(and other Vik & Tori stories)

You know when old people tell you sometimes to be grateful for your health?  So true!  No time more true than when you have just had to have emergency surgery!  No time, like being helpless in a bed, to bring back years of regrets, thoughts, questions, doubts...sadness.

Ok, backing up a bit to nine years ago...it may have been 10 actually.  Anyway, picture me if you will,  I have 4 young kids - all so close in age that there is no point in even telling you their ages - they were all about the same!  I loved being a mum but was a truly unhappy wife and had become the size of a small tractor-trailer.  I kid you not...255 lbs on this small 5ft 2 frame.  I guess that I had not given my body a chance to shrink after each pregnancy and so I was a balloon by the time the last one was born - a sad balloon at that!

This was not my first foray into fatness however!  Oh no...this has been a lifelong struggle which began when I was a very young girl and my PE teacher told my mum that she thought my spine was curved!  Now we call that scoliosis here in the US but that was too many syllables for the Scottish PE teacher so she just told Mum I should be checked out.  I was a perfectly healthy wee girl though and though not the same body type as my 'perfect' sister, never felt bad about myself till then.  The doc said I was just fine, no abnormal spine, just perhaps a bit 'overweight' and that should be taken care of.  Poor Mother...it became, right then and there, her goal to make me a thin person.  This is a challenge that went on for decades and one could say it was still going on! Dear me...

So I come home that day from the doctor and remember vividly looking at a picture on the shelf of all our family about to go sailing. We are lined up leaning against the Volvo, in matching outfits (Mum was a control freak!)  Dad - all grey haired and dapper with gorgeous, thin mother and bobbed hair older sister and then... old Chubbs at the end of the line.  I was squinting into the light - and at that point I realized that I was not really as attractive as the rest of the familia and was most likely even considered the odd one out!  I am going to dig up these photos for a visual but until then - I will continue.

Since that day, I went on every diet known to mankind!  Many of them were ripped out of Good Housekeeping and mailed to me by mother when I moved to boarding school or was at University.  Even Mum's Mum would get involved "How's Tori's weight?" she would chirp and then hushed whispers.  "Here's a wee diet I read about, Tor.".. she would say.  "Day 1 you eat 12 eggs!"  Ahhh, Egg diet, how I remember ye - mightily unsuccessful and left me bound up like an old bull fiddle!

My weight yo yo'd up and down through middle and senior school.  Looking back at pics I would say I was really not that heavy.  I played hockey and netball and swam on the team and Mum only had healthy food in the house (except Dad's 'biscuits for coffee') but I always felt less from those early days and sometimes I would feed that hurt and sometimes I would starve it depending on the day. 

Oh well - I am not sitting here now blaming anyone or anything for this.  Mum did her best and Dad was really very limited in his understanding of human nature and how best to handle such things - and so I struggled along diet road, South Beach, Lindora, Weightwatchers to name but a few...oh and Phen-fen - yup i took those too.

So back to the balloon time, post-babies... my friend and co-worker told me that she had got a lap band fitted and as I watched her pounds disappear before my own eyes every morning-drive time in the studio, she encouraged me to look into the procedure.  To be honest, I felt so alone in it all.  My ex was not supportive or encouraging. I felt I had no options.  I qualified for the surgery, which in itself was scary, because that put you in a special category of over-weight, alongside the people who had to get cranes to hoist them out of bed or needed livestock industrial scales to get weighed!  Ok, ok, so perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration but still... I was pretty fat folks.

I had success with the band.  I only had it filled once and that acted as enough restriction for what went in my mouth that it helped me lose about 50 lbs over some time.  I then continued to lose over the next 10 years and managed to keep it off only going up 3-8 pounds here and there and then losing it again.  Crazy roller-coaster ride I was on but one I guess I now felt in control of.  I have great will power when I want to so I became increasingly annoyed with the band because I felt I could probably take it from here on my own, thanks very much! Anyone who has ever had a band will also tell you the horrors of food getting stuck occasionally because of it, and then the inevitable rushing to the loo to puke what you just ate a few seconds ago...eyes watering and face-red... I hated it.  Hated myself for having needed it...hated the fat-ride...wanted to be rid of the fat-suit...on my own.  The band reminded me of an old version of myself.  A less enlightened soul who was angry and unhappy, helpless.

Well I guess the band heard me!  Or it could have heard Vik saying "I hate that band".  Funny though how the body responds in mysterious ways.  A few weeks ago - rather dramatically - it slipped!  It slipped all the way to the top of my esophagus - totally blocking it. 

In true British fashion, I soldiered on for 4 days being able to eat nothing but sipping protein drinks.  It's probably just indigestion I thought...or that cold I had has caused a swelling etc etc.  We went to Parents Weekend for daughter 3 and I slept sitting up, popping Tagamet and gagging.  When we got back, Vik was enraged and drove me to the ER where I was then prodded and probed and given barium, and tipped upside down, by a million Dougie Housers.  Then I was transported by ambulance to the hospital where the band had been put in 10 years before.  My Surgeon, Dr No-Bedside-Manner-Whatsoever was still there!  And the decision was made.  The band had to come out.

And now here I am.  I am band-free but what a terrible road this has been.  I am trying to find the words for how I got there, or here for that matter.  I find that now, in retrospect, I feel enormous sadness for my younger enormous self.  I wonder now that, if in my early years, I had not spent so much time 'blaming' everyone else (the PE Teacher, Mum, all those really bad one night stands etc) and just got on with the business of losing the weight, if I just had the strength...

Oh well - those coulda, woulda thoughts really won't help at this juncture will they?  The point is... I didn't have the strength back then.  I felt less so I tried to be more in other ways - the funniest, the sexiest, the best mother.  I also picked a partner who had his own battles to deal with and had no time for mine. All the while, I kept adding more to my plate (literally), Baby 1,2,3,4, dog 1,2, hamsters 1,2,3,5, Goldfish 12, guinea-pigs 2, re-finance 1,2,3 and my crowning glory - a vintage Airstream Trailer (in need of total overhaul) and this was going to house all of us and we'd all travel away together to National Parks - into the sunset...

One of my saddest days, during my divorce, was watching that Airstream be towed off by its new owner.  Sold it for way less than it was worth and off she went, door held shut with tape, weeds on the wheels, dirty windows.  Off 'Peggy-Sue' rolled out of the driveway of my friend's house where it had come to rest and was being used to house her chickens! I had so much hope and naivety and sadness.  I had sobbed scrubbing chicken shit off the vinyl table.  This was not supposed to be this way.

So weighing it up now, with much water headed under the bridge (at a quite a fast gush),  I guess I can only wish that I had just believed in myself a little more a long, long time ago!  I wish I'd been able to say no when I meant no - either with Swedish Fish or scones or stupid, hurtful men.  But I didn't... I said yes, yes and yes...and don't worry, I may be fat, but I am mighty and I got this., I can handle it.  Put some more on my plate. Load it up.  An endless game of denial and of proving myself - but to whom I wonder?  To whom?

Well - here I am today, incredibly grateful for my returned good health and for the body's knack of healing, no matter what shit you throw at it on your life journey (and I have thrown it quite a lot of shit let me tell you!). Also, I am grateful for the myriad of Dougie Housers (and old surgeons), and my beautiful, tolerant Vik who was by my side at all times. But, well now it's all just down to me isn't it? No gadgets blocking my intake any more. Time to just say no thanks. This is me: a bit bruised with seven little incisions, a few jiggly bits left over from the many, many children all in a row...

I am a shadow of my former self, getting rid of my fat-suit and well - finally just taking care of business.