Judy Austin celebrated a momentous anniversary a week before Christmas. It marked one year after gastric bypass surgery. She made it. One full year. One tough year where she lost more than 200 pounds. Remarkable? Yes. And she hated almost every step along the way.
Judy’s story has a silver lining, but it’s only after a gray, stormy recovery.
“Beforehand if I wanted something, I just got it. I wanted a house so I bought a house,” explained Judy Austin, bride of St. Louis American sportsman, Earl Austin Jr. “I wanted a car, so I bought a car…”
And if she had a taste for something, she just ate it. Wavy Lays, $25 worth of Chinese food from around the corner ? something sweet with her black coffee… and mindless eating in front of the television.
Eating habits had taken control.
Through therapy, Austin discovered food became her source of comfort during childhood.
“If anything upset me, food would satisfy me. If I was lonely, food would give me company. If I was sad, food would make me happy. If I did something good, then food was a reward, so food became a central part of my life,” she said.
Over the years, Judy grew to become morbidly obese.
“I had gotten up to 560 pounds in 2004 and everybody kept telling me ‘You need to do something about your weight,’ ‘You’re just getting too big,’ and I realized I was 40 pounds from 600 and that was very, very scary. And I kept telling everyone I was in school, working on my master’s and I’d say, ‘When I am finished with my master’s I will concentrate on my weight,’” she said.
“And of course, while I was working on my master’s, what did I do? I rewarded myself with food.”
Honest urging from family and friends and even a new man in her life only had a limited effect on her weight issues.
“June of 2004, I joined Weight Watchers, for like the eighth time, but for some reason, this time it really worked and I lost 130 pounds in a year. And when I met Earl, I had lost 100 pounds. I lost 30 pounds after he and I started dating ? that was 2005. I became reacquainted with him, because we actually met in college,” she explained.
Judy weighed 460 when she and Earl reconnected and got down to 430, but slowly but surely she started gaining the weight back.
The effects of her weight affected her health.
“It was becoming almost impossible for me to go to work, because I was just so tired and achy throughout the day,” Austin said. “I had problems with my knees, problems with my ankles…”
Weight affected her job as a first grade teacher.
“It was even difficult for me to pick my students up from their related arts classes ? music, art, and P.E. Other teachers would go and pick them up for me because they knew it was just too difficult for me to go down the hall,” she recalled.
“And, it was hard for me to even walk around the classroom, so I had a chair with wheels and what I would do is sit in a chair and wheel myself around the room to my student’s desks to help them with their work.”
Her weight did not go unnoticed by her young pupils.
“One of my students one year copied down a 1-800 number from an infomercial that she saw for some exercise equipment. She was really sweet about it and she said, ‘Miss Houston, if you got this, this would help you to lose weight,’” Austin said.
“She did this out of love for her teacher ? she wasn’t trying to be mean or anything like that; she was trying to be helpful. It touched me ? it hurt me. I had to step out of the room. I started to cry and everything and I said, ‘I’ve got to do something, I’ve got to do something.’”
In the summer of 2008, “something” turned out to be figuring out where to have gastric bypass surgery and finding a way to pay for it.
“My insurance from the district would not cover the surgery,” she said.
Austin was too heavy for the operating tables at one St. Louis area hospital that performed the surgery. One other hospital could do it, but without insurance, Austin said she needed a $10,000 down payment.
“So I’ve got $10,000 open on a credit card … and I got $5,000 open on another so we can use that to pay for the surgery and the anesthesiologist,” she decided.
Judy had the Roux-en Y gastric bypass. During the operation, a smaller stomach is created by making a small pouch at the top of the stomach (using staples or a band). The smaller, egg-sized pouch is then connected directly to the middle portion of the small intestine (the jejunum). The procedure bypasses the stomach and the upper part of the small intestine (duodenum). Health experts say the Roux-en-Y gastric bypass causes immediate and more dramatic weight loss – several pounds per week during the first six months to a year following the procedure.
Although the bypassed stomach is unable to receive food following surgery, it remains intact and still performs an important function in the digestive process. Food passes through the newly created stomach pouch, while the bypassed stomach continues to secrete stomach juices flowing through the intestinal tract to aid the digestion process.
In order to have a laparoscopic procedure, Austin lost another 23 pounds before her surgery on December 18, 2008. That’s when the not so smooth recovery and transformation began.
“It was the worst surgery I’ve ever had in my life.
The recovery from the surgery was just awful. When I woke up from the anesthesia, I never felt so horribly in my life,” Austin said.
What made the recovery so horrible for Judy was lots of pain in her abdomen from the operation.
And also there was an extended issue with drooling ? cute on a baby, but on an adult? Not so much.
“I also had a rare complication with my mouth. The left side of my tongue was paralyzed, so even though I was eating Jello and drinking or eating soup or whatever, I couldn’t put anything on the left side of my mouth. If I did, I couldn’t control it, so I was drooling,” she described. “I sounded like Mickey Mouse ? my voice was really high and it stayed that way for several weeks. The drooling went on for a month. The paralysis lasted for about six weeks.”
Judy was in the hospital for five days, getting released just in time for Christmas and just in time to prepare and serve guests a traditional holiday meal ? meals she could no longer stomach.
“I managed to cook Christmas dinner sitting down in an office chair,” she said. “For breakfast, I made omelets for everybody the way they wanted them, smothered potatoes and onion, bacon, sausage and cinnamon rolls. And of course for dinner, I cooked all the traditional stuff ? prime rib roast, ham, and all the sides and macaroni and cheese. Oh my God, my macaroni and cheese that year was so, so good! But again, I didn’t eat it ? but everybody kept telling me how good it was.”
Judy really earned her apron on that day. As others were eating in the dining room, Judy ate alone in another room. Her meals were very tiny and not so sumptuous.
“I was able to eat cottage cheese, applesauce and that’s pretty much it ? and protein drinks.”
She was okay with it because she stashed some holiday food in the freezer for the weeks ahead when she could eat solid foods again.
“That never came to pass, because I suffered with so much nausea,” she said. “Everything that I was putting in my mouth made me nauseous ? to the point that I would have to go somewhere and lie down at least two hours until it would pass. And then I was getting to the point that just the smell of the food would make me nauseous.”
The smell of bacon (formerly a breakfast favorite) made her sick.
The taste of the toothpaste made her sick.
Even the smell of the newspaper made her sick.
Judy was sick of everything making her sick.
“It was very frustrating because I went to my doctor about it and he wanted to prescribe a medicine whose side effects included a possible increase in appetite, weight gain and an increased desire for sweets,” Austin said. “I was not willing to take that medication and he would not give me anything else in place of it. It was an antidepressant as well.”
Judy had to tough it out.
It was frustrating.
It was depressing.
And she hated it.
“Leading up to New Year’s after the surgery, I had a lot of regret about the surgery, because it’s not like a diet, where you can say, ‘Oh, forget it, I’m just going to go ahead and eat,’ You can’t do that with this surgery … you will either get really sick or kill yourself,” she said. “And that was so, so frustrating knowing that I couldn’t throw in the towel. It was like, ‘I’m trapped. I really want to go get some White Castle ? I really want a Big Mac ? I really want to get some potato chips and I couldn’t do it.”
2009 was a pretty hectic year for the Austins. The weight loss surgery, wedding planning, taking care of her mother and the death of Earl’s mother made it life-altering in many respects.
“We pretty much leaned on each other for support and guidance,” Earl Austin said of his then betrothed. “It brought us closer together as a couple.”
Last summer, when she was able to eat small amounts of solid foods, Judy found out the hard way that she could no longer eat and drink at the same time.
It was only a couple of sugar-free cookies with small sips of black coffee. It was good going down, but it caused instant diarrhea.
“That comes in what they call ‘the dumping syndrome,’” she said. “For the rest of my life, I cannot eat and drink at the same time. There has to be at least 30-45 minutes in-between foods and liquids. Even as it stands right now, I can’t even eat a bowl of cereal, because it is a liquid and a solid together.”
“For the rest of my life…” must have felt like a prison sentence, at least until she could really see results.
“I had an outfit ? just a simple pair of pants and top that I would wear and put on every month for a photo. In my home, there is a hallway … I could stand there and touch the sides to the opening just standing in the middle. And about two months out, the outfit was becoming very loose on me and when I would stand in that opening, I would have to lean left or right in order to touch the sides,” she said.
“It was working ? it was really going off. I was losing about 25 pounds a month about the first four months and clothes that I had originally wore to work that were too tight were now extremely loose.”
Remember, she hated almost every step along the way after her weight loss surgery.
Major success for Judy came in her favorite color. In 2006, she purchased and stashed away $200 worth of pink clothing from Lane Bryant, hoping one day she could get down to a size 26/28. Last summer, Judy could fit boxes of smaller sized clothing given to her by an Earl’s cousin in Maryland.
“She tried them on and modeled all of them in front of me and you could just see her in the mirror and the smile on her face and you could just see she was giddy,” he said.
Then Judy remembered her pink buried treasure.
“I pulled the stuff out of the bag and I could fit everything in the bag except one item.
I just started boo-hooing, I just started crying, ‘Look at this!’” she said. “It felt very good.”
She credits Weight Watchers for her cooking healthier prior to the surgery. For others who may be considering the procedure, she recommends healthier prepared and small portion meals before the surgery as an easier transition afterward.
“If you’re used to frying your chicken, you’ve got to learn to start baking your chicken. If you’re used to frying your fish, you’ve got to learn to start enjoying baked fish. If you are used to having greens with salt pork and ham hocks and all that, you have to learn how to start using chicken bouillon or turkey parts in your greens,” she said. “Chitlins. I used to love chitlins ? it was my favorite thing for the holidays. That’s all I would think about. I don’t even eat a chitlin now ? I don’t even touch a chitlin.”
Judy is inundated with praise about her weight loss, but she finds it hard to accept compliments for what the surgery and her perseverance produced.
“Because I wasn’t able to do it on my own,” Judy said. “And I still haven’t gotten over the way I used to eat. I ate that way for over 30 years.”
“That’s what the battle has been. Her relationship with food has been a lifelong thing. It’s been difficult for her to really let it go like that,” Earl Austin said. “She always says the results have been great but the process ? getting there ? has been a struggle at times, and it continues to be a struggle.”
The physical change what others see is quicker than transformation of mind.
“Even when you lose all the weight and you look in the mirror and get all the compliments, you still ? in your mind there are a lot of changes going on. Sometimes you feel like that ‘other person’ before the surgery, so it’s not only a physical makeover ? the mental makeover is longer and the change mentally is more difficult and is what people can’t see,” Earl Austin said.
“We think on the surface everything is okay but we can’t see what’s going on inside another person’s head or what’s going on in their heart unless you are right there with them everyday.”
A year later, Judy Austin has gone from size 42 and is holding steady at size 26/28 on her 5’11” frame.
Earl said his wife tries to keep a hard exterior about it and although she may not admit it, he catches Judy sneaking a peak in the mirror and smiling at what she sees.
“I would always tell her how good she looked. I did that anyway so it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, even before she had the surgery,” Earl said of his bride. “She’s a beautiful girl to begin with inside, which is why I fell in love with her. I just wanted her to realize that she was doing the right thing for herself and not for anybody else.”
