Good, I thought. I’ll just go ahead and fail my evaluation like before and then I won’t have to do any of this. Surprise! I passed! Seriously. I was not planning on passing. I told the truth about DBT therapy and the eating disorders. Sure, by now it had all happened almost ten years ago, but I didn’t realize that I would present the perfect picture of mental health. Now I had a decision to make. Move forward with someone I was uncomfortable with, find another surgeon, or just get super serious about losing weight naturally again.
After straight-up napping on it for a month, I chose option C. I took a few months off to eat whatever I wanted, and then I got super into training. It truly felt like my last chance. I could almost feel sickness one step behind me. Maybe even death. Ugh! That’s sooo dramatic! But it might have been true. Five years of secretly living with diabetes comfortably was starting to feel weird. I was afraid I couldn’t keep it up for much longer. Ahmed had ended up in the hospital again. Mom was now sick with some kind of infection and was dropping weight really quickly. When she’d first started slimming down after a lifetime of being heavy, she took it as a blessing. She started to worry a little later. She told me she’d been hitting the gym and eating grapefruit and stuff. I was suspicious since I never saw her eating anything but Oreos and boiled eggs. I had no idea she was sick. I was out of town a lot and she just didn’t tell me. Even when she ended up in the hospital, she was there a whole day before a friend of hers called to tell me. See where I get it? Everyone I loved was getting sick from a lifetime of eating like a POW survivor. My secret and I were probably running out of time.
The story of how I got to the bariatric department of UCLA Medical Center is long and filled with uninteresting twists, so I’ll spare you. I’m just glad I did. I wanted the surgery, and for the first time, I knew it. I realized that after eleven years of saying, “Surgery will be the last resort,” I was finally here. At my last resort. Another huge difference that let me know I was serious this time was that I told my favorite friend, Kia, I had an appointment to see some doctors about the possibility of weight-loss surgery.
“Okay. You know I don’t like doctors and hospitals, so tell me when our appointment is so that I can go pray and meditate on it before we go.”
“‘Our’? ‘We’? Nah. You don’t have to come with me,” I told her. She looked at me like I was stupid and rolled her eyes.
“Girl, let me go light this incense and meditate on our appointment,” she said, leaving the room. She was going with me. End of discussion. No matter how many times I insisted she could stay home or in the car or go to brunch during my appointment, she sat right next to me in that doctor’s office at UCLA Medical. I am forever grateful she didn’t listen to me.
The team at UCLA Medical is amazing! They were so cool and kind while explaining things to Kia and me. My surgeon said I’d have laparoscopic bariatric surgery. They’d go in, cut my stomach in half, sew it up, and pull what they took out of there. I almost asked if I could take it home with me in a jar, but I figured that was kind of weird. This surgery would reduce my stomach and limit my hunger and capacity to eat. After three weeks, my brain chemistry would change and I’d want to eat healthier. The surgeon said that the medical profession didn’t know exactly why that happens due to this surgery, but it does. Whatever! I’ll take it! Laparoscopic is kind of a scary word. I think it means that the surgery is somehow done with lasers. Fancy. Everything at the hospital was so fancy. I had an appointment before surgery with four different people, two surgeons, another doctor, and a dietician. When I arrived, there was a greeter waiting to take me up to the medical suite where my appointments were. Instead of sitting in the waiting room, I was ushered into an exam room. I stayed there for every single appointment and each doctor came to me. That’s fucking service! I’ve never seen such a thing. As much as I sometimes complain about being so recognizable, I was very grateful for this privacy and for these people making sure I could get the surgery and heal and be back at work ASAP.
The scariest part about all of this—more than the two-to-three-night hospital stay, more than the lasers beaming into my stomach, more than having to rely on everyone keeping my secret—was going back to work. The surgeons said that I would lose weight really fast at first. I would be shooting season three of Empire in three months. I had a very established body in seasons one and two. I knew I’d already look different for the first episode and that by the last show of the season I might be completely unrecognizable. Viewers would notice. Should the writers address it in the script? Wasn’t I supposed to give the show’s creators a heads-up that I was thinking about the procedure? How could I do this to them? Was I a horrible person? What about the costume department? I was going to start shrinking during production. Just when they thought they had my size, it would go down and they’d be foiled again. They’re all great people! Why would I do this to them? Shouldn’t I take the time to consider what I was doing to the show?
“No,” Kia said.
Just no. Kia is THE BEST! She’s right. This is my body! Mine. Yes, I had a job, several jobs, but my number-one job was to make sure that I was healthy. That I was alive. Explaining my changing body to viewers, the costumes fitting—that was all someone else’s job. My cast and crew loved and supported me, and I was sure the inconvenience of my morphing body would be outweighed by the pride they’d feel for my handling my own shit and getting healthy by any means necessary. Or . . . maybe the surgery wouldn’t be a success. Maybe I wouldn’t lose any weight at all. Maybe everything would stay the same. Maybe there’d be nothing but my health to worry about. Forever.
My appointment with the bariatric team was on April 7. My surgery was set for May 9. That’s what the professionals call “fast as fuck.” I had to lose ten pounds at least before the surgery to help the laser get to my stomach. I didn’t super know what that meant. I just got my ass in gear. Ten pounds is actually pretty easy for me to lose. If that’s all I need to do. Unfortunately, I had a million things to do, so Kia helped me find and hire a private chef. That’s hella fancy, y’all! Kia also found a boxing trainer to help me work out. After a few weeks of this regime on top of working at all kinds of stressful things that I usually stress-eat through, I was exhausted! I couldn’t wait for the surgery. It was going to be nice to veg out for a day or two.