Day 69: Gaining Weight Through The Tube (Part 1)

Day 69! I feel like I say this often but I am extremely tired today. Maybe it’s a sign that I need to go to bed at a more reasonable time. Who am I kidding, I’m too stubborn to do the reasonable thing. My stubbornness is going to be the death of me eventually. It actually was close to being a reality and that is what today’s post is going to be about. I am going to take you on a journey with a three part series through my extreme weight loss, getting my G-Tube, and finally what life afterward has been like. Are you ready? Here we go!
The weight loss begins:
My severe weight loss started pretty much right after my back surgery, so around the age of thirteen. The back surgery made me lose a good portion of my original chewing strength. To put it in perspective, before my back surgery I could eat a Big-Mac, four piece McNuggets, and a large fry with ease. Post back surgery, I could barely get down a cheese burger without getting tired. I would just eat until I became tired and quit, even if I was still hungry. At the time I was quite over weight, so I looked at it like a positive. Boy, was I wrong.
It felt like out of nowhere my weight was melting off of me. For the first time in my life, I could consider myself skinny. In a way, I felt really good about my body image, my back was straight and I was slim. The thing is though, the weight wouldn’t stop coming off. Puberty weight loss plus not being able to eat a sustainable amount was a recipe disaster.
The realization:

I was around fifteen when I first started to hear the comments about my weight. I knew I was way too thin and the weight kept coming off but I was at a complete loss as what to do. The more people I heard say “you need to eat more”, the more discouraged I became. Hearing those words uttered day after day became my bane. I almost wanted to purposely rebel for some reason, probably was the teen angst.
The big realization came when I met with my pulmonologist for an annual check up. At this time in my life, breathing was becoming a huge problem. I was constantly short of breath and every breath felt like a fight. My pulmonologist entered the room and took one look at me, immediately said that my lack of weight was causing my severe breathing problems. To give you an idea of what my weight was during this time, I was 50lbs standing at 5'1". She exclaimed that I needed a G-Tube immediately and if I didn’t, my death would come soon. I took this to heart and started on the process of meeting with the right doctors.
Once I made the appointment with my general surgeon everything moved quite fast. In part two I will be going in-depth about the surgery and hard road to recovery. Part two of this journey was probably one of the most painful experiences of my life. It was far from the easy recovery I was promised.
I am going to wrap it up on that note. I hope you enjoyed and like always, I will be back with another post. See ya’!
To my regular readers:
I am so close to hitting my merchandise sale goal! Only 5 more days left to pick up a limited supply of daysofparker.com merchandise. Percentage of the proceeds goes to St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital. https://teespring.com/days-of-parker


Here’s another beautiful photograph from my lovely photographer.

Originally published at Days of Parker.
