Jen Larsen - Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

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Table of Contents

For Mary Madeline Theresa Fitzgerald Larsen

part one: before

Chapter 1

secret fantasies... an unexpected discovery... a life-altering decision

Here is a fantasy I used to have.

The doctor looks at me gravely. He sets his clipboard down and folds his hands neatly on his lap, one stacked on top of the other. He looks so sad. He says, Its cancer.

I lift my chin and set my face in brave and stalwart lines. Beside me, my mother bursts into tears, but I dont. I am the bravest person who ever lived, who was ever about to die.

Theres nothing we can do, the doctor says, and his voice cracks. My mothers shoulders shake.

Everyone cares. Everyone regrets every terrible thing they have ever thought about me. Everyone is filled with shame, and loss. Everyone cant believe this is happening. The cancer creeps throughout my body and in the space of months, I lose hundreds of pounds. I am slender, hollow-boned, ethereal. I glow with a light that must be reflected from the eminence of heaven. No one can believe this is happening to such a beautiful girl. I give away everything I own: to people I love, to charity, to the world. I ask for nothing in return.

Sometimes, I go into remission. Sometimes, I make a beautiful corpse. Oh, the thunderous sobbing that lifts the roof off of the funeral home, the tears that flood out the door.

Heres another fantasy.

A terrible car accident. I am beheaded. My body is a ruin, but my bouncing head is swept up off the highway, jammed into a bag of ice and raced to the nearest emergency room. Rushing doctors yell stat! and machines wail and gouts of blood splash against the sterile walls. A doctor picks up my head, looks into my quickly clouding eyes, and sees my beautiful soul. I am secreted away for emergency, experimental surgerymy head is implanted on the body of a supermodel! The implant works! The scars heal invisibly.

At first, it is so difficult to walk when Im six feet tall and my legs are spindly and my ankles are so narrow, but muscle memory is magical. I quickly learn how to walk in four-inch heels. Even better, I dont have to figure out what I want to do with my life, why I am so lonely, why I am depressed, why I feel like I mess up everything I touchIm a beautiful supermodel, and my ass is superb.

And another.

Theres a switch. I reach inside my rib cage and flick it on, and suddenly everything is different. Nosuddenly Im different. Totally changed, flipped inside out, polarity reversed. I am a good person, a happy person, a smart and dependable and wise person who is never scared of anything. Everything is clear and easy.

And another:

Weight loss surgery.

I found out about weight loss surgery by accident.

For poetrys sake, I want to tell you that I had reached my lowest low. For the sake of the narrative I want to employ irony, and tell you I was eating ice cream right out of the carton, or had my elbows propped up in a pie. That my darkest moment had arrived, and there I was, fat and sad and unaware that dawn was right over the horizon.

But it didnt feel like my lowest point. It just felt like my life. I weighed over three hundred pounds and was the fattest I had ever been in my life. I had been systematically shoving all my friends out of my life because I was almost comically ashamed to be so depressed, out of control, and unhappy. I didnt want to admit to anyone that I was so fat I didnt want to live anymore. It seemed a poor excuse for sadness, and it sounded pathetic in my head. It would sound worse coming out of my mouth.

And then there I was, reading a blog called something like, Hey Im Really Fat and I Hate Myself For It. The blogger wrote about shed never lose weight unless she went on The Biggest Loser. I wished I could go on The Biggest Loser, except it seemed kind of terrifying to me, all that nakednesshow could they get so emotionally naked on national television? More importantly, how could they stand to be filmed with their shirts off?

I scrolled to the comments. You could try, a commenter wrote, weight loss surgery. The duodenal switch, the commenter continued, isnt like most weight loss surgeries. You lose all your excess weight in a year or less. You can eat whatever you want. It is new and sophisticated. It is the future of weight loss. Here is a link: duodenalswitch.com.

I clicked almost before I finished reading the sentence.

I had heard of weight loss surgery before, because Al Roker had it. Carnie Wilson had it too. She used to have to hide her bulk behind rocks and cars and buildings in Wilson Phillips videos while her skinny bandmates danced. She lost all that weight, but then she gained it all back. Al Roker experienced dumping, which is what happens when you eat poorly, then you sweat a lot and throw up, or spend hours in the bathroom with a can of odor-killing Lysol, miserable and alone. I always pictured Al Roker eating ice cream on the toilet, and it made me sad.

That wasnt what I was looking for. That kind of weight loss surgery sounded crazy. Not worth it. A panicked last-ditch effort, even.

This, though. Duodenal switch dot com.

It was a very blue web page, very neatly laid out, and I clicked on the link that said Procedure. What would they proceed to do to me?

A picture of a surgery-altered digestive system popped up. I studied the pastel pink stomach, bisected, half the size of a normal stomach or even smaller. The ghost of the removed part of the stomach was dot-dot-dotted behind it, no longer important. The long white loops of intestines wiggled down the illustration, with arrows pointing out parts that looked exactly like other parts. I couldnt make much sense of it. Somehow I failed to noticeaccidentally, on purposethe arrows that helpfully pointed out where sections of the intestines had been torn from one another and looped around so the surgeons could stitch them to each other. Where one loop ended abruptly, where bits and pieces of the guts were Frankensteined together.

As far as I could tell they just did some rearranging, like the digestive system was your living room and you wanted the couch over by the window, then you were cured. It looked so easy to me, someone who was only vaguely familiar with the workings of a normal digestive system (I always thought my actual digestive system had never really had the opportunity to be normal, really). It looked so simple. Could it be so simple? I read sentences like, The BPD/DS combines restrictive and malabsorptive elements to achieve and maintain the best reported long-term percentage of excess weight loss among modern weight-loss surgery procedures, and I thought Oh, well, of course it does, that makes so much sense.

This was weight loss surgery, but it was different. It was weight loss surgery that

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