I missed an interesting anniversary last Friday. It was seventeen years to the day from when I had a Gastric Bypass operation. It reduced the size of my stomach therefore reducing the size of me. Depending on now you figure it, I lost somewhere between 100 and 135 pounds. Some of it eventually came back and some of what came back was lost again, this time through more organic means. Nothing I say in this piece should be taken as a recommendation or encouragement for you to rush out and get this done. I'm just telling you how well it worked for me. In those seventeen years, there has not been one second in which I regretted having it done.
Except maybe for this: My physician warned me about this at the time and he was very wise but somehow, I didn't think this would actually happen to me. He warned me that there would people who, though purportedly friends of mine, would feel the urge to tell me some possibly-bogus story about some possibly-non-existent person they knew who had the surgery, felt fine for a while, then dropped dead. Gosh, that was helpful information.
And here's something I realized the other day and wanted to share with you or someone: I recall three different people in my life doing that to me. One was a fellow comic book writer. One was a not-too-famous stand-up comedian. And the third was a guy…I don't really know what he did but I kept running into him at comic book conventions. All three of them tried to plant in my mind that I had perhaps made a fatal mistake by having the surgery…
…and all three of them have since dropped dead. I, at last report, was still around.