Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Could Have Been Me...


I was eating my breakfast this morning, and had my car pulled over on the side of the street.  My project is being held at my school, so I'm close to very familiar surroundings.  I see a morbidly obese woman on a motorized scooter.  This is a pretty common sight in the very poverty stricken neighborhood in which I teach.  I know that there are three parents in my building who have these motorized scooters, with no other apparent disability than being extremely overweight.

I can't help but feel sorry for this person, especially because that could have been me.  I weighed 393 pounds on the day I had WLS.  I am three years out, and I started to do some math.  Lets be conservative and say that I continued to gain weight at the rate of twenty pounds a year.  I would currently weigh 453 pounds.  How much longer could I have worked at that weight?  How much longer before I would have been declared disabled due to my weight?  What kind of pain would I have been in on a daily basis?  What new prescriptions would I be on?  Would I have high blood pressure, diabetes, more severe sleep apena, high cholesterol? 

Questions flood my mind of what might have been.  Things are not perfect now, but I'd certainly trade the health problems that I have now for what I was flirting with before. 

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