My Journey Has Begun!!

I've done it! I have come up with a decision that will life-changing! I have decided to have weight-loss surgery!!!!

I know what you may be thinking... but it is decided and I have no intentions on changing my mind. My parents have been suggesting it to me for years, but at that time I figured it would be to hard and that it didn't seem worth my efforts. I didn't see the point in trying to fight a losing battle.

Weight has always been an issue for me; in the 8th grade I weighted a whopping 280 lbs, and I remained large until my dad was given custody of my sisters and I. Once we moved in with him he decided to put all of us on the Atkins Diet. Eating no carbs and having almost 3 hours of gym class everyday seemed to work wonders, and after a year I lost 80 pounds!

Unfortunately that success didn't last very long, and by the time I was a senior in high school I no longer stuck to the Atkins plan and I started slowly inching my way back up in the pounds. Then add 1 year of a deep depression due to a bad and very lonely relationship, and a person that is a comfort eater, and you get the perfect ingredients for Super Morbid Obesity.

Sadly it only took me that 1 year to gain over 200 lbs.

I have maintained the same deathly weight for 3 years now. And I am not going to lie. I has to the point where I didn't want to try to lose the weight. I thought it was to hard, and that I was to close to dieing to even really try. It took me 1 year to gain it, but it was going to take me a life time to lose it, and keep it off, and I didn't want to put the work in.

Then in June of this year I woke up one morning and finally looked at myself in the mirror. I had been avoiding mirrors for the past 6 years and the image I saw broke me... I saw only a shell of the person I used to be. I looked in my eyes and i saw myself disappearing. I realized then that I have changed. I was letting my weight take over who I was as a person and I didn't like it one bit. I missed the girl I was 6 years ago.

It was the moment that I decided I was going to do whatever it took to bring myself back. I instantly started to look online for solutions and started researching surgeries. I applied to go to a informational seminar and I called my parents and told them what I was planning. The joy I heard on the other end of the phone was enough to bring tears to my eyes. I knew my weight affected my family; I knew they all worried about my health, but that was the first time it actually hit me. I wanted to make my family proud of me, but most of all I want to make myself proud.

It took me 6 years to realize that my life is worth fighting for. And I am going to do it!

I have already had my first month of weight management with my primary care doctor, and I have had a consultation with my future surgeon. I am working towards getting Gastric Bypass the beginning of next year. The struggle is going to be hard, but I am going to pull through.

At the end of my struggle I am not going to win money like they do on the biggest loser, I' m not going to be a super model or a sex goddess, but I will get to live a full long life in good health... And to me that is the best prize of all!

Wish me luck!

UGHH IT'S HOT

This morning the radio was reporting that it is supposed to be in the hundreds today. Us Marylanders like to call days like today HOT AS BALLS. See Maryland is one of those lucky states where we get to experience every season; we get the colored falling leaves in the Fall, snow in Winter, plenty of green and flowers in our rainy Springs, and the heat in the Summer. But this year so far we seem to be getting the extremes. In February we had 2 blizzards in a week, and we were buried in around 5 feet of snow for what seemed like an entire month. Then in May we had non-stop rain, and now we are only in the first month of Summer and we are already peaking at over 100 degrees! While driving down the road I decided to go ahead and check the temperature to see if the radio was right and turns out it was... a whopping 104! Damn, I wasn't aware that I was living in Hell! Mother Earth please bring back the lovely high 80s!!!

Happy 4th!

Well Jenna stayed at her boyfriend Bob’s house last night, so I had the house to myself. I had plans to wake up pretty early, since it was my first day off of work in a week, but I failed at that plan and ended up sleeping in until after noon. Even though I woke up late I still felt pretty accomplished; I did some laundry, cooked and ate lunch, watched How To Lose a Guy In 10 Days, got showered and dressed, and then went to Bob’s house for a cook out. It was my first time meeting his Dad and his brother Chris, who is home from the Air Force Academy until Friday. We all played Corn Hole (A game where you have to throw bean bags onto a platform with a hole in it. To score points the bag has to land on the platform for 1 point and if it goes in the hole its 3 points.) Then we watched some of Inglorious Bastards. The movie seemed really awesome, but they had more guests show up at the house so we ended up turning it off right before the bat scene :(.

The food there was pretty delicious; we ate shrimp and ribs, and had some really awesome sides. When the sun went down we all went out front to the cul-de-sac. Some of their neighbors came out and set off their MD approved ground fireworks. They were pretty, but it seemed like they had about 50 of the exact same firework going off. Luckily Bob and Chris road tripped to PA to buy some fireworks that are illegal in MD. The mortar fireworks they got are by far my favorites. I love how you can feel them when they shot off... and the fact that they are in the sky, huge, and awesome doesn't hurt either lol. All in all it was a really fun day. I’m really glad we went there. Next year his mom suggested we all go to DC to watch the fireworks. That should be a pretty awesome show to see. I hope you all had a great 4th too!

He Always Takes The Good Ones...

My family moved to the Annapolis, MD area almost 10 years ago. It was the second move since my dad was given custody of my sisters and I, and we moved into a quiet waterfront community right off of the Chesapeake Bay. Since I didn't have any friends in the area; I spent my time hanging out with my sisters and walking our dog down to the beach. It was on one of those walks where I met Ajay. He lived in the neighborhood too and was in the same grade as I was. Ajay and I hit it off really well quickly, and it was through Ajay that I met my other future best friends Brian and Kenny. Since Ajay already accepted me in the group neither of the other two really had a problem taking me in under their wing, and I ended up hanging out with the three of them everyday, and we all became very close.

Over time our group changed some and Kenny and I grew much closer. Not only were we spending time together in school, but we were spending all our time out of school together too. I honestly started to get a major crush on him; he was so funny, and when I was around him I couldn't help but smile. At this time in my life I was very self-conscious because I was always the "fat kid" in school; so even though I was pretty much in love with Kenny I never told him. I just sat on the sidelines and watched him date girls that weren't right for him.

After we all graduated High School I met Rocky and moved out of my neighborhood and into an apartment with him. The apartment was about 30 minutes away from my old neighborhood, and being as I was the only one out of them that had a car, I didn't really see them all to much. The only one I really kept in touch with was Kenny, and after a while Kenny started hanging at our apartment with us all the time. I would pick Kenny up and he would stay with us for weekends here and there. Rocky really didn't mind that much because out of all of my friends Kenny and him had the most in common; they would talk about fishing and hunting all day long, and never run out of things to say.

On the surface Kenny seemed like he was a happy person, but the people that knew him, knew that deep down he was very troubled. He had many issues that I couldn't help him with, and unfortunately he turned to hardcore drugs as a way of cooping with his pain. I honestly believe that it was because of his drug addictions that Rocky also didn't mind him always being at our place. When he was with us he was clean; so I tried to keep him at my place as much as possible.

I remember one night in particular; I had a about 7 friends stay the night and party at the apartment. Kenny was always the first one to pass out when everyone would drink and around 5 am everyone else would join him. I on the other hand can usually never sleep when I have people over (thanks a lot anxiety), and about the time everyone fell asleep Kenny woke up. So that morning it was just the two of us. He sat there and we talked about all kinds of things. Then he looked at me and told me that Rocky was a lucky guy. That he wished he could meet a girl like me. It was then that I told him how I had a crush on him since I basically became friends with him. I told him that I would have dated him in a heartbeat and that if I was ever going to cheat on Rocky (which is something I would normally never do) it would be with him. I told him that I loved him and that he means the world to me. And to that he just looked at me and gave his smile that could always make me melt and said that I should have said something earlier. He gave me a hug and then told me that he could tell Rocky loved me and that we had something special, and that he was happy for the both of us.

Three years ago today I received a call from my friend Trisha. She was in tears and hysterical. As soon as I answered I could feel something was wrong. So I asked her, and she told me that she just heard that Kenny was found in his bed that morning dead. I couldn't believe what she was telling me. I had just seen him a few days before and she had to be lying. I was in complete shock. She told me that he died from a heroin overdose, and there was nothing anyone could do by the time they found him. My heart crumbled. I knew that people die young every day, but I never in a million years imagined that it would happen to someone that I knew, and that was so close to me. And the thing that hurt the most was that at the time he was telling me that he was staying clean, that he was going to his N.A. meetings, and that it was helping him.

I didn't understand, and I was so angry with him for leaving us. I still to this day don't know why it happened; why it was that he had to die. He was so young... he was only a month away from his 21st birthday and we had plans to go out and go bar hopping. He had plans with Rocky and I to go camping with us that Summer, to go hunting with Rocky that Fall, he just had so much in life that he still had to do; but now he was gone. After he passed I had to unfortunately cut down on my friends. The guys that I hung out with were still doing drugs, and I honestly couldn't live through losing another person so close to me over something as stupid as drugs. I wish there was more that I could have done for him while he was alive to help him with his pain, but at least I know that the last thing I said to him was that I loved him. And now looking back it is surprising how much a memory is built off of things that went unnoticed at the time. I miss him every single day, and I have never and will never stop loving him.

Rest in Peace Kenny Potter

August 7th 1986 - July 2nd 2007

"There's heroes and there's legends. Heroes get remembered but legends never die." - The Sandlot