A Little About Q

My name is Sharon Quinones, AKA Q. I am 40 years old and am overweight. Correction, according to the medical world I am morbidly obese. Morbid - like deathly obese. As if being fat wasn't enough, I am deathly obese. Hmm, now I get that I am too fat for my own good but morbid seems like such a stretch because at my fattest, I have never had diabetes, high blood pressure, bad cholesterol, etc.

In 2004, my dentist located a goiter in my neck. I went in for a routine teeth cleaning and she said she felt a lump in my throat that I should get checked out. I left her office and went straight to my PCP's office. He laughed it off that she could not possibly know what she was talking about. I had really good insurance so I asked him to humor me and send me for a sonogram or something to prove or disprove what in fact it was. The goiter was quite large and the surgeon suggested that it was so big because it was overcompensating for my thyroid not working properly. What bothered me is suddenly there is this rush to get me into surgery to remove it but nobody is concerned about my thyroid. I put the brakes on the surgery and immediately found an Endocrinologist. Oh the needle biopsy I had gave a false negative and for a year I walked around with cancer growing my body.

My Endocrinologist, Dr. Robert Feferman, was God sent! Finally someone listened to my reasoning and actually was concerned with dealing with the initial problem of my thyroid not working properly. I was diagnosed not only with hypothyroidism but also PCOS. Once we got my thyroid meds under control I finally decided in 2005 to have the goiter removed, after which I discovered that it was in fact papillary carcinoma.

I had seen others having gastric bypass and lap band and remember thinking to myself what a loser to have to have surgery to lose weight. I shook my head even more at the ones who would gain weight just to get approved for a surgery to lose weight. I thought I would never be that desperate. Never say never right?

Ugh, this is the part I hate about trying to write. My thoughts are all over the place...I suppose I need to rewind a bit...For years I weighed 169 and was a size 16 in some things and a 18 in others. Bigger than what I wanted to be but I carried it well. Then it was like one day I was sitting on the bed in shorts and looked over in the mirror and was thoroughly grossed out by how big my thighs looked in the mirror. I go to weigh and jeesh, I had gained a 100 lbs. What the hell had happened? I was in size 22s.

I know I'm a good person with a good heart and all but suddenly the only thing I could see when I looked at me was fat and a lot of it. Within a few months I was about the same weight but pushing a size 22/24. Oh but then those were tight and lo and behold I was almost 300 lbs. I decided I had watched several people have success over the past year with lap band and suddenly I was just desperate enough to have it.

At the end of 2006 I began jumping through hoops with Cigna to get approved. On July 2, 2007, I had my surgery. It was like I could hear the birds chirping and the angels singing. I would lose a bunch of weight and be so hot and oh yeah, I was going to end my friendship with that bitch Lane Bryant because I was not going to be a fat chic anymore. Oh, the morning of my surgery I weighed in at 316.6 lbs. Where the hell was I hiding all of that. The number alone would make you think Oprah would need to come knock out a wall and have me lifted my crane on a flat bed truck to rush me to the hospital, right?

Don't get me wrong, lap band can be successful for some but it has not been the life changing experience I thought it would be. I cannot credit any weight loss I had over the past 4.5 years to it. As a matter of fact I have had nothing but problems with it. It has slipped no less that 6 times every time it reaches the point of being half full. I have thrown up more with the lap band that I have my entire life; oh and the sliming...seriously gross! I do have to say that at one point I did manag to get down to 233 lbs and into a size 14/16 and honey you couldn't tell me I wasn't fine and on the road to becoming even finer. I did this by watching my portions and not eating after 6pm and I joined a TOPS group. Several months later the band would slip again and TRUE Results did not seem concerned with giving me an EGD or sending me to a specialist to find out why this keeps happening so I set off on my own.

Every where I turned, be it to coworkers, my gynecologist, a bill board, the news, one name kept surfacing....Dr. David Kim of Colleyville. I met with him in October of 2010 and decided I was on the way to battling Aetna to get approved to at the very least, have the lap band removed but possibly have a revision done to the gastric sleeve.

Tonight as I type this post, I weigh in at 290 lbs. I've been approved to have the revision done and so begins my journey. I entitled this blog "Once upon a time there was a fat chic named Q" for two reasons:

1. I hope this is the beginning to a new life for me. A life that is healthier and skinnier.
2. No matter how good of a person I know myself to be, once again fat is all I see. Right now, fat defines me. I know it should not be that way but it is what it is.

I write this blog in hopes of maybe helping someone else understand the process. I write it so that I can express my feelings instead of bottling them up. I write it so as I hopefully shed pounds, I can shed a lot of negative self talk that has come with the pounds. I write it with the biggest hope of finding Q and being completely in love with her.

This is a big step for me. I don't tell anyone what I weigh and now I'm telling the world...well whoever happens upon this blog. This is the Diary of a Fat Chic....