Behind a big woman's eyes - Infertility, Weight, and Mental Illness

Warning –this one is good, but long

My diets continue until I am 18.  I graduated high school weighing about 180lb.  I started my period when I was 11, I began to have irregular periods by the time I was 15.  In college I am diagnosed with Hypothyroidism, a conditions which runs in my family.  It is known to make periods irregular and very heavy.  It is also known to make you gain weight.  Shorty after I meet Mike, and become sexual active,  I am put on birth control.  Their hope is it will also make my periods regular.  It does and it also makes me gain 30lb.  My breast swell past D’s and I have trouble walking until I get used to them.   I tip 200lb for the first time.  I quickly get off of it, but the weight stays.

I think one of the reasons I marry Mike is that I have felt all my life; no man will want me because I am so fat and therefore so ugly.  To have someone find me sexy and attractive, at least in the beginning, is a dream come true for me. While in college and in my abusive marriage to Mike I continue to gain weight. I hit 300lb for the first time.  I develop breathing problems and sleep paralysis.  I am taken to a lung specialist who undoes my bra and tells me part of my problem is I am wearing such a tight bra it is cutting off my air flow.  I am wearing a D.  I get new bras and measure in at 52 I.  My bras are now very expensive and come only from a specialty shop.  I am told the sleep paralysis is coming from the excessive stress I am under.  The Dr. also tells me I must immediately loose half my body weight. 

For the first time I join a gym.  I remember going in the bathroom to change into my work out clothes.  I come out shaking, terrified that people will make fun of me.  No one does.  I graduate and we move back home.  When I go to work for the car dealership they offer perks like helping you pay for a gym membership.  I sign up.  Not long after I leave Mike I have lost 50lb.  I continue working on my weight, at the gym and by joining Overeaters Anonymous (OA).  After I lose my job at the car dealership I continue to work out at the gym every day, writing my article for the paper and going to meetings.  In total I lose 87 pounds.  I plateau. I weight 217 lb. when I meet Jay.  Who could freaking careless how much I weigh.

After months of looking I am finally able to start a new job.  Losing weight and writing gets pushed to the side as I work and fall in love with Jay.  When we marry a year later I am at 245 lb and blissfully happy.  We have moved to Sabine Parish and there are no OA meetings for me to attend there.  The weight continues to creep back up.  There are attempts at walking and diet, but nothing sticks. We return home to Caddo Parish after Hurricane Rita.

Shortly before Momma Muriel dies in 2008 we begin the process for me to have my stomach stapled, RNY.  Mercifully I am turned down.  I have talked to many people since who have had the surgery, that are 10, 15 even 20 years out from their surgeries.  Their health is just deplorable, and for those who could not afford the plastic surgery afterwards, they look just as bad.  I am very, very glad I was turned down, but here is the major lesson I learned.  If you want to have your stomach stapled, and they send you to a psych evaluation, whatever you do, don’t tell them you are a witch.  I did and I am turned down because of it.  It takes us a while to get the evaluation from the insurance company.  The first lines read, “While Ilsa may present as possibly psychotic it is my opinion that she is just different, very different.  It is because of these differences that she may have experienced trouble in her life.”  While I passed the evaluation, it is my guess all the insurance company saw was the word “psychotic,” and that was enough to turn me down. 

We try again to diet and eat right in August of 2011.  We go to see the dietician the week before I have my first major panic attack.  I had been trying to measure my food and do as I had been told.  I still think it may have been one of the contributing factors to the attack.  When I go back into counseling in December of 2011 one of the goals during all this is to lose weight so I can get pregnant. 

Mike and I never tried to conceive a child.  Even though diagnosed with Hypothyroidism at age 18, my periods continue to be erratic.  I am unwilling to try birth control again after my first experience with it.  We settle on me taking Progesterone pills 10 days out of the month.  After I leave Mike I go in for a battery of tests.  Given what Mike was into I want to make sure he had not been cheating, and didn’t give me something.  He thankfully did not.  I am clean.  My new OB/GYN, however, diagnoses me with Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS).  I am given less than a 10% chance of ever conceiving naturally.  I am told it will take a team to get me pregnant. PCOS is a vicious cycle.  The added testosterone in your body makes you gain weight; the weight makes you produce more testosterone.  And round and round it goes.  The only treatment for PCOS is anti-testosterone birth control, Yasmin.  We find out later it causes gallbladder trouble. 

The day I meet Jay I tell him all the conditions I have, the medications I take and the meetings I attend.  I tell him that if he can’t deal with that, there is the door.  He stays.  PCOS is mentioned in that list but never discussed.  A month later we are standing in a Wal-Mart checkout line.  He is standing behind me, holding me and kissing my neck.  I am making baby talk with a cute baby in front of me.  He looks at the child and whispers in my ear, “What do you think?  In about a year? year and half?”  He’s asking me when I think we will have our first child.  I sputter.  Thank the Gods he can’t see the shock on my face.  I begin to unload the groceries onto the conveyer belt.  I said, “Did you just ask me what I think you asked me?”  I think he has just asked me to marry him.  I did not know that at the moment he said it, he had meant it as a joke.  But he said later, once he heard himself say it, he meant it.  He never expected my response. 

I begin with, “I have PCOS.  The doctors have told me I have a 10% chance of ever conceiving.  They have told me it will take a team to get me pregnant.  I think you are the man for the job.  Yes.”  I look up and he is smiling and his bright blue eyes are sparkling.  I follow up with, “if we can’t conceive we will adopt.  If we can’t adopt we will raise dogs.”

Since that day 12 ½ year ago Jay and I have tried to get pregnant.  Which is really hard when you have no periods.  For a while we try while I am on birth control, even taking prenatal vitamins which make me sick.  We go for long periods where we don’t try.  We try Progesterone.  We try Colmid twice, not only does it not work, I don’t even ovulate.  We have Jay checked early on.  The Dr’s tell us that he has the highest count they have ever seen.  My response is, “I must have some really broke shit then.”  The Dr’s send me home and tell me I cannot conceive because I am too fat.  To go home and come back after I have lost some weight.  I try, but nothing happens. I am routinely told it is my fault.  I am told to relax and when we finally give up it will happen. I am put on Metformin which chains me to a toilet with diarrhea for more than a year.  I am finally told the next step in infertility treatment is to give me shots in my stomach, which are not covered by insurance, and very expensive.  IVF is about $10,000 per treatment, not covered by insurance and may take as many as 7 times to work.  Besides having PCOS, I have been given no other reason why I cannot conceive.  They just look at me and throw medicine my way that doesn’t work.  It’s hell to be infertile and poor.

I look at my husband and often feel nothing but guilt, that I can’t give him a child with his beautiful blue eyes.  That I can’t give him a little piece of immortality.  That I can’t keep his line going.  My beautiful, wonderful, loving husband has nothing wrong with him.  It’s all on my end.  That eats at a woman.  I began to think that he needed to leave me and find another wife, so he could be a father.  That I should just end my life. 

I am blessed to have a friend like Juno, who has just a many mental problems as I do.  She is great in that I can share with her my crazy and suicidal thoughts and she understands.  One day sharing that I had been having these thought Juno says to me, “you know why you can’t kill yourself.”

“No why?”

“Jay is a wonderful man.  He is so kind hearted that if you die, who ever marries him may not be so kind to him and take advantage of him.  You have to stay alive to protect him.” 

That was one of those light bulb moments for me, game changing in my craziness.  I had to stay alive to protect him.  It has taken root in me.  Even sometimes in my moments of panic attacks I repeat this to myself.

Gods bless Jay, my weight has never been a problem for him.  He loves me just as I am.  He has never told me I was fat or asked me to lose weight for him.  He just looks at me with those loving blue eyes and kisses me.

We have attacked this from a spiritual point as well.  I know I have several closed chakras and have worked to open them.  I have begged and pleaded with Holda.  I have done spells for myself. I have attended high seat rituals to ask why I cannot conceive and when, if ever, I might.  I am told to be patient and that it is not yet time.  The last high seat we attend, Jay bless him, asks.  The oracle tells him she does not believe it will not happen without medical intervention. 

People say, “Well just lose weight.  Go on a diet. Eat more vegetables and fruit.”  They don’t work for me.  No matter what I do it won’t come off.  Fruits and vegetables are also terrible expensive.  I think many poor people, like me, are fat because they can only afford carbs and meat.  Vegetables are a luxury.  I am also really, really tired of well meaning people.  I have been coerced, cajoled and damn right bribed in the past to lose weight.  I have been promised makeovers if I lost weight.  I even had a fellow offer me a dollar a pound if I would lose weight. Why does everybody think it is there business??  Every time I was with my mom she would say something about my weight, until I finally told her it was an off topic subject.  If she started that shit while I was on the phone with her I would just hang up.  If I was at her home and she did it I would get up and leave.  I had to do this until finally she learned.  If she can’t love me and accept me for who I am, she doesn’t deserve to love me.

In the last year I have gone so far as to join a gym, exercise, give up sugar, and join OA again.  I lose 30lb initially and then gain it all back.  After a year of not losing I quit trying. I am now almost 40.  If I was to conceive at this point I am very high risk.  I have been told I will develop gestational diabetes.  I have high blood pressure and could develop preeclampsia.  At my age, my DNA has become sticky and means I could have a child with Down Syndrome or other abnormalities.  I am also on Buspar which could lead to a whole host of other problems.   At this point in my life it is not advisable for me to conceive. 

We have been asked, “Why don’t you adopt??”  I want to feel the baby move in me.  I want a baby who looks like Jay.  I want my own child.  A private adoption is about $20,000.  Most of the children in foster care have problems emotional, mental or physical.  I’m not even sure with my mental history they would let me adopt a child.  I’m not sure with my mental history I could handle one with problems.  Then there is the problem of our religion.  While Jay is Agnostic, I am a very loud, proud and out Pagan.  I talked with a friend of ours some years back.  She had just adopted her sister’s kids.  She told me, once they found out she was a witch they did not want to let her adopt her own flesh and blood.  Wonder what they would do with me.  While I am sure it is highly illegal, don’t doubt it’s being done and simply filed under another made up reason to deny people.

It’s not that I like being fat.  I often feel trapped in a failing body.  Being fat has just been part of my identity for so long that I don’t know any other way.  I am a bit terrified to be thin.  How will my soul live in such a little body?  A friend once said about me, “Yeh she’s big, but that’s because she has a big heart.”  Being 350lb is not easy.  I have frequent back spasms when I stand for more than a few minutes at a time or walk more than a few hundred feet.  I still can’t walk from here to the barn without being winded and hurting.  By the time I leave the house, walk to the barn, a few hundred feet away, put the goats away, and come back I am hurting and need to sit and rest.  My hip hurts me.  It started about 8 years ago.  I went into the hospital for it, they ex ray me and then tell me they can find nothing wrong with me.  I am convinced it is arthritis, and my possible be tied to my weight.  But have I mentioned it again to my Primary Care Physician, nope.  I am afraid he will do the tests and tell me, again, that there is nothing wrong with me.

I think the worst part about being fat is having occasionally to ride in the motorized cart at the store.  These are days when either my hip is hurting, I am having back spasms that won’t quit, or my Interstitial Cystitis pain is so bad that I can barely walk.  I am terrified of being taunted by others in the store.  The last time I had to use the cart I was with Jay at the grocery store.  I was trying to talk myself out of using it, he was trying to talk me into it.  Finally I gave in and said, “Okay but if anybody says anything to me, you beat them up!”  So when you pass a fat lady in a cart please be kind to her.  She may be riding it because of a pain you don’t know about and have nothing to do with her weight.  Just remember the lady riding in the cart may be me.

Yet the Buspar is doing something I am hesitant to discuss.  It’s a minor miracle that I am afraid might disappear or may just be a fluke if I talk about it.  But I must.  In the last few weeks I have noticed that I am eating less.  Not trying to, I am just full.  So full I can’t eat anymore.  I have to decide in my head, before hand, what and how much to eat because I know I can’t hold it all like I used to.  Last night I am thinking to myself.  I can’t have another piece of chicken, because I won’t have room for pudding.  I’ve never had to think like that.  I have so much more energy now I am even considering starting to go for walks in the fall.  But I know by saying all this I have broken the magical spell and I will go back to living in my nightgown before long, eating however I want. 

Ilsa