Part One: Finding a Surgeon
It took a year to write this.
Why?
Because the public, social media, and many medical providers have a variety of negative opinions and think it’s absolutely foolish and dangerous to have a panniculectomy if you’re fat.
Many people will look at the pictures and criticize me for having surgery before I met “goal weight” or a desirable BMI for a plastic surgeon. They may say that the surgical result looks terrible and think the surgeon did a poor job. Judgment and ignorance abound. Let me enlighten you.
This was an extremely emotional journey that came after several years of fighting for appropriate medical care. I was repeatedly turned away from the best medical solutions based solely on my weight. The battles endured to attain those surgeries drained me, but as my body and mind healed, my fire came back.
While attending an Unjury Cares Support Group for bariatric surgery, they talked about skin removal. I was only a few months post-bariatric revison surgery but I am one of those “research everything extensively, prepare, and act” kind of people so thus this all began.
I started calling providers in-network to find out their surgical criteria. Most would not even do a consult for a future procedure unless I had a BMI of 30 or less. That’s pretty discouraging to hear when your highest BMI was 82.7 and you fought really hard to lose over 130lbs at the time of the calls.
Some offices were polite and sympathetic to my disappointment. Others were downright cruel with their responses. I hung up in tears with each call with my first bariatric surgeon’s voice in my head: “No one will EVER do a panniculectomy on someone over a BMI of 30.” That sentence damaged my confidence in ever being successful with weight loss surgery from a mental health and body dysmorphia standpoint.
But I was 22 then: naive, believing that one doctor’s word was law. I now know that to be untrue. Some bariatric offices across the world do panniculectomies on people at my former size in combination with their stomach surgery. Then after their weight loss is more successful in large part due to the panniculectomy, they have a revisional surgery at their goal weight.
I soldiered on armed with a mask of self-confidence that I knew what I knew and there may be a surgeon willing to LISTEN to what I was asking. All I was hoping for was a conversation. I just needed to know from a provider what criteria I had to meet to be eligible. After being rejected by 6 offices across the state of WI, I finally found 3 surgeons willing to have that conversation.
Cue panic attacks, self-doubt, and medical trauma triggers.
(Check out Part Two!)
Wisconsinite Yooper 