified in taking the majority of my check. Still, I couldn’t say no without a logical reason. So I went along with it and a few months later was leaving work to go to the airport to catch a flight to San Diego.

By the time my brother and I landed in San Diego, I accepted the positives about the procedure. While still supremely annoyed that my family forced it, I knew it was all love. I hadn’t done my due diligence in terms of research, but I stopped fighting it. After my brother and I got our bags, we headed to the pickup point where the driver was going to be. We didn’t see him at first, but I had been in contact, so while my skepticism flared just slightly, it dissipated with each text I got from the driver.

It wasn’t long before a minivan matching the driver’s description pulled up to the curb. I walked over and saw the name of the doctor in the window, a sigh of relief escaping my lips involuntarily. However, my skepticism erupted like Mount Vesuvius when I saw the driver. He was much more obese than me with a stomach that cast a shadow over his feet! How in God’s name can someone that obese be a representative of a weight loss clinic? It made no sense, but he knew my name and was charming. The longer I thought about him and his personality, I realized how comfortable I was and appreciated his presence.

Less than an hour after we packed up the minivan with our luggage, the driver was pulling over and I blinked, taking in my surroundings. The concrete buildings needed repainting, and there were cart vendors on every corner. The roads were wide, with gutters full of trash and stray animals obeying traffic laws. Some buildings were nothing more than shacks, but these shacks stood next to five-star hotels and beautiful plazas. Cars from every decade rolled through the streets, some spewing black smog like it was a building on fire. It seemed like graffiti covered every wall, but this was traditional Mexican art, so the views were amazing. Familiar with Telemundo and Univision, I was halfway expecting to see models walking on the streets. Unfortunately, the models were of midlife women, so there wasn’t much eye-candy for me. Overall, something about the place reminded me of Nigeria. The culture was different, the food was different, and the people were different, but the feel was the same.

After our luggage unloaded, the driver sped off, and a man emerged from a building, motioning us over. After doing some paperwork and tests, they hooked me up to an IV drip and dressed me in one of those hospital gowns that exposed every unflattering inch of your butt. I was told to lie down on a bed in another room while another doctor asked me questions. Before I could really think about them, a mask was over my face. Confused, I waited for something else to happen, and then woke up.

As soon as I woke up, something in my chest inhibited my breathing. I weakly flailed as I tried to lean up, but the muscles to do this were still anesthetized, so I accomplished a lot of nothing. Suddenly my mouth started overflowing with saliva and I knew from my football days that I was about to throw up. I said I was about to puke and almost immediately, someone placed a blue tray under my chin. Half a second later, blood and a bunch of fluids I knew weren’t saliva spewed out of my mouth. And that was my introduction to my life for that first night. Doctor recommended throwing up, pissing and farting.

Because I had been just drinking fluids for the past two days, nothing but air bubbles and saliva would come out if anything came out at all. Most of the time I was dry heaving, which was so much worse, leaving the muscles lining my ribs and stomach sore. Before long, my back and neck ached, so I tried to sleep. Unfortunately, when I tried to lie down, I couldn’t get comfortable. I put my hand on the source of my discomfort and I discovered a drain leading to a clear pouch filled with blood and bits of what could only be fat. I nearly threw up each time I looked at it, especially after I felt its warmth.

That entire first night, I tossed and turned, unable to sleep for more than an hour or two before I either had to throw up or pee, so I resigned to watching TV. Luckily, the TV had channels that broadcast in English, so I watched an NBA playoff game, among other things, to take my mind off my discomfort that first night. The next morning, my brother and I moved into the building next door and my new room only had Hispanic channels. Luckily, I had my laptop, which was filled to the brim with games and movies, so I was literally just waiting for time to pass.

The next day, my last day there, I drank an incredibly bitter blue drink as soon as I woke up. It was confusing, but they needed to make sure that everything was okay. I repeated the process with a clear liquid that was a little sweeter, but this time I had to drink it while being x-rayed. Everything checked out and I had the drain pulled, which was a weird experience.

I forgot to mention earlier, while I was there, there was a couple, the wife was getting the same surgery I was, there but there were odd coincidences between us. Okay, so there was one actual coincidence and one kind of coincidence.

The actual coincidence was that the couple was just a few miles away from where my brother and I lived. Their flight was actually just an hour after ours in the same airport. The kind of coincidence was that my brother and her husband shared a name but their name is actually quite common so that coincidence almost doesn’t count.

But when my brother told me this, I said if the wife’s name had my name then we were leaving. We had different names so they checked out.

This couple was awesome and the namesakes went to for a drink while the wife and I rested from the procedure. Their adventure actually upset the wife, especially after my brother coerced her husband to take shots. He was a four year starter at a Pac-12 school and quietly joined a frat during his tenure as a collegiate athlete. We all know how frat guys get, especially with a playoff game on TV.

The namesakes stumbled in professionally and collapsed into their beds in their respective rooms. We did not eavesdrop but my brother and I were laughing when we heard the wife’s distinctive voice going off on the man. She was still cool about the whole thing in the morning though…I think.

Anyways, the wife got her drain tube taken out before me, because ladies first, right? But while she was in the room with the door closed, all I heard was her crying out and saying go slower like she was a sober virgin on her wedding night. Yet when this woman came out of the room, she had the audacity to say, ‘Oh, it didn’t hurt that bad.’

I damn near slapped her.

If the pull was not that bad then why was she making all that noise? Rather than asking, I nodded and opened the door to go in. She asked to watch and I didn’t care so I said that was cool.

When I laid down, I made sure to settle myself to give the nice nurse as much room to maneuver around me as she needed. After I was settled, the nurse took one more look at me and nodded. Neither of us spoke the other’s language but we were both intelligent enough to communicate to one another.

She smiled softly as she took off the tape and cleaned away the area around the drain. She looked at me with her eyebrows raised and I smiled with a chuckled because I was not feeling any pain for some odd reason. She nodded with a more confident smile before she gently tugged on the plastic tube just enough to break the premature scabbing.

Now, while yes, there was a twinge of pain, for the most part, the pulling was just an odd sensation. As she continued to pull on the drain with a smooth practiced stroke, once the tube was out, I felt like I just finished taking the largest of craps. Not an insignificant crap but one of those stomach bubbling craps that was causing your intestines to hurt and the relief from the putrid drop could be ranked as a top five sensation…but my butthole was sealed at the same time. Almost like the best of both worlds, the oddest of sensations.

The drain had been bothering me but now that it was gone, I was given the okay to drink sports drinks, Gatorade and Powerade, as well as water. I hadn’t had anything to drink in three days but with the IV drip I was fine. But the IV drip had been taken out the night before so I was incredibly thirsty. When my brother brought me some Powerade, I was ecstatic to drink some.

One of the nurses who spoke enough English, said to drink slowly or I’ll throw up. So when I took my first sips and nothing happened, I was elated. I took more and bigger sips and I got cocky. I got way too cocky way too soon.

Saliva flooded in my mouth so I ran to the restroom but the husband was in there throwing up from my brother’s ministrations the night before. This left me puking into a cup I found right there in front of my thoroughly amused brother. He was more than just amused but you get the idea. When I was done I learned my lesson, and sipped slowly. I’m still sipping slowly in fact.

After a few scares because of my stupidity, I am the lightest I have been since I was a sophomore in high school. During the time when I ignored what I needed to do, I was miserable. I bitterly questioned the surgery but once I got past my own stubbornness, I healed quickly and weight continued to drop off me.

Now I can eat normally albeit on a much smaller scale and at a much slower rate but nothing is restricted to me except carbonated drink but that is my personal prerogative. I’ve actually saved quite a bit of money from the lack of food expenditure and that was a nice collateral benefit.

I still miss buffets though.