Trigger warning: Discussion of weight loss surgery and eating disorders.
So I want to do a little crowdsourcing about weight-loss surgery (WLS). Are you up for that?
There, now I’ll be healthy.
I’ve been interested in the subject a long time, ever since I knew such a thing existed. I remember in 7th grade â€"before I was fat myself â€" reading in the newspaper about a fat woman whose jaw had been wired shut by doctors. The sadomasochistic overtones of this extreme act were both horrifying and fascinating: it was exactly like putting your mouth in jail so it couldn’t commit any more crimes.
The woman had agreed to this treatment (obviously she must have agreed to it), but equally obviously there was an aspect of punishment and public humiliation to it. In my daily life back then, I knew only two really fat women: my neighbor and my scary-strict language-arts teacher. When the teacher went on leave in the second half of the school year, I speculated that maybe she was going away to get her jaw wired, and I shared my speculation with other children.
Just before 8th grade started, I was sitting on the floor of the Spanish/French classroom, helping the Spanish teacher organize her new teaching materials, when the language-arts teacher suddenly appeared in the classroom doorway. She was no longer fat, but just average-plump as any middle-aged woman might be.
Once she was gone, I asked the Spanish teacher, “Why did she go on leave?” She and I had a good relationship, but I was certain she would never reveal information about a fellow teacher to a child. Still, the apparition had been so startling that I couldn’t resist saying something. The Spanish teacher paused a long time: “Well….” In her face I could see her rapid ethical calculations. “Did you notice anything different about her?” So I was right, I was right! Something drastic, something deservedly drastic, had been done to the monstrous language-arts teacher.
In three years I would begin to consider myself fat, and an era of heroic secret attempts at self-starvation would begin. For the first four years these efforts failed. Why couldn’t I stop eating long enough to be thin? If only there was a way to enforce the true desires of my best self upon my recalcitrant will! If I could, like Odysseus, have myself tied to the mast, with instructions to ignore all subsequent commands for release. To decide at Time A to render myself powerless to make the opposite decision at Time B.
Just before my senior year of high school started, in 1978, I had a vivid dream of a post-apocalyptic world in which I was being chained up in a line with other slaves. In my sleep, I rejoiced: slaves didn’t stay fat! I could worry about escaping once I was thin again. FYI, not that this should make any difference, but I weighed about 140 pounds â€" at 5’6″ â€" when I had this dream.
Awake, I pondered the paradox: I yearned to be a strong-willed person in control of her own body, yet the best self-improvement technique I could imagine involved renouncing the freedom to satisfy my appetite.
The harder I tried to be thin, the more I fattened. I finished out my teenage years as a fat anorexic, though that certainly wasn’t how I thought of it at the time. I thought I had somehow turned into a secret glutton. How I think now: there are part-time anorexics, wannabe anorexics, failed or temporarily successful conventional dieters â€" it’s all just different points along the same misguided spectrum of food shame, food restriction, body shame, and the pursuit of thin privilege.
During those years I saw occasional media references to the new technique of “stomach stapling.” The idea was queasy-making for me, even worse than the jaw-wiring. I thought at the time, and I still think now, that even if we make the assumption that it’s good to control food intake, the digestive organs are a dangerous site at which to exert that control. Essentially, surgeries like these remove anorexia and bulimia from the behavioral realm, and enforce it at an anatomical level instead â€" generally permanently.
How can it ever be a good idea to deliberately damage the functionality of healthy digestive organs? In 1983, I read shadow on a tightrope, which included a few first-person stories by women who had had either gastric or intestinal bypass operations. The pain and side effects they described were horrific. I could hardly stand to think about it.
Three decades later, I figure I’m just about grownup enough now to enter the global intellectual conversation about weight-loss surgery, though both the specific techniques and the prevalence of WLS have changed in that time. Last year I co-wrote an article with a team of Norwegian researchers who were interviewing gastric-bypass patients about their experiences following surgery. What’s next?
Over the course of my own life, I’ve felt both a visceral revulsion at the concept of weight-loss surgery and also a visceral understanding of its attractive logic. I think having had this range of feelings is useful; feelings are relevant, necessary even, when we’re debating the wisdom of cultural values and practices. Some questions (e.g., Does technique X produce lasting weight loss?) are purely empirical. But others (e.g., Should technique X be used?) have both empirical and moral components. And how could you grapple with questions that involve a moral component without making value judgments?
But we still need data; feelings alone aren’t enough. Currently my Norwegian writing buddy is continuing to study the personal narratives of post-surgical patients. The patient success stories featured on the websites of for-profit clinics are glowing and happy, of course, but it would be silly to imagine that they’re typical. Does anyone out there in FFF-land know of, or know how to find, the Norwegian equivalent of WLS-survivor groups that would provide stories from the other end of the spectrum? Or, more generally, where would you start networking or what would you read if you were attempting to grapple with the question of what constitutes a typical post-WLS experience and how many WLS patients get an average result, as opposed to fairy-tale happiness or sheer horror?
Filed under: DT, ED, FH, FP, FS, MBL, Terrible Tuesday, WL, WLS
- Repost by plussizesstyle.blogspot.com - Original post::http://fiercefatties.com/2014/12/02/why-im-looking-for-wls-narratives-especially-but-not-only-norwegian/
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