Are you excited yet?

(Yeah I know. I'm writing twice in one day. I'm long-winded. So sue me.)

To answer the question in my header, well, umm, actually . . . . No.

Does this mean that I will be kicked out of the WLS Club because I'm not all bouncy-excited about my upcoming surgery? I hope not, but you never know with these things it seems.

I guess my problem is why does everyone have to ask me this question. I mean, I understand being asked that kind of a question when, say, you're going to be having a baby for the first time (SHOUT OUT to two of my friends, one of whom I hope will be reading this blog soon - love you, Lys!), or if you're getting married or something like that. But having weight loss surgery? That gets a big "Meh!" from me.

Maybe I'm just missing a sensitivity gene somewhere. Honestly, I oftentimes feel deficient in the "female" department of things because I just don't "get" a lot of the things females are supposed to think and feel and do.

For example: Why do friendships have to be "work"? You either are friends, or you are not. You go about your daily lives, you interact with other people, and you either are friends with them or you are not. Why is there work involved in this? Yes, sometimes you and a particular friend may not see or speak to each other for a time for whatever reason - say, physical distance. This does not mean that you are not friends anymore, now does it?

Now I have one friend in particular. She and I have known each other since, well, since I was born. She's older than me by 28 days. She moved away from where we lived when she was five years old. Five, people. I don't think we were even in kindergarden yet. As we were children, occasionally we would see each other once a year when she came back here to visit relatives during the summer. As we got older, those visits got more infrequent - a couple of years would go by without us talking to each other or seeing each other. Somehow, one of us always managed to find the other and we get back in touch and gush about each other's lives and care about each other and all that sort of good stuff. I still consider her to be one of my very best friends, and I love her to death. I think about her at least once a month, if not more often for whatever reason. We are both admittedly bad correspondants, and it usually takes large life-changes for us to find one another. But we always do.

Can somebody please tell me where the "work" part enters a friendship? Yes, we could both be more proactive in keeping in touch with each other, but dammit, I'm not going to dump her because we both suck at it. She's my friend, for crying out loud. I will ALWAYS be there for her.

Why do we, as women, have to be so high maintenance about this? So you happen to be the one who wants to keep in touch with someone else. Okay. No big deal. Like Nike says, Just Do It for crying out loud. Don't go and complain that the other party just isn't putting the same amount of effort into the friendship as you are. Maybe they're just a crappy communicator. It doesn't mean that they don't care about you or don't like you anymore. They just suck at communication and making contact with their friends. We all suck at something, so what's the big deal with them sucking at this? They put up with you and your suckiness - so shut up and put up with theirs if you really are a friend!

Sorry. I really got off on a tangent there, now didn't I? This has been a subject that's been bugging me for quite some time. I see it so often on some of the message boards that I frequent and to me it's just utterly ridicockulous that I am left stunned everytime I see it.

Anyway, back to this damned surgery.

No, I'm not excited about it. I am, however, utterly impatient to be thinner than I am now. I'm going to be one of those people who wakes up in recovery and blurts out, "Am I thin yet?" And I'll probably be very female at that moment and burst into tears when they tell me that I'm not, because dammit, this surgery is supposed to be MAGICAL, I tell you! MAGICAL! Just kidding.

I am also utterly fed up with having to explain this particular surgery every. single. time. somebody asks about it. I know it's my own fault for picking a surgery that is not as well known or performed as often as the RNY or even the Lap-Band, but I have about reached the point that I want to make up little cards with the salient points about the DS and just hand them to people to get them to understand what's going on. I cannot even BEGIN to count how many times I've had to draw how the stomach is going to be re-sected and the bowels re-routed. (As a side note, do you realize how many full-grown adults with college degrees have absolutely positively no idea of any portion of their inside anatomy? The ignorance is astounding!)

And another thing: Why is it that everybody is an expert about WLS? Even when they've never had it or never even looked into it? They always say something along the lines of "Well, I knew someone who knew someone who had it and they, well they DIED." Thanks. Thanks a lot, buddy. Thank you ever so much for your brilliantly genius and constructive statement. Now please go stand in the corner. Because dying? Is pretty much guaranteed for all of us. Last time we checked the death rate on life was right up there at 100%. I will bring your dunce cap to you immediately.

What I really am is reflective about having the DS. Reflective on how this is going to change not only my life, but the life of my entire family. How this is going to effect The Husband. How this is going to effect my precious children. How this is going to effect my friends and how this is going to effect how the whole world percieves me at first glance and afterwards.

Yeah, I know that there are going to be drastic changes around the corner. And this tempers any excitement I may be feeling over having the DS. But I think that that's a good thing, don't you?

The word is: Dysmorphia

Can you use that in a sentence, sir, please?

*sigh*

Yeah, that would be me. D to the Y to the S - M - O - R - P - H - I - A. I have no idea who I really am and how I got here. Psych consult for one, please!

This body dysmorphia has been taking over me and my life since I started putting on weight after I gave birth to Thing One. Before baby, yeah, I was a little bit on the pudgy side of things. But no more than your average Jane. I wore a size 14 or a 16. It was all good. Sure I could have stood to lose weight, but damn, my boobies looked good so life was just fine.

But slowly and surely, the pounds crept on. Slowly they came, step by step, inch by inch, until I turned into this 300+ pound whale that I find myself. Imagine my surprise!

The problem really isn't that I now find myself so overweight. The problem is that I still think and feel that I am that 175-pound girl that I used to be. And because of that? I am an accident waiting to happen.

Now, I've always been clumsy. My feet have always been a little bit on the big side of things, and when you have Goofy feet, you tend to trip over them. Often. But over the last several years, I have developed a very nasty habit. You see corners? Well, they just don't like me. They up and jump out in front of me, making me smash my hips into them because damnit if I'm not supposed to be this large and should actually be able to get around them without this problem. You know, of them running into me.

As a result, my body is usually in some state of bruising somewhere. When I take off my clothes at night, The Husband will often say, "How did you get that bruise, honey?" And I'll have to tell him about the vicious attack desk that decided to move itself out two feet into the walkway because it just had to have some of my epithelials or blood cells in its wood because it just likes me in that kind of a way.

I've even had doctors ask me if The Husband beats me because I have so many bruises on my body at times. Ummm, no, he just has a wife that is a complete clutz and doesn't know the width of her own body, thankyouverymuch.

Lately, as I've gotten to this heaviest point in my life, my accidents are starting to get worse. Case in point, about two months ago, I was walking in our yard from the chicken pens to the sheep pen, helping the girls do the chores. Midway, I tripped over my own two feet and fell violently into a rotted 2x4 with my knee. As I lay there on the ground, stunned, I felt the pain overtake me in a way that I never have before. The girls were hovering around me, and I managed to grit out that they just needed to take care of the chores and mommy would be just fine.

But little did mommy know that she was NOT fine.

I managed to struggle to my feet and began to limp back to the house. I was pissed because there was now a small rip in the knee of my brand-new jeans. Sonofabitch. The Husband emerged from his garage and noticed me painfully making my way to the house and came to help me. He asked what had happened and got my sorry-ass tale of tripping over my own damn feet.

We made it up the steps and got inside and that's when The Husband noticed it. The red stuff. Because I couldn't bend down to take off my shoes, he helped me out of them, and as he was putting them away I started to take off my jeans. And there it was. A huge freaking gash in an L-shape across the top and down the side of my kneecap. And it was wide. The Husband came back out of the bedroom, looked at it and immediately pronounced "You're going to need stitches." That's when I started to cry.

Here it was, a late Sunday afternoon, and I - the girl who has never even broken a bone before - am going to need stitches. And my brand new jeans are fucking ruined. Great. Just great.

The Husband wasnted to call an ambulance, but I was having none of that. All I needed was stitches and the damn thing wasn't even bleeding much so BY GOD I was going to drive myself to the emergency room. And, well, I did. I mean, really. It was my left knee, and I didn't need that to drive the truck. And I didn't want The Husband there because while he used to be an EMT and all that jazz when he was much younger he really can't handle things well when I'm the one that's hurt. I just didn't need that kind of crap if someone was going to have to STITCH MY FLESH BACK TOGETHER.

So somehow I bludgeoned him into loosely bandaging my knee up and letting me go on my merry way into town to traipse into the emergency room to get doctored up. I mean, really. The girls didn't need to be there, and God knows how long it was going to take, etc., etc. I really pulled the wool over his eyes on that one, so to speak, didn't I?

Anyway, three hours, eight stitches and a vicodin later, I was good to go. It was hell living with this injury for about a week and a half, but it obviously got better, especially once the stitches were out. Now I'm left with this c-shaped scar that curves perfectly around my kneecap. It's actually kind of cute. But it could have been sooooo much worse, and I know it.

This was the latest injury in a series of twisted ankles, deep bruises, wrenched backs and all sorts of painful things. All because I weigh so much that I either can't control my own balance anymore or because I think that I'm not as big as I am. The only thing that I haven't done is break a bone, and I'm just counting the days until I do something that makes that happen.

How do we get this way? Why can we not see ourselves for who we are? Yeah, I can see the fat in the mirror, but why in the hell can't my brain process that I'm wider than my actual hipbones now? It's not like this happened all in one fell swoop overnight. It's been building for a while for crying out loud!

And they tell me that my body is going to do the opposite thing once I start losing the weight with the surgery. That I'll see myself as this really big fat person when I only weigh 125 pounds. It appears that I'm going to be doomed to body dysmorphia no matter what happens.

But at least I won't have any more vicious attack desks eating me for lunch anymore.

What's she talking about?

So, I guess it might help to identify some terms and acronyms that I'm using and then link it to my profile so that y'all don't have to guess what I'm babbling on about. My actual real-life job partially entails keeping a detailed acronym list, and oh my word are there a lot of them. I'll try to keep this list short, sweet and updated.

Sheeple - members of my personal herd of sheep; stupid people whom I like to rage against, i.e. "Rage Against the Sheeple"

DS - Duodenal Switch, sometimes known as the Biliopancratic Diversion with Duodenal Switch or the Gastric Reduction with Duodenal Switch; the specific type of bariatric surgery that I am having

OH - Obesity Help website (remind me again *why* I'm listing this?)

SF - Sassy Fatties, otherwise known as the rockin' group of girlies (and boyies) whose webring I belong to

RNY - Roux-en-y, the most common form of bariatric surgery; what people usually think of when they hear the words "gastric bypass"

Thing One - my oldest daughter, age 10

Thing Two - my youngest daughter, age 6

The Husband - kinda obvious, right? You know, the man who rocks my world

WLS - weight loss surgery

Quad - a four-wheeled off-road vehicle that we use for conquering the desert and making it our bitch, so to speak

Being part of the "In Crowd"

All throughout school, I always wanted to be part of the In Crowd. But for some reason, I never was.

The In Crowd is populated by people who have some kind of a connection with some ephemeral greatness that nobody else really understands but everybody instinctively understands. Nobody can just penetrate the In Crowd - you can try to hang on the periphery like Winnona Ryder did in Heathers, but it's just never the same.

But now? I'm the one in the In Crowd. After decades of not belonging, I have FINALLY made it big.

You see, I have a car. And this car? Well, it's a special car. Not many people have this car, and those of us that do? Well, we smile at each other as we pass on the street even though we don't know each other, content in our vehicles, smugly knowing that we are better than anybody else out there because we have a LANDCRUISER.

Yes, that's right. A Toyota Landcruiser. But not that new piece of crap that they brought out this year that is masqerading as a Landcruiser with the faux-retro look that every car company is trying to cash in on. And not the Yuppie-mobile of the late 80s and early 90s.

No, I have a REAL Landcruiser. It's a 1983 - the last year they imported the FJ40 from Japan into the US. The thing can literally climb a greased pole. It used to belong to my brother-in-law for years. When I first met The Husband, he was actually borrowing it from his brother. And throughout the years, it has come to live with us on occasion when BIL thought that we would have fun with it and he wasn't using it.

The last time it came to live with us, The Husband gave it a brand new paint job and then managed to accidentally drive it through the wall of our garage and then use it to push the wall back into place. Yeah, you read that right. It really was an accident! Luckily, the thing's such a tank that it really didn't matter that he had driven it through the wall. And there were only a few paint touch-ups that he had to do. But the cannisters of different calliber reloading brass that were scattered across the floor of The Husband's garage was certainly a sight to be seen. He cried a little bit when he realized the task he was going to have to deal with sorting that stuff out. I would have cried as well.

Anyway, last year we bought it from BIL. I have coveted this vehicle since before The Husband and I ever dated. And since we sold our house for mucho profit (well to us, not to The Donald), we had some Benjamins left over to buy me a new car. Now, I could have gotten something new. But no. I wanted the twenty-year-old tank. And so, I got it.

This thing is awesome. Not only do the top, doors and sides all come off, exposing the full roll cage inside, but the windshield can also fold down flat if you want to have that safari look and have bugs fly into your mouth for dinner and things like that. Add to that that I can go anywhere offroad that I want to, and I've got a killer vehicle.

So now that it's summer around here (again!) The Husband spent a few days making my Crusher airconditioned for me, taking off everything, and putting on the new bra top and half-doors.

And I get to drive around, feeling sassy with the wind going through my hair, looking down on the pretty people in their expensive but banal and trite convertibles being the sheeple that they are, knowing that I belong to an In Crowd that they don't and would probably never even qualify for. And one that they could never even begin to imagine how to break into.

Revenge is sweet.

Meet the Sheeple

Well, at least meet some of them. I'll be adding to this post throughout the day as I can figure out pictures and all that sort of crap. Adventure! Excitement! A Jedi craves not these things.

Anyway . . .

Yes, I really really do have sheep. Six of them currently to be precise. I would have nine, but, well, let's say that my first attempt at making the little boy sheeps into little un-boy sheeps didn't go quite as planned, and it was a very sad time, and mother ewes wept and Sarah felt very, very bad and nearly had a meltdown and all that sort of thing, the end. Ah, the joys of livestock!

Our four adult sheep are pets. As in they have names and everything and will be around until they die of natural causes or The Husband shoots them in the head because they annoy him so much with all the screaming for grain, whichever comes first. The babies? Well, let's just say our family is all about the food, so don't be reading this blog if you like don't want to hear that meat you get in the grocery store came from somewhere other than that styrofoam plate and might have been cute and fluffy at one time in its life. Because usually it was. Sorry.

The oldest is Clarice. Yes, as in "do you hear the silence of the lambs, Clarice?" Blame The Husband for that, mmkay? *I* wanted to name her Petunia, but noooooo. Anyway, Clarice actually suits her just fine and she answers to it and all that jazz so it's all good.

So, here she is, in all her fluffy glory. She has always given us multiples. The first two years it was twins, and then this year it was triplets. So, needless to say, she's a GREAT producer and a fanfrickingtabulous mamma. I think we'll keep her. In this particular picture, this was her second set of twins.

She is the alpha female of the herd, for what that is worth considering that they are sheep. I mean, have you ever heard of the term "alpha female" connected with sheep? No? Me neither. But, she is determined to let everybody else know who's boss so we just let her go ahead with her bad self.

Clarice enjoys handfulls of grain, lots of #2 hay, rams that don't butt too hard, and long walks in the rain.

Our next two sheep are the same age. Chocolate Chip has only produced singletons so far, but they've all been stunningly healthy so we don't complain at all. At least she is earning her keep. She lost her baby this year in the Great Mistake of 2006(see above), so to distract her we actually ended up loaning her out to a couple of friends to do weed patrol for them. It worked out pretty well, and she became MUCH tamer as a result. Which is all well and good when you want to do something with them like, oh, shear them or give them shots. Shove a can of grain in this girl's face and she will do ANYTHING you want. Hubba hubba!

Here she is with last year's baby.

Rambo. The name says it all. He's big, he's black, large and in charge. Mere mortals tremble before his awesome forehead and other, um, parts. Well, unless The Husband is wielding the Rambo Be Good Stick (aluminum baseball bat). Then? He runs away. At least he learns, right? Sheep aren't as dumb as they say.

Funny/cute story about Rambo and my oldest daughter, Thing One. Thing One had a friend over when we first got Rambo. Both are approximately 8 years old and are very sheltered when it comes to the grownup world - they go to the same private Christian school. It was friend's first time seeing a sheep, and more specifically a male, intact sheep. Friend points at the dangly bits underneath Rambo and asks, innocently enough, "What's that?"

Thing One, being the good daughter that she is, has picked up on mommy and daddy's euphamisms.

"That? Oh, that's 'the sac.'"

Thank the Lord above that The Husband was around a corner when he heard this because it wouldn't have been a good thing for Thing One and friend to discover a fully grown man rolling around in the dirt with laughter. They just wouldn't have understood.

Now, remember that cute little lamb up above, peeking out around Clarice? Yeah, I mean the one over here on the right. Meet Oreo. Part Deux. She is the only one of the babies that have been produced to not meet Mr. Butcher. She belonged to our partner in livestock crime, The Chicken Man. The deal was, that we raised the four-footed creatures on our property, and he raised the two-legged and feathered ones. Unfortunately, The Chicken Man died last year of lung cancer, so we asked his family what they wanted to do with his lamb. The Chicken Man's daughter, The Kid, said that the decision would be up to his granddaughter, The Princess. The Princess decided she wanted to keep the little one, and she could be a producer of more babies for us. And so it was. I'll post an actual picture of Oreo later on tonight when I actually have access to it.

UPDATE! Obviously, the fluffy thing up above on my left here is an adult sheep. More precisely, Oreo. Here she is with her little girl from this year. She's a good mama as well. Very protective.

So, now about me . . .

My name is Sarah, I am 35, and this is my life.

I live in a place more commonly known as BFE (Bum-Fucked Egypt), California. I have been married for 12 years to The Husband, and we have two girls - Thing One (age 10) and Thing Two (age 6). We live on 15 acres and have a menagerie of animals - sheep, chickens, ducks, pheasant, dogs and a bearded dragon. As if that wasn't enough, both The Husband and I have full-time jobs and I have a second job. Ooof!

So, as you can see, life is, well, interesting.

And to make it even more interesting? I've decided to have weight loss surgery. Specifically the Gastric Reduction with Duodenal Switch, more commonly known as the Duodenal Switch or just the DS.

I've always been a little bit on the "bigger" side of things. I was never one of the cool kids in school, and was always a size or two larger than they were. Nothing terribly bad, but I knew and they knew that I wasn't "good enough" because of my size. Bah!My weight kind of just crept up on me. The happier I am, the more I eat. There was a time when I was in a deep depression over my then-fiance leaving me and I didn't eat and lost 20 pounds in one month. Not a good way to lose it, but obviously I wasn't complaining!

But then I found the man who became The Husband, and, well, since I was happy . . . .

Over the years I've tried different diets to get my weight under control. While they may have worked for a time (and some didn't work at ALL), I always gained the weight back, and then some. So now, after having two children, I find myself at over 300 pounds. Something has GOT to be done!

About 10 years ago, I met a lady who had the old-fashioned stomach stapling done to her. She was one of the success stories, and had dropped nearly 200 pounds in a year, and was keeping it off, three or four years out. Yes, she could only eat little bits at a time, but she was able to eat what she wanted with very little consequence. Only rice and bread gave her any real problems. At the time, I weighed only 220 pounds, but the idea intrigued me. I thought that this was something that I could do if I couldn't ever get the weight off me.

As the years went by and I gradually began getting heavier and heavier, the idea of having WLS appealed more and more to me. I began researching the RNY approximately 7-8 years ago. I learned all that I could about it, but thought that my husband and I could never afford the surgery even after insurance paid for it (or IF they even would pay for it!). That, plus I was very worried about some of the side effects of the surgery, such as dumping syndrome, stoma problems, the blind stomach, etc., etc. There were just too many ifs for me.

Every year or so, I would check back into WLS again, check out the surgeons closest to me. But go through the same old arguments again and again. It was the same thing, different day.

One of the ladies that I work with got the RNY about 4 years ago. She weighed somewhere in the high 200s, and was very desperate. She quickly lost the weight, and has been keeping it off. She has a fantabulous body because of the pounds she has shed. I kept looking at her and thinking, "Dang. I can do this, I can!" But I never got further than printing off the patient questionnaires from one of the doctors.

Then another lady where I work got the same thing. She had even more weight to lose, and watching her become the shrinking woman really set a fire under me for a time. This is something that can work, I would think to myself. But again, the same doubts and questions came back up.

In January of this year, the Husband sat me down. He wanted to know what were the top things that I wanted to spend money on this year. We have been greatly blessed in our financial freedoms lately, and he wanted to know what would make me happy. I thought about it for a day and came back with my list. At the top of it? Weight loss surgery. I was crying as I told him that I was tired of being this big, that I feared I could never lose weight on my own, and that I wanted to be healthy for him. Well, he looked me straight in the eye and told me that I needed to do some research and make a consult and that he would be there. I was so happy!

I got on the ASBS site, plugged in my info and searched for a surgeon. I didn't particulary want to have to go to the Alvarado Clinic in San Diego if I didn't have to because it is 5 hours away. I knew we would have to travel, but I didn't want it to be that far. Approximately 65 miles away from me (yeah, right! As the crow flies!) in Delano Ca. was Dr. Ara Keshishian. I clicked on his website link and discovered something that will change my life forever. I discovered the DS.

As I read about the surgery, about its risks, complications, aftercare - everything - it was as if God was suddenly opening up the door to heaven just for me. This was it. All of my doubts about being able to eat the way I needed to after surgery melted away. This was a REAL way of living. This kept more of my anatomy the way God had made and intended it to work. I didn't have to worry about dumping, eating 2oz meals at a time, being able to DRINK during my meal, stoma blockages, dilations, ulcers - all the sorts of things that made me shy away from the RNY previously. This was something I could do!

I quickly called Dr. K's office and set up an initial consult. I was so excited I could barely breathe. I came home and babbled to The Husband about it. He was confused because wasn't one weight loss surgery the same as another? Ah, no worries. He'll get it eventually, right? After the two-hour teaching presentation with Dr. K's nurse Dee, who has had the DS, The Husband was a convert. He now understood why I wanted THIS surgery or no other one. And after meeting Dr. K, he was even more confident about me having surgery at all.

On the trip home, we spent the time discussing the different things we had learned, and about the question of "what does Sarah want in the way of plastic surgery after this is all done and the weight is off." Hee! Needless to say, The Husband is not going to quibble a bit about me wanting to get the "girls" nice and happy and my tummy nice and tight after all of this. You gotta love him! I know I do!

So, my surgery is now scheduled for July 19. But life still goes on, and there are many, many things to do around here. So let's get to it!