The Horrible Answer to My Fat Chick Prayer

By Wendy Reynolds, New York Press. Posted February 6, 2001.

I wouldn't mind so much if I didn't know the truth.

Carnie Wilson's recent cover story in People heralded her surgically-engineered 150-lb. weight loss as if it were the Second Coming. I believed in bariatric surgery too -- so much so that three months after I logged on to adoctorinyourhouse.com and watched what I thought was Wilson's stomach-reducing surgery (according to an E! Entertainment Online Profile, she's recently admitted that it wasn't her surgery that was on the web, but someone who had the same procedure) I checked into a Bronx hospital and had the same thing done. After 33 years and 330 lbs, I too had thought this would be the answer to my fat chick prayer.

Wilson's surgeon and mine told us the same thing -- that we were in relatively good health despite our morbid obesity, but we were walking timebombs. The heart disease, the diabetes, the sleep apnea that could choke us to death, the early onset of arthritis (the pressure on my joints was so much that a specialist told me it would be a matter of less than two years before I'd need both my kneecaps replaced). Did the doctors tell her she was a "perfect candidate" for the surgery? They told me that. Another 30 lbs and I'd run a bigger risk of never coming out of the anesthesia. As I was, however, I had "nothing to worry about." Yes, people died having this radical procedure, but I ran "a higher risk of a heart attack" on the stairs to my fourth floor walkup. "Sure, there can be complications, but you're young, healthy..."

Did they gloss over those "complications" during Wilson's consultation? I can't remember hearing the words "pulmonary embolism" or "blood clot," but then again I barely remember the two office visits I was allowed by my HMO to the sole surgeon they approved for this procedure, other than he was a very arrogant, confident, handsome man who "never lost anyone in the 18 years" he'd done the surgery. I was surprised that my HMO had approved the surgery in the first place -- according to the year's worth of research I'd done beforehand the majority of HMO's and insurance companies won't cover bariatric surgery because it is elective.

Then I found out why I had been approved. After consulting with the HMO psychiatrist, dietitian, general practitioner, pulmonary specialist, cardiologist, pretty much everyone concurred that I would be permanently disabled in a matter of two to three years by obesity. Long-term care is pricey, and while bariatric surgery is very expensive, they would save money in the long run compared to what could be another 30 years of replacements, prescriptions, consultations and the like.

So on Nov. 30, 1999 I went under the knife, allowing a man I'd barely met slice a pouch off my stomach and attach it to my intestine; this would only let me consume an ounce of food at a time, instead of my usual quart-plus.

And then the fun began. I hemorrhaged into my small intestine, threw a pulmonary embolism, sank into a coma, and three weeks and two more surgeries later, awoke in Intensive Care to see my mother, sister and best friend grinning like idiots around me. "There she is," Bucky said, tears running down her face. "Welcome back." She was more than relieved -- she'd seen me code on the way to X-ray and watched them defibrillate me, scared out of her mind because with my family in Buffalo she'd agreed to be my next of kin on the "just in case" forms.

I spent three months in the hospital, without a drop to drink or eat -- there were holes in my "pouch" and the surgeons didn't want to go in a fourth time unless they absolutely had to. Instead, they waited for the pouch to seal itself. So I watched as cans of liquid crap were poured into an IV and pumped though a jejunal tube inserted into my body. I felt like a Yugo sucking down unleaded through a straw.

Did Carnie have to have six people at a time tip her off a gurney onto an X-ray machine every day? Did she have to sleep on a "bari bed" specially designed so that the nurses could tip you over on your side to remove the shit stained sheets from under your fat ass? Did she fall out of the bed a few times and have to have an entire medical team hoist her back up because she was so weak she couldn't even sit up by herself? Did she wonder if maybe she'd never get the hell out of there, that she'd die alone in a hospital room with a bunch of monitors beeping at her and a nurse coming in every half hour to gauge a raging fever and sing to her to comfort you after a scary, morphine-induced hallucination?

I bet she enjoyed the luxury of the less invasive laser surgery -- my scar is a spreading red zipper from my chest to my now floppy "apron" around my abdomen. They tried to encourage it to close faster by stapling plastic floss to either side, criss-crossing all the way down, and pulling it taut, like I was a sneaker. The staples popped out every day, and every day they had to be replaced, without anesthetic, without painkillers (by that time, they were trying to get me off the morphine).

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