Can I Sit Here?

Have you ever been the "new kid?" What about the "outcast?" Think back to how you felt when you walked up and down the school lunch room watching those people you wanted to be your friends eat their Wonder Bread sandwiches, with their Jello pudding cups, and cans of Pepsi. How long did it take you to work up the nerve to ask, in your quietest child's voice, "Can I sit here?"

I never did. I never had the self esteem necessary to be so bold. I'm sure that sentence surprises the people who know the 2009-34 year old me, but I would rather (and often did) eat my lunch alone than to ever speak up. It would have been too embarrassing to be turned down.

I remember how it felt to get on the school bus. "Is this seat taken?" I would ask almost in a scared silent whisper.

I look back now and I wonder what the hell I was so scared about. I was thin. I was pretty. I was just as funny then as I am now, but perhaps less crude. I was not popular but I didn't need to be. It was just a bus seat, right?

Today, right this very minute, I'm sitting in Barnes and Noble waiting for my husband to call to say he's done working so we can, yep you guessed it, go out to dinner.

I brought in my laptop, accessed the free Wi-Fi and looked quizzically at the little bistro chair. In my head I was that shy little kid all over again: "Can I sit here?"

I didn't have to ask anyone. The table was mine and mine alone. I didn't have to ask a soul if I could share a table. I was inquiring more about whether or not this chair would hold my fat ass.

That's what it's like to be morbidly obese. We worry more and more about where we sit than almost anything else in life. I would just about die if this chair were to crash under the stress of my weight. So far, it's holding me. It's wobbly but I haven't been sent crashing down yet. However, it is creaking.

And the chair is NOT comfortable. My ass is wider than the seat. My legs have to hold most of the weight. My right thigh is shaking from the weight it is bearing. I'm petrified to move an inch in fear that I may hit the deck.

My back is killing me. I'm miserable. Yet, somehow, according to the people around me and maybe even you, the reader, I'm not miserable enough or else I would have done something about my weight by now.

How, as a morbidly obese person, do you respond to those who feel that obviously you don't want it bad enough or else you would quit your bitching and get moving? If it were that easy everyone would look like Kate Moss.

My story is probably not very similar to yours. I was a thin teenager, until the age of 17. It was then I began to gain weight without explanation. I had always had problems with my periods, when I ever had them. Not to mention I "became a woman" before I even entered Junior High School. My "female" life sucked and sucked royally.

After many doctors, different brands of birth control, hair growth in places that only men should grow hair, and losing the hair on my head did I find a doctor who listened to me. I will never, as long as I live, ever forget sitting in the exam room of the Physician Office Center, part of Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, West Virginia when Dr. Mark Gibson, MD gave me my diagnosis: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS).

At first it was a relief. Prior to this diagnosis I was told that my symptoms pointed to one of two things: PCOS or Cushings Disease. I remember him saying that Cushings Disease could be fatal and to hope it was PCOS. When he told me I have PCOS, I didn't fully understand the vast way that it would affect my life, but I knew I would have a life to live. I wasn't dying from Cushings. Life was good.

PCOS is a condition where the female reproductive system produces too much androgen and testosterone. My reproductive organs require more insulin to function than the rest of my body. Thus I'm considered an Insulin Resistant PCOS (IR PCOS) patient. What happens when your pancreas makes considerably more insulin for only one organ to use, thus leaving a lot extra floating in your body? It gets stored as fat. Big ugly fat.

There are ways to manage PCOS. It can not be cured. PCOS led to the loss of my "girlie figure" and no matter how badly I want to blame my current status on it, PCOS did not cause me to gain over 200 pounds. I will discuss PCOS more indepth in later chapters. What I will say here is that while I can no longer allow myself to blame my current situation on my diagnosis, I will say that PCOS girls have a tendency to hold onto weight once it is gained, thus making any significant weight loss a very slow process.

I guess I should tell you a little bit about me so you can understand what I'm talking about. I'm five feet tall on a big hair day and each and every day my knees, ankles, and back carry around (*GULP* I can't believe I'm about to type this in a public forum) 325 pounds as of my last weigh in.

The night I weighed myself, I remember telling my mom how my husband gave me the bad news. She told me I am brave for allowing my husband to know exactly how much I weigh. There was no bravery about it. I didn't have a choice. I wanted to know my weight and I couldn't see the scale. It was either have him read it when the numbers popped up or else try to guesstimate when I should hop off the scale and still have my weight on the screen.

There's no bravery in writing this blook either. But there is shame. Tons and tons of shame. I need to save my life, I need to be held accountable and if broadcasting to the world that my name is Allison and at five feet zero inches tall, I weigh 325 pounds and have a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 63.5% helps me save my life then so be it.

So, as I close this entry from Barnes and Noble, I will leave you with the words of a card that is on a stand right in front of me. For the last hour I have been reading it over and over again. "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined." Henry David Thoreau.

From your quote to God's ears, Henry.