"You Must Feel So Much Better!"

I think I've alluded to this topic before to some degree but I've been hearing this so often lately that I think it bears a revisit.

People have been suddenly asking how I'm feeling, or saying to me "You must be feeling so much better now!" or some other variation of the statement.

I of course don't know how to react to it. I had to sit down and think about a decent canned response for the question.

In tech support issues I learned that when people ask what happened to their computer they are lying. They don't really want to know. They want some nice short Twitteresque response that fits into a little box with a bow, not the dissertation to explain that they downloaded malware from a website probably while web browsing those stupid flash game sites and that program started downloading other applications in the background and turned their computer into a zombie under the control of some jackass in Europe with a penchant for launching denial 0f service attacks on companies that wouldn't give them a refund for a broken dishwasher. Nope, they want to hear something like, "It was the electron exchanger. I reinstalled with the restore CD and it's better now."

The same goes with surgery. I know, heavy on cynicism, but this kind of weight loss doesn't easily summarize into two or three sentences. I can't delve into details of the pain of recovery. I can't explain in two minutes that I can't eat brownies or pie anymore. Or the dumping. Or fear of trying new foods with unknown ingredients. Etcetera. Etcetera. And I have my own fears of stigma; I took the "easy way out". Surgery is magic weight loss. Effortless. It's none of those, but without proper elaboration the average person making smalltalk may think that. For an Aspergian, these exchanges are painful sessions of indecision of what is proper or appropriate to say.

The truth is that I feel like the same person I was. The change wasn't instant. It's painfully slow. Day by day. When you change in a way that leads to slow acclimation, you don't notice a sudden spring in your step. You have revelations. Like getting out of the shower with the glass doors and not SCRAAAAPING to get through it or wondering if you're going to knock the doors out in the process. Or bending over to get something and your underwear falls down because they don't fit right anymore. These are sudden things, not gradual changes that you can see like a health gauge on a video game character.

But I still wake up feeling like the same me that I was a year ago.

So has anything changed? Sure. I work hard at trying to lose the weight. I hate the riding of bike, the treadmill, the freeweights. I hate the missing all-you-can-eat pizza at gatherings and the Chinese Buffet cheese wontons and the double cheeseburgers and the mozzarella cheese sticks. I hate seeing nothing but clogged arteries when I see a TGI Friday's sign.

I have become, hopefully, a little less willfully ignorant of eating and exercise choices. I'm still learning. I'm actually acting more on my knowledge than ignoring it. C'mon...are you telling me you didn't know that the specialty coffees from Starbucks you didn't realize were unhealthy than just plain coffee? Or that McDonald's isn't a healthy meal choice? I don't know of any restaurant that isn't fraught with health dangers; you have to search for choice selections to have any chance since most restaurants...Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Panera...are high in sodium, fats, and/or calories. They're good once in awhile, but they've become staples in western diets. And we ignore the fact that we KNOW they're not good for us because they taste good and hey, we're not leaving the restaurant in an ambulance! The surgery was an excuse...and reason...to avoid most of the things that doctors have been telling us to avoid all along.

I have more demons. Most fat people aren't fat because they like to just eat.

Okay, I liked to eat.

But there's more to it. I have a kind of love/hate relationship with depression. I have relationship issues. I have stresses. I have issues that fudgy brownies helped make me feel better about.

The bariatric surgery means that in the short term you can't turn to your old counselors for emotional boosts. It means depression gets worse. It means strained relationships. It means stresses getting higher. It means in my case stripping away my greatest defense from the world I have grown to despise in so many ways, and being laid naked in that environment leads to problems that need to be dealt with in other ways. Otherwise the surgery will fail. That bit about being a magic bullet? That's bull. There are people who start piecing at the sugared foods again. They tolerate dumping. They liquify meals so they can eat more at one sitting and get the excess calories, and they can cheat the system. Or they start eating more and more of the sugar-free stuff to avoid some dumping but get cheap calories and by eating slowly much more often they pack in the pounds again.

I also have issues with my skin. It's loose and flabby. I don't know if there's any way I'll afford surgery (or another copay) to repair it. When I turn around I stop moving and after two beats my gut stops moving. I'm deathly afraid of raising my arm in public lest people think I'm melting when they see the grotesque flesh dangling from my upper arm.

So I am controlling my diabetes through diet. I fit through door more easily. Sometimes I wonder if I could get up the stairs or walk the distances I do now if I hadn't lost the weight. I get anxious while buying clothes because there's no way these numbers should fit. But I also have more demons to control. I have traded some problems with fat for problems with image and issues controlling my wavering despair and stress.

In the end when people ask how I do it I use my new stock answer. "I eat less." Because it's the truth. When they say, "You must feel so much better!" I say, "Some things have gotten better." Because that's the truth too. I don't know if they'd ever want the full truth. Because I don't know if they can handle the truth.