For many morbidly obese people considering gastric bypass surgery, the fear of serious complications or even death keeps them from going through with it. I, on the other hand, was so unhappy with my life that I didn’t care if I died on the operating table. As I saw it then, death would be better than continuing to live such a miserable existence. Of course, I am well aware that only an extremely low percentage of bariatric surgery patients suffers serious complications, but even if the risks were much higher, I would have decided to have the surgery.

I wasn’t an overweight child. In fact, I was athletic and very skinny – so much so that my family tried to fatten me up. Sometime during my mid-teen years I started noticing that I was larger than most of my friends, wearing a size 14 and weighing somewhere around 150 pounds. Looking back now, and knowing what I now know, I realize that I was only tall and large-boned and that my size was okay, but at the time it really bothered me to be different from my friends.

As is often the case, my weight continued to climb with each passing year. A history of depression in my family combined with many health issues concerning my daughters, kept me mentally and emotionally troubled. Food was my comfort and thus the vicious cycle of weight gain/depression/over-eating continued. At times I managed to lose a bit of weight, but as soon as the next bout of depression set in, I would start packing on the pounds again.

Carrying around 300 or more pounds sure takes its toll on the body; it certainly did on mine. I suffered from excruciating back and knee pain, often requiring the use of a wheel chair in order to get around. I needed to sleep with a sea pap mask for my sleep apnea condition and I had uncontrollable high blood pressure. I couldn’t stand for more than ten minutes at a time and basically my weight held me prisoner in my own body, unable to do most of the things I wanted to do. I wasn’t even able to climb the stairs to the second level of my own home. Travel was out of the question. I couldn’t fit in an airplane seat and I would have been too uncomfortable to ride long distances in a car. Plus, using public toilets was, at best, a real challenge.