Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
Life was a drag for Lee Ann John two years ago.
John, the secretary for the Sweet Home Public Works Department, had been battling weight problems for years – since her first child was born, in 1969.
She’d weighed more than 450 pounds, though she now was down to slightly over 360.
Her knees were shot. She had a perpetual backache. She had to use the electric riding cart at the grocery store.
She’d tried “everything;” TOPS, Weightwatchers, diets – even hypnosis.
“I knew I had to do something or I would be in a wheelchair,” said John, 55. “My knees were very, very bad, to the point that I couldn’t maneuver. I’d drive around and around the parking lot, looking for a space to park so I wouldn’t have to walk far.”
One of her biggest regrets was that she was unable to really hold her young grandchildren in her lap.
“I had no lap,” she said.
So, on Feb. 23, 2005, she took the advice her doctor had been giving her for years and had surgery technically known as a gastric bypass roux-en-Y procedure, which reduced the size of her stomach to about the size of her thumb.
A year and a half later, she weighed 140 pounds, her current weight. And she has a new life.
“Now, when I go to a store, they can’t wait to help me,” she said. “They’re smiling at me. The gas station attendants can’t run fast enough to my car. Before, the store clerks would ignore me and go to someone else.”
John grew up in a family that, she says, tended to be heavy. She married when she was 17, in 1969, and “had a baby right away.
“That’s when I started the upward climb,” she said. Another baby followed and she kept gaining weight.
“Every year I would put on more pounds,” John said.
She liked to eat. Hamburgers with all the fixings, French fries, anything with sugar.
“My husband Duane used to clean the car out and he’d find candy wrappers under the seat. He’d say, ‘What are you trying to hide here?’ I had a real sugar habit.”
It was Duane’s death, in a March 2000 trucking accident, that started her on the road toward the surgery.
“Once I lost my husband – he did everything for me – I guess I knew I had to do something because I had to do it myself after being a princess,” John said.
Her physician, Bruce Matthews, had been encouraging her for several years to have the surgery. She underwent the necessary tests and made a required visit to a psychiatrist, which, she said made a lot of sense after she had the operation.
“I think that’s really good,” she said. “I think you almost need (psychiatric help) more after the weight loss because the mind doesn’t change like the body does.”
She underwent the surgery by Dr. Robert Reid in Corvallis, who specializes in such operations. The $30,000 cost was not covered by insurance, she said.
John said she was afraid of the risks of the procedure and that her family wasn’t in favor of the operation before she had it.
“You hear all the horror stories,” John said. “One out of 100 dies. That’s a big percentage. I was very fortunate that I had no medical problems other than arthritis. I had great cholesterol, great sugar levels.”
Still, difficulties with blood loss and other problems caused her recovery to take longer than she expected, she said. It was about a month before she could go back to work.
“It was probably six months before I was glad I did it,” she said. “I had lost 100 pounds after six months.”
She said the crew at the Public Works Department gave her a lot of support, both before and after the operation, and her boyfriend Gary Adams “has been a great support,” taking care of her after the surgery.
The operation left her with a vastly reduced appetite. She can eat half a sandwich for lunch. She has to take medicine for her arthritis at intervals throughout the day to make sure she has room for the pills.
She said her weigh finally “stabilized” in early fall.
One plus for her is that she can’t stand sugar any more.
“Now, for some reason, sugar makes me violently ill,” she said. “I call it my blessing. I don’t need those empty calories.”
Now she has to make sure she eats plenty of protein and monitor her vitamin intake to make sure she has enough nutrition.
“It’s very easy to drop 5 pounds,” she said. “I have to be careful.”
She said that when she looks in the mirror, “I still see a heavy person there.” When people suggest that she might be gaining wait, she said, she has to be careful because her first impulse is to stop eating.
She said there are things people who aren’t large don’t think about that large people have to.
“You can’t just get in a car,” said John, who said she stands about 5 feet, 7 inches tall. She said it was especially hard, if not impossible, to get into a small vehicle and she had to use a seatbelt extension.
“When I went to a restaurant, I had to scope out the whole place to see where I was going to fit,” she said. “Whenever I traveled, I had to take a ton of clothes because you can’t just go anywhere to buy size 34 or 36 clothes.”
The biggest changes, John said, are in how people react to her and how she sees herself, now that she’s gone from size 34 or 36 to size 6 or 8.
Before she took her present job, in January of 2002, she worked for a local dentist for 21 years. She said she would attend seminars and find herself shunned by other attendees.
“Nobody wants to sit next to you. Nobody wants to eat with you,” she said.
John said she once went to a boutique to buy a gift for her teenage daughter. A clerk walked up to her and told her bluntly, “We don’t have anything here that will fit you.”
She said she has been rejected for at least one position that she was told she was qualified for.
“I have been discriminated against,” she said flatly. “I have to thank (Public Works Director) Mike Adams because he overlooked my weight and hired me based on my qualifications.”
She said she thought she was being shunned at first, following her operation, because people didn’t respond to her. It wasn’t until she went to visit relatives in eastern Oregon, who did not recognize her when she knocked on their doors, that she realized people really didn’t know who she was.
“I had very low self esteem,” she said. “It’s kind of fun to trick people now.”
She can now trim and polish her own toenails. Recently, she tried on the dress she wore at her wedding, nearly 38 years ago. She hadn’t worn it since. It was too big now.
“I’m smaller than I was in high school,” she said.
One big change, John said, is the response she gets from men.
“Guys flirt,” she said. “I’ve never had that happen before.
In recent months, she caught her first salmon on a trip with her boyfriend, Gary. She’s gone tubing at the lake with her grandchildren. (“I wouldn’t have even gone out there in a bathing suit before.”) She recently bought her first pair of cowboy boots.
Her next goal is to “ride horses on the beach,” she said. She also wants to take a jet boat trip on the Rogue River.
“I couldn’t fit in the life jackets before,” she said.
So was it worth it?
“People say, ‘$30,000?’ Well, how much do you pay for a new car?” John said. “And it’s not going to last you.
“This is the first time in my life that I’ve had the control to be normal,” she said. “I guess I just kind of feel that my life was reborn after this surgery.”