Pre-op anxiety

I met with a pre-op today who is experiencing some last-minute anxiety over having surgery. A lot of what she confided in me today reminds me of my night-before-surgery meltdown in the Travelodge next to Kaiser SSF.

She's overwhelmed by her fears, and almost all of them are normal. She said she's overcome by what I call "last supper syndrome," which is the compulsion to make every meal your last as if you'll never eat again. I assured her that everyone goes through that. I spent six months before surgery saying goodbye to food that I thought I would never eat again. It took four times to truly bid farewell to the chocolate mousse cake at Fabio's, but I managed. The funny thing is, as I told this woman today, that many of the things I thought I couldn't live without are things that don't even tempt me now. My taste for them no longer exists.

She also fears failure. After all, she's failed at every diet she's tried before. Granted, this isn't a diet, but when you're a pre-op, surgery seems like a golden egg -- too good to be true. We all going into surgery worrying that we'll be the one person the surgery doesn't work for. But once we have surgery, we realize we have the power to make it a success. The patient fails the surgery; the surgery does not fail the patient.

I think the scariest thing of all when heading into surgery is the knowledge that your entire life is about to change but the inability to know exactly in what way. We can interview post-op after post-op, but everyone's mileage varies. We never know how we will react to surgery until we go under the knives ourselves.

Anybody out there care to share their fears in regard to weight loss -- surgical or otherwise?