12/25/04 - Just catching up on the events to date - Part 1

Making the Decision

The whole process went very quickly for me. I discovered that my insurance company, Aetna, would not cover the surgery as of 1/1/05 unless the company you worked for took a rider to cover it. This piece of information enabled me to move forward and decide to have the surgery before the option was taken away from me. I have been thinking about having WLS for over 4 years. I wanted to believe I could do it on my own. There were a few things that factored into my decision:

• My last failure on Weight Watchers helped put an end to that notion. Rodney and I had done so well with Weight Watchers. When we moved, life interfered and we lost our focus. Both of us ending up gaining back the weight we had lost, and I gained even more than that.
• I had a scare with my thyroid in August/September. I had an ultrasound done and a nodule was discovered. It turns out I have Hashimoto's, so the nodule is nothing to be concerned about. This caused me to think even more about my weight and its impact on my health. Obviously, if I did have to have surgery my weight would be a factor in how well everything would go.
• I became increasingly uncomfortable moving around. I've always been a fairly active overweight person, but I was getting to the point where it was harder and harder to do things.
• My company offered a basic introduction to Cancer class. The professor discussed that high levels of estrogen play in increasing one's risk of cancer. Well, it turns out that when you are overweight, you have higher estrogen levels. This made me think even more about what I was doing to myself by being so overweight.