Big (1988)

For just a moment let's be blunt.

For just a moment let's cut through all the PC verbage and get right to the heart of the matter.

From about the time I started junior high school I have been fat. Not plump or husky or any other unflattering terms (I mean who really thinks being called husky is better than being called fat) that people use. Nope. I have been morbidly obese for going on 15 years.

How does this happen? How in the world does a kid who was pretty good at baseball and soccer get fat? A kid who loved to play outside and run around with all the other kids after school. How does this happen you ask?

The truth is pretty shocking in it's simplicity. It wasn't a hormonal thing. My bones are not bigger than an average man's bones. I didn't have a glandular problem. What I did was eat bad food. That combined with the fact that the older I got the more lazy I became helped turn me into someone I hated and didn't want to be. Slowly sports after school turned into video games on the edge of my bed. Playing outside with my bike and my friends became hanging out at the food court at the mall with a coke and handful of quarters for Street Fighter 2.

And the downward spiral was that the bigger I got the worse I felt. And the worse I felt the more I would retreat into my safty zone of bad food and being lazy.

You may be asking yourself a question like, "Well damn man - just how big did you get?"

It's a valid question. The only real answer I can give is that I honestly don't know. Fat people will do just about anything they can not to get on a scale. The scale is honest about our body image. Nothing is worse than feeling bad about your weight and then having a machine tell you it's worse than you thought. So I honestly don't know how much I weighed in high school. I can tell you that my waist was as big as 36 inches and I can tell you I didn't date much. That's what I remember.

So years go by and a sedintary lifestyle sets in. You (and by "you" I mean me) become complacent and to comfortable to make a change. You diet all the time but never as much as you could. And the thought of working out at a gym becomes more and more exhausting.

At my peak I weighed in at just under 380lbs. Even at a height of 6'4" that much weight is bound to take it's toll. But I hovered at the 350lbs mark for years and never seemed to be able to loose the excess weight. In fact, it was at a point where I really started to feel comfortable at that place in my life. Not only unable to change, but almost unwilling to do anything different.

So what made me make the decision to do something as drastic as Gastric Bypass Surgery?

One word answer? Women.

But more on that later.

First Blood (1982)

Having a conversation with an old friend can be a strange experiance. You pick up right where you left off. It can almost be like you never lost contact. But you have lost time. There are gaps in the knowledge you have about each other, because while time may have passed in reality, it hasn't passed in your friendship.

I was talking to an old friend last weekend when one one of these gaps caused an odd little revelation.

I had written a short narritive about some medical stuff that had happened to me (more on that later) and my friend had read it that week. We chatted about it and he asked if I still wrote on a regular basis.

It was like I had forgotten that I had ever written anything. I can remember a day when I was on the computer hacking away at twenty different things (though never finishing any of them) every day. These days I found myself exhausted if my e-mails were more than two paragraphs.

But the question remained.

I didn't write, but I sure as hell should. The last year of my life has been the most transitional year of my life. Stranger than the year I was apprehended by Dutch Military Police. Weirder than the year I got married by Captian James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise. This year has been a big one for me and I should be writing about all the changes I have been through.

So we'll start at the beginning and work our way up to speed.

Next time I'll fill you all in on what made me decide to change my life forever and go under the knife.