My One True Love

We met when I was still a chubby toddler with wild curls and a gift for chatting up complete strangers.  My true love was never a stranger to me, though.  We met for the first time, I think, at my grandparents' big round oak table, but we immediately began to see each other on a very regular basis.  We delighted in the infinite variety we found in each other's company, but we also treasured the parts of our relationship that were built on tradition and family and plain, pure love.  For a long while, it seemed I had a bit of the upper hand in our understanding of one another---if being able to manipulate is the "upper hand."  But that kind of lack of balance is never good for building long-lasting, loving companionship.  By the time I was seven or eight, I knew in my heart that food could never fill that true-love spot for me....but I kept at it, simply for lack of understanding how else to fit something or someone else in that well of need I felt.

I loved baking from the time I could stand on a kitchen chair and help my great-grandma roll out bread dough or pie crust or chilled cookie dough.  Along the way, I'd stuff my little belly so full of whatever we were working on that I'd either get queasy or, worse, bloated from too much yeast dough.  I would bake at home, too, whenever momma would let me.  There's no accounting for what percentage got cooked, but it wasn't ever nearly all.  There wasn't anything inherently wrong with baking or serving desserts, especially in those days, when everyone worked harder out in the heat, and few people had air conditioners.  We burned off what we put into our bodies, for the most part. 

There's no clear reason why, but I never developed a taste for vegetables; I wanted meat and carbs of all sorts.  Of the older generations in my family, only my Papa Welker, who was severely diabetic, didn't eat mostly healthy foods.  I had good examples to follow; I just didn't care to---even though I was warned from a young age that I needed to watch out for my blood sugars to go up, that I would most likely become diabetic at some point.  But when this doctor or that did the before-and-after meals testing, my levels would be perfect.  This, or course, set me on a "What do they know?" path toward chips, candy, and assorted other junk.

These things, I should stress, weren't allowed in our house in much, if any, quantity.  We didn't keep pop at home, and we were only allowed to drink pop in the afternoon or evening, never the morning, and never at meals.  Of course, then, it goes without saying that that was the FIRST rule I threw over when I went away to college.  Chips were allowed with sandwiches or hamburgers, not as snacks.   At Ralston, where we went to school, students were required to eat at the cafeteria  every day through 6th grade; after that, we could walk "uptown" (three blocks) to a grocery store named  Leroy's and get lunch there.  To the best of my memory, every day from 7th-12th grades, I had a lunch of chips, pop,and candy.  My weight had already become an obvious issue by then, but I refused to do anything about it, though I wished I could.  I was convinced that I would fail, and why set myself up for failure?  No, better to know that my true love---grease, fat, salt, and sugar---would be around to greet me each day. 

The much-threatened "Freshman 15," the extra pounds most freshmen are said to gain, didn't trouble me because I already had put on so much more weight in high school.  I stayed practically the same size for the first three years of school.  Then I found a group of friends who worked in the residence halls and hung out together like a rag-tag family of gypsies, surviving on a little cafeteria food, Love's deli sandwiches, cigarettes, beer, and late-night sugar binges to keep studying at the last minute.  I kept that up all the way through my Masters, and I....blossomed....into much the same size I am today. 

But that's not all to that story, of course.  I had always enjoyed remarkable good health; I could count on one hand the number of times I'd been so sick I had to stay in bed up till my early thirties.  Then, at 32, I was diagnosed pre-diabetic.  All I had to do to resolve it was to quit drinking Pepsi for several years.  I didn't have to start taking medicine for another 6 years, when Laura was terminally ill.  But so much other stuff followed hard and fast:  hypothyroidism, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, depression, anxiety, neuropathy, autoimmune arthritis, hammertoes, foot sores, ulcers, neck and back pain, blinding headaches, and a few bouts with pneumonia and bronchitis.  Finally, it seemed, my true love had come for me, body and soul, and I would have to pay up for all the damage I had caused.  There was only one thing to do that I found viable.

Wednesday, my true love and I broke up.  We are separate now, for the most part, for the rest of my life.

With joy and in desperation, I did something I said and thought I would never do:  I changed the structure of my body to limit my ability to eat.  The procedure I had is called a vertical sleeve gastrectomy; it's relatively new and is less risky than gastric bypass, and my body can't reject it, like it could have done with the lap band.  I worked on getting the procedure done since December of 2009, spending three years with Cherokee Nation, and finally giving up on them because the surgical nurse there just hated that I asked questions. 

Just when that source seemed insurmountable, I found that the state insurance, Healthchoice, is doing a test of 100 patients this year to see if bariatric surgery will save them money in the long run---a question I find laughably stupid, when the money they have had to pay up in scripts for me in a single year has amounted to just about the same cost as the surgery.  I hope that by this time next year, anyone who has the health issues I've had can come through the program as quickly as they can prepare themselves for it, and start over with a new life, new chances for good health and happiness.

And of course, a newer, truer love that will never endanger, but only enhance who we wish to be.