I am pre-op and need to lose about 175 lbs. but most of the time I feel like a side show freak. I can hardly walk and take care of daily tasks is becoming harder each day. But the thing that bothers me is the aloneness I feel. I love this board and my other support board. I know you can't really understand until you alk in a persons shoes. But it would be so nice if people had more compassion and less judgemental feelings for the obese. If I had any other kind of handicapping dieases people would look at me in a whole different light. Ok, sorry to vent. Thanks for all the support each and everyone of you give to this board. God bless, Donna(preop Punkin')

Feeling like a side show freak is one of the reasons why my doctor put me on Zoloft...back in 2002 I needed to lose 200 pounds and over a period of one year I lost 120 pounds on Weight Watchers....then my mother had a heart attack, I got married, and the weight started piling on....now I'm in 2005, my mother died last year (it'll be one-year on tomorrow), still have my hubby, but have gained 100 pounds back that I've lost....

I was placed on Zoloft back in 2003 because I was diagosed with post tramatic stress/depression...I was (and still am) harder on myself than anyone else can be, and when I started gaining weight, well that was the straw that broke the camel's back...

When my mother died in 2004 at age 55, it made me take a LONG look at my life...she was overweight, I'm overweight....I need to do something about this before it gets too late...so I started the process for RNY, my insurance denied me 3 times, then I found out about Dr. Spivak and the Lapband, attended one of his information sessions, and was hooked...the Lapband is for me, but I wasn't about to goto Mexico to have it done (actually my supervisor is Mexican and she told me that if she had the choice she would go with a doctor in the US) so I've taken out a loan, and I'm scheduled for Lapband placement on June 28th...

Praise God!!!

Paulap

I don't feel like a freak, I am one. Being overweight is just one of my freak problems. I'm too tall (6 ft in heels.) I have huge 11 1/2 feet, so I can't find shoes. I have frizzy hair, an alcoholic father, a paranoid schitzophrenic mother, I'm 100% Polish, never got to have babies, etc. And while everything about me is huge, I have teeny tiny boobs (ha ha on me.)

However, none of those things bother me worse than my anxiety disorder. I could handle all the problems if I could just get some sleep and relax once in awhile. It's not the "being fat" that bothers me as much as the way my brain messes with me. Does that make an ounce of sense?

Sorry to hear about the boobs. I feel like a freak when I'm around young children. When I walk thru my daughters daycare they look up at me with a look of "don't fall on me"!

Oh Delarla, do we have that in common, too. I too suffer from anxiety disorder and can't ever sleep. Most nights I only get 3-4 hrs rough sleep. So the being exhausted and trying to raise three kids and have a full time job is a bit overwhelming at times. I have to take Ambien to sleep, but I think I'm getting addicted to the stuff, so I've been trying to go to sleep on my own this week, but it isn't working.

Well, at least we have our humor! Afraid the kids will think, "don't fall on me" now that's damn funny.

A girl asked me where I got my boots. I told her from the World's Largest Shoe store in Pennsylvania. She said, "don't you mean the Shoe Store for the World's Largest Feet?"

Sometimes all we can do is laugh.

Estela, and anyone else who has trouble sleeping, have you tried melatonin? That stuff is the bomb. I love it, and now Trader Joe's has chewables!!

I sleep wonderfully now.

Melatonin keeps me awake. I think people with anxiety disorder get reverse actions to a lot of meds, at least I do.

Ok Jack

Tell us how she cured you in about 30 minutes. Maybe I could hook up with this Jamaican person and get cured also. How could you tell us this big long story and then drop us like that!

Eileen

oops! I meant 30 seconds - I didn't mean to over exxagerate the length of your therapy!

I used to feel like a freak, didn't help that my mther and younger sister used to describe me as looking like a circus freak, especially when I was breast feeding. They told me that if I'd ever had another baby that they would have tried to discourage me from breastfeeding the new baby.

Wolves, the lot of them.

The only time I feel like a freak is in the bedroom. LOL