A month ago today I got 2/3rds of my stomach removed. Yesterday I came home from a two night stay in the hospital to figure out how it went wrong.
And if you’re like “Omg why didn’t she tell me,” well once like a decade ago someone used things I told them in confidence against me when they were angry and I’ve just…never told anyone anything again. So, sorry. If you didn’t ask, I’m not going to tell.
I did not do this because I wanted to. After surviving a plague and several rounds of Cymbalta I’ve reached a point of body neutrality that I never imagined possible. I feel no desire to count calories or restrict into sadness. I no longer want pills to repress my hunger or to wait in line for an injectable that may work for now but not forever. It was my insides that were a problem, insides that were going to complicate my future and make living increasingly more difficult as I got older.
So I did this. Not because I yearn for thinness, or for a body that held a far more fragile person when it was smaller, but because I had to.
I did this and I wish I didn’t have to because I don’t want to see my worth expand as my body shrinks. I am fat, not ugly. I am fat and I’m aware that I’m pretty. I am fat and I like it that way. And I’m sad that it ends trying to save my own life, from conditions I already have and ones that are shrouded in the dark, waiting.
I didn’t want to do this.
But I did, and now my life is different in a way I thought I was ready for. Five small cuts across my belly and my stomach is gone and I am different. I left 2/3rds of a part of me on an operating table in the same hospital I was born in and I forgot to tell them to not take too much, I need some of me left inside before you close me up, sealing me tight with layers of glue.
I asked a nurse in the room if she could take a photo of my stomach before I was dragged into a painless sleep. I wanted to see what I was to lose, what was taken from me so maybe I could live a more fearless life.
My body wasn’t ready to let go. The food that I loved to eat and cook and try was no longer welcome inside of me. I can’t participate in something central to social life, to time with family and special moments with my husband. I had made up my mind but my body didn’t agree. She still doesn’t. With a cacophony of pills I will beg for her forgiveness, so the next time my therapist asks me if I have any regrets it won’t pain me to admit, “No. I don’t.”
There was me on November 7th and me on December 8th. Heavier and lighter and lighter and heavier.
I never saw that nurse again. And I didn’t get my picture, either