Day 18: I Have a Confession to Make

Dear Blog,

I haven’t told you the whole truth and this won’t work unless I’m 100% honest. I need to get this off my chest and clear my conscious.

Back during the pre-diet posts and on the About page I told you I wanted to half my body weight to lose weight, feel better; to improve my health and get fitter to and while all that is true it’s not exactly my main motivation.

The truth is I need to have surgery. A hysterectomy in fact. And I am petrified of dying on the operating table and so am trying to lower my surgical risk to as low as possible, as quickly as possible.

You might be thinking “a hysterectomy at 29, that seems a bit drastic, why do you need that?” Well without going into too much of the ins and out of my medical history, I have a cyst on my ovary that was being monitored and during a scan it was noticed that the lining of my womb was unusually thick and so they took a biopsy.

The biopsy showed a “complex atypical endometrial hyperplasia” but wasn’t itself cancerous, however, my oncologist has told me “4 to 6 people with my test results will have cancer elsewhere in the womb, […] usually grade 1, stage 1 […] however the only way to diagnose is by removing a complete section of uterus”.

I was told the best treatment option was to have a hysterectomy so they can determine if there is any cancer, if there is it would hopefully treat it all, if not possible chemotherapy and radiotherapy would be needed to get any remaining cancer cells, however if there isn’t any cancer then they would still do the hysterectomy as treatment for the unusually thick womb lining and to prevent the hyperplasia turning into cancer. They would remove the ovary with the cyst as a minimum at the same time.

There is another treatment option that involves thinning the lining on my womb, inserting two coils and having drug hormone treatment. However this would be temporary, the thinning surgery would be need to be repeated every 6 months or so and It wouldn’t necessarily address the cancer, it could in fact accelerate its growth.

It’s been a really hard decision to make, but I am 95% sure I will be having the hysterectomy. It’s brought up a lot of questions and emotions. Things I haven’t wanted to deal with have been at the forefront of my mind constantly. Having a menopause at 29, the risks of HRT, how I will have a family, finding out how people really view you, realising I haven’t got any more time to waste when it comes to losing weight…

My consultant said he would want to get things moving in the next month or so. That was a month to make my decision, have an anaesthetic assessment and lose as much weight as possible.

They say people who are the most successful have had some sort of wake up call, and with us fat people it’s usually something medical. Either to ourselves or to someone close to us. I’ve been dieting on and off for as long as I can remember. It’s some of my earliest memories. I remember seeing a paediatric dietician when I was about 10 and like all the diets that would follow for the next 20 years I started out really well before falling back into old bad habits and regaining more than I started with.

Over the years I’ve mostly done Slimming World as it’s spoken to my big appetite, plus it’s always what my Mum has done so it’s been easy to do at home. That said I’ve tried all sorts, I even talked my Mum into buying some patches once, they were supposedly appetite suppressants mixed with fat burners if I remember rightly, I think they were just plasters! In total over the years I’ve probably lost at least 20 stone, and regained it all back with more on top.

They say madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. With that said I realise doing thing Very Low Calorie, Total Food Replacement Diet is both drastic and not long term. I’m using it to both boost and kick start my weight loss and path to a healthier life, but also because I cannot be safely operated on with a BMI over 50.

I don’t know what the cut off point is, I don’t know what they consider safe, but for me personally I will start to be slightly less terrified when my BMI is out of the 50s. It is currently 52.91 for it to be 49 I need to lose another 1st 12lbs; 26lbs; 11.7kg. Don’t get me wrong, that is in no way my target or even an interim target, but I think any weight I can lose reduces my risk during the operation.

I need to start looking ahead to what I am going to do beyond this TFRD and what plan I will follow to get me all the way to target, do I go back to old faithful with Slimming World? Do I cut carbs completely and do a Keto plan? Should I maybe carb cycle? Or just eat what I want and just make sure I stick to a calorie deficit. There is so much misinformation out there and I like to think I know quite a lot, especially knowing a lot of the bullshit, but I want to make the best decision for my body and my health. I know whichever one I choose I will lose weight, I just want to make sure that it’s sustainable, safe, healthy and something that doesn’t make me miserable. I’ll talk more about this in a post nearer the end of my plan.

So there it is. This is much more meaningful and much more urgent than I had previously let on. I’m not really sure why I didn’t let on before. Maybe I didn’t want to belong to that catchword of being “scared” into losing weight, or maybe I don’t want to be seen as weak and damaged when that’s how I feel, but I would hope that no matter the reason started, I could be applauded for trying to improve my health and change my life.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.