*I'M BACK + BIG UPDATE* - My Story (16st gone + pics!!)

Wow cookie what an amazing transformation. Definitely encourages me to stick at it :)
 
Your progress and story has been fantastic. What an inspiration.

Julie
 
well done you!
 
lovely to read
 
Well done cookie12 you look great!! All your hard work really paid off :p
 
Absolutely amazing. You should be SO proud of achieving such a weight loss. I hope all goes well for your surgery xx
 
[FONT=&amp] Hi Everyone,[/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]Blast from the past here [/FONT]:D

[FONT=&amp]Firstly, thank you to everyone since I’ve last logged on for all the kind messages / congratulations, concern's about my absence and if I’m ok etc. It's very much appreciated!!![/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]Secondly I’ll shall try and give as much as an update as I can without writing a books worth of pages about the last 12 months or so as a lot has gone on.[/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]Right ok, where to start, my last update / post was incredibly back in Dec 2012 (doesn't seem that long ago) when I was still recovering from my abdominoplasty (skin removal from stomach). At that time I was back doing normal things like work etc, but was still not fully fit from the op and the resulting complications like the pressure sore I got whilst in hospital. It took a couple of months to get back to full health and mobility. The scar has healed really nice and looks incredible (pic below) and there are no lasting effects from this and my stomach looks so much better than the saggy skin I had before. The pressure sore has fully healed, however I still have problems in that area, the skin is very very thin and I still get pain there if I sit stationary for a while.[/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]In March 2013 I bit the bullet again and applied to the local NHS authority for skin removal surgery, this time for my chest, and after a lot of jumping through hoops again like the last time (meetings with health professionals, weigh ins etc.) I got the approval and met with my consultant at the start of Oct 2013. I got a bit of a shock during this consultation because unlike the last consultations for my stomach, the surgeon questioned me as to whether or not I was sure I wanted to go ahead with the surgery?? - this was because unlike my stomach, he didn't deem this as a necessary procedure for my health, where with my stomach I had issues with sore skin, sweating etc., I didn't have these issues with my chest, it was purely a body image / making me feel and look better issue and I may not be happy with the results, his exact words were, it won't give you a beech body where you will be happy to take your top off on a beach!!!! - My response was well I won't have bigger boobs than a lot of women out there and I’m happy to live with the scars and the scars will be better for me than what is there now. He said as long I was sure, he was happy for it to go ahead. His original timetable was to complete the surgery sometime in February 2014, so I went away happy that I got the approval from everyone and I could get Christmas and New Year out the way, well so I thought!!! - A few weeks later I got a letter in the post instructing me to arrive at the hospital ward on the 2nd December 2013 for my surgery (WOW). In the space of a few weeks I went from thinking I’ve got a few months to prepare, to having just literally 4 weeks. So I went ahead with the surgery and I had a very interesting time again in hospital. I had my surgery on the day of admission, Monday the 2nd December and that went well, and on Tuesday 3rd I was feeling well and I was already out of bed walking around a little and thinking wow this is a lot better than the abdominoplasty in terms of pain and discomfort. I had two drains in with one coming out of me just under each armpit but again they were nowhere near as uncomfortable as the drains in my groin for the abdominoplasty.

Then on Tuesday night things took a turn for the worse. I went to sleep quite early on (10ish), and just after midnight I woke up with considerable pain on my right side around the sight of the drain going in. I immediately buzzed the nurse and she came to me and I told her what was going on / what I was feeling and she examined me and said to me the right hand side looks more swollen that it was a few hours ago and she'll get the on call Dr to come down and take a look. As the minutes went by I was feeling worse and worse and then the Dr came in, and again I was examined, and he told me he thinks I have a Haematoma (blood collection / clot like). He had contacted his consultant who was on her way. After this I was pretty much out of it and can only remember bits, I believe the consultant arrived and agreed it was a Haematoma and they rushed me down to surgery. I woke up around 3pm Wednesday afternoon in recovery, I was taken back to a different ward and the surgeon came to see me a little while after. She told me I had a really extensive bleed and I had lost 5 pints of blood and the haematoma weighed in at just over 800 grams (2 bags of sugar). I now had an extra drain on my right hand side, which made 3 in total, and a catheter had been inserted as I was expected to be bed bound for a few days. This wasn't the end of the setbacks unfortunately, I had a few issues with one of my drains leaking the day after the emergency surgery, now sometime between that happening and late on in the evening, one of my drains was accidentally clamped off by someone. This basically meant that the blood that needed to be drained out of me wasn't doing so. During that evening the nurse on duty said my drains needed checking and a couple needed replacing as they were full. When he came to me to do these jobs, he spotted the clamped off drain, he went to check in my medical notes to see if there was a reason for this, and asked me about it, to which I said nothing has been said to me about it. He said there was no reason for this to be clamped off and so the clamp was removed. Immediately after doing so a quite extensive large amount of blood came rushing out into the drain bottle, this knocked me sick like you wouldn't believe and I started shaking and I felt all cold down the right hand side of my body. So again the emergency Dr was called out, but thankfully this time no lasting damage was done and within the space of an hour I was ok again and the Dr just said my body was shocked by that amount of blood being pushed out so fast. So after all this I was bed bound for a total of 4 days and even then I was very weak and needed help to move around for the first day out of my bed, especially with 3 drains and a catheter bag to carry round with me. I was in hospital for a total of 12 days. Since my discharge my recovery has been very quick and I would saying I’m pretty much 90% back to full health already now. I had a small infection on a section of my scar, but a week on antibiotics sorted that out and I still feel a bit stiff and the skin pulls a little during certain movements, but hey I’ve had another big op so it's to be expected.

In terms of everything else I’ve not been great to be honest which is partly why I’ve been in-active on this and many other forums and other social media recently. I've not just been inactive on the computer, I’ve been really struggling personally the last couple of years, well pretty much most of my life as many people will probably relate to who have had weight issues but things have really gone bad the last couple of years. This is a 15-16 year long story so I’ll try and summarise it as best I can. Again a lot of people will probably relate to some of this but I struggled with a lot of things in my school years, I struggled to fit in with people, struggled with the girls because they wouldn't look at me twice with being so overweight, didn't know what to do in life and so on. Between leaving school and when I decided to lose weight, I piled more and more weight on and became more and more reclusive, to the point where pretty much the only social interaction I had was at work, and even there I hid my true feelings from everyone and hid behind humor. Then when I took the decision to change things (my original post) I thought losing my weight wouldn't just sort out my physical health and appearance but it would help sort out other aspects of my life, like friendships and finding a girlfriend and of course my life in general.

In fact what I found was it had the exact opposite effect on me, I became even more socially awkward / shy / scared and I just generally spiraled downwards to the point where I was depressed and didn't know what to do. In my mind I was still morbidly obese and unable to do things and still thought people would instantly think negatively of me and of course I had the loose skin issues until recently. I had one outlet to talk to someone who I felt comfortable with and that was a work colleague and she was so amazing and tried to help me all she could but it got the point where I think she didn't know how to help me anymore or was frightened of giving me the wrong advice and she backed off a bit, which I totally understand and I think were still on good terms. I spoke to the manager of the whole department about some of the issues I had as I thought it was impacting on my work and I wanted to make her aware (i.e. being truthful), but I don't think I realised how much of an impact it was all having at work because after speaking to her, I think she looked into things a bit more and a couple of weeks later I was called into a meeting where my performance was discussed and I was put on something called the capability policy, although it was informal at this stage. This basically meant my performance from that point would be monitored closely and I was given goals etc and the next few months on this didn't go well (most of this work related stuff is 2013 by the way). Not only was I going through this capability policy stuff but just before I went in for my operation our team was called into a meeting and we were told that we needed to save money and 1 person would need to be made redundant. This of course just instantly made me think it was going to be me because of my performance issues and I tried to struggle through the next few weeks but one day I just basically broke down and my manager sent me home and I went to the Doctors straight away. At this point I was already being treated for depression and attending counselling sessions at work, so I wasn't unknown at the GP practice, but the GP thought maybe something else was going on and he wanted me to get in contact with a group called healthy minds who amongst other things have psychiatrists and an appointment was made to see one, the GP also signed me off work for a month. I went to see the psychiatrist the week before my operation, and I was there for a good few hours telling him the whole story in a lot more detail than I have in this post, the back story of my early years to present day. He instantly said that he believes I have social anxiety disorder, which has then led onto to me developing severe depression. He thinks I’ve had it for a very long time, probably since my teenage years to some degree but it's just become very more apparent since my weight loss and me trying, but failing, to one degree or another to move forward with my life. I'm still currently off work due to this and not my operation and I am due back to work on Monday 27th Jan 2014, which at the moment I am very anxious about as i still have my performance issues to resolve, which I'm scared I might not be upto still.

The last few years have been so amazing in some ways, I had a massive achievement in loosing so much weight on my own without surgical intervention, and I was so privileged to be able to get skin removal surgery on the NHS when we all know many many things on the NHS are a postcode lottery, even cancer drugs, never mind skin removal surgery. But no matter how I look at it, it has also been the hardest period in my life by far, and that is hard to say considering the problems I had in my early life with my weight problems (school for one). My original goal with my weight loss was that I could go on and live a normal life and do normal things that people do like meet new people and have more social interaction, meet someone and settle down with them and maybe have kids one day and just try and be happy!!!

To say the least, so far it hasn't gone to plan, and I’ve even thought that maybe I’d have been better off never losing the weight and stay hidden away, living in ignorance on my own for the rest of my life :cry:As well as the above and some stuff I haven't mentioned, this sort of leads me on to some of the reasons why I moved away from social media / forums and stuff and what really started making things go really wrong with me with regards to my mental health. Now I’m not blaming this website but bear with me when explaining this. I joined this website as a way to celebrate my achievement and to try and get a big confidence boost about everything and try and bring me out of my shell a little and it did, it was really great getting some really nice feedback and people praising me and congratulating me and so on. During this sort of happy period I was going through and my confidence was growing, I saw an advert about getting in contact with talk to the press about weight loss stories and I thought why not. I spoke to someone and they were trying to get me into woman’s own and unfortunately they wanted a woman’s perspective and I was / am single and my mother didn't want to take part so they withdrew their offer. I was then offered to be in the national press and I agreed and this went very very badly. I talked to someone and it went well on face value, talked about my weight loss story on how I did it etc, had some photos taken but at the end of the interview they asked to speak to my girlfriend and I said I’m single, and he then asked have you ever had a girlfriend and I said it's none of your business at that was that. Then to my horror a few days later I got home from work and went onto the internet and saw the articles on the sun and daily mail website (A 30-stone virgin who lost a staggering 16 stone in just 18 months still can't find love because of his saggy skin | Mail Online). Even though some of their assumptions are right, we never discussed / I never said most of the stuff written in these articles and when I tried to get them taken down I was told they would only take them down if every website it was now would as well, this meant me contacted a load of websites and at the end of the day the damage was already done, I was getting a few messages on Facebook, even marriage proposals from south American countries and Asia, which I assume they were trying to use me to get a free pass into the UK or something. [/FONT]

I'm going round in circles a bit now but everything became too much for me and like i stated earlier i had a bit of a breakdown, but things have settled down a bit and i'm trying to sort my life out. I've had a few sessions now with the psychiatrist, who is really good and helps me understand things that are going on in my head a bit better, it's very early days with this but the first couple of sessions have helped. I'm doing cognitive behavioral therapy and i've been given alot of self help books and literature to read. I've also opened up to a few friends i've met recently, a couple being my neighbors believe it or not and i've become very good friends with them, and they have been really supportive with me after i told them everything. Also my psychiatrist has me to get out of my comfort zone a little and start pushing boundaries a bit, this is partly why i've written this monster essay on here. I've put everything into it, and yes it may be to complete strangers, but in a way it will probably let me see how people react to this in an honest way if that makes sense.

For the help i've had from the few people who i've let in so to speak i'm really appriciative to them for helping out, i would like to name them but they not appriciate it, but as above they are my colleague at work who is the only person who has been there from the beginning, and my neighbours over the road, if you read this thanks and lets see what the future brings hey. Oh and thank you to the people on here who have made the nice comments :)

Right, ive got that out the way, lets get to some new photo's!!!!

These are new as of January 2014, for the before photo's see first post





Before and after photo's of skin surgery (something i've been shy of showing before!!!)











and this is me in my pressure garment just after being discharged and the aftermath of the haematoma!!!



and to finish off this is to just try and show how well my scar has healed from the abdominoplasty.




Thanks for reading

Cookie
 
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Wow Cookie Sounds like you've been having a really tough time lately Shame on that newspaper for what they did That would knock anyone's confidence You are such a strong person to get to where you are today and you probably don't even realise it You should be so proud of yourself It's great that you're getting help for your social anxiety It's not an easy thing to live with but I'm sure as you have more counselling things will start to look up :) Best of Luck with it all and keep us updated!
 
What a year!
Thank you for sharing your story. I know that my weight has always been a downer In my life. I am also doing some cbt to cope with what life has/is throwing at me! You have come so far and will carry on going far!
 
Wow!!! *VERY* well done. You look very well! x
 
You really have done amazingly well and should be very pleased with yourself! You have spent most of your life adjusting to who you are and how you act because of your weight and now you have to adjust the other way, it will take some time for your brain to catch up with your body. You are taking so many positive steps that hopefully it will start to feel like things are improving for you sooner rather than later. Best of luck with everything. :)
 
Hi I have just joined and decided to look at success stories first in order to motivate myself. Yours is a really incredible one. It's appalling that you were treated like that by the newspapers, but you have managed to bounce back and find your self belief again, which is fabulous. You look great and hopefully your confidence will continue to grow and you will find even more good friendship and love in your life. Thanks for sharing your story
 
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