I did this: I called a lady in Mexicali Mexico who made an appointment for me to come to a Mexican Hospital I had never seen, by myself, and get my stomach cut out under anesthesia and then I came home and I am still not dead.
I still can't quite get my head around my behavior. I spent from about January to March mulling it over but I can't say I really researched it. I didn't have insurance and was not going to get any and I was so fat, and I was truly at the end of something, some rope, some road.
My normal non-desperate self is, first of all, terrified to fly. I was just recently married to someone who was very keen on outlining how Mexico was falling apart and becoming an anarchic apocalyptic state. I am the woman who spends money on everybody else and not herself because frankly what difference does it make in the end? We all end up in pineboxes feeding the ecosystem, right? So who cares if you're fat, you're just an average human borg-ant marching around, what kind of hideous, vain, self-centered, irresponsible, recklesss, banana are you anyway?
So what I sort of had to do is not let the woman in the previous paragraph know what I was doing. I had to just shut the whole system down, all of it, anything and anyone who was going to tell me not to do it. This included: my family, the insurance borg, my ex-husband, and the rest of patriarchy and my own neurotic fear-stricken personality. I had to sneak around behind my own back. Because you know what the neurotic parts of your personality do with a thing like this. Hellfire. Volcanoes exploding. A crater appears in the hospital bed where you used to be. Your legs *fall off*. Etc.
I knew I wasn't gonna die. Everybody: you are not going to die. Fine, this is the most momentous, earthshattering medical decision you have probably ever made, but look on the other side of the operating table: the guy who is going to cut you open is *not* afraid you're going to die. He would not be doing it if he thought you were going to die, just from the malpractice alone it's a bad idea to kill people.
And I finally figured -- life is just not that easy. If I developed later complications no way in hell was I going to get off with just a checkout card from God, no way, I'd get *saved* and then be harnessed with a trillion dollar medical bill I'd running from for the rest of my life. And I also at one point looked all of this right in its smarmy, ratty little face and thought, can it really be worse than everything I've been through in the past five years? I think not.
It's almost three weeks later and I am still amazed at myself. I am not sure if I was desperate or if I was finished or if I just wanted a vacation or what. But I really did this. It was almost like I was doing something I had forgotten to do years ago. Reorganize the hall closet. Reallocate the 401K. Steamclean the couch. Get your stomach cut out.
One more week and I'll be a full human again who can eat food and order in restaurants. What a strange, strange, little known fact about myself.
