About eight months ago my weight hung around three hundred pounds like un wanted company. I checked my food intake, looked at my card to see if I was green. I had my last fill in Feb. 2008. I had great restriction and felt like I finally hit my sweet spot.

Long spaces of time between meals, not even thinking about food, obsessing about food is more like it. That was gone. Drinking my meals, gone. Gulping food, gone. I had retrained myself successfully but each time I tried to do the rest of it, the working the body to strengthen it I got nothing but pain. The more weight I lost, the greater the pain.

This wasn't part of the bargain, sure, my knees stopped hurting, my feet stopped hurting, no more diabetes medication, no more snoring. This part I had hoped for but the pain. It radiated down my spine. It shot down my right leg. I felt stabbing pains in my groin and lower stomach. The more I walked the worse it got. The only thing that gave it remedy was bed rest. My life was work and then going to bed. It was easy to see why my weight had slowed up.

It took getting caught at work not being where I should have been because the distance required walking was too much, and having my boss sit me down and confronting me to force me to confront the pain. What the truth was and is remains. That I have lost over eighty pounds, over fifty since being banded, and despite have good restriction and food control I am unable to walk any distance or stand longer than five minutes.

I stepped back from focusing on the scale and focused on cause. I started with my doctor who ordered an MRI of the area most disturbing. It came back and there was part of it:

arthristis, bulging disc, compressed vertabrae, scoliosis.

My lower spine was a mess. To keep me working, I cannot afford to stop working, I was placed on morphine and it helped slightly.

In late November I went to the Cleveland Clinic in Weston, Florida. A second MRI was done, a CT Scan of my abdomen, revealed the beautiful band Dr. Kirshenbaum had inserted was exactly where it was suppose to be. My band was fine.

I had a hiatel hernia though. I had a hernia filled with fat in my stomach near my navel. This will need to be repaired when they do the surgery to remove the skin that is becoming part of the problem. I will need a lower body lift. My stomach had gotten so large and now that it was shrinking, my body was redistributing the weight and it was pulling higher up on my spine. In that location where I had the most stress from my stomach, the spine slides out of place. The nickname is SPONDY and the long name is two other versions of SPONDY that I was diagnosed with also in my cervical spine.

The next test will be a CT Scan of my entire spine. Now that they found one, two maybe three or four sources of the pain, no one is stopping the doctors.

This next year will be filled with rehab. Physical and Occupational. When I get over this hump I have the vision of a better life, the same vision that got me started.

Onward I go...