ashloretta
Well, to start out with, my name is Ashley Thornhill, I am 23 years old and I am 5'10" with a grossing weight of 350 lbs. I started the process of getting Bariatric Surgery thru Kaiser Permanente Northern California when I was 19 years old. I actually started doing research on Bariatric Surgery when I was around 12 years old. When a friend of mine at the time had her "Stomach Stapled"; Or at least that is what people called it back then. The surgery had a BIG connotation on it back then, it was probably the worst thing you could ever do in your life!! Or at least that is what everyone said. But it was really hard to listen to those people because I wanted to make a change so badly.I have been overweight my entire life. I remember having boobs in kindergarten and thus losing the embarrassment of getting my boobs in about the 6th grade. It makes me laugh to see my niece who is in the 6th grade and is getting her curves. It's funny to see how embarrassed she was in the beginning and now she seems to be so proud of her changing figure. I wish I could have lived thru that type of happiness. Not the happiness of being in the 3rd grade and being overjoyed at the 10 pounds I lost on some diet plan only to be mortified by the eventual weight gain. Here I am in my 20's now and I am going to enter a life that I have NEVER entered before. It's seems so untouchable and inconceivable that I could eventually reach a weight of 160 pounds; my same weight in the 4th grade! And I sometimes think about failure; that I will be a failure once the surgery is done and over with; that I will eventually gain my weight back, just like on the hundreds of other diet plans I have been on in my life. But you know what I have learned most while going thru this rollercoaster of a ride is that I can't dwell on what I think I am going to fail at. But thrive on what I am going to accomplish. Take each day at a time and live each day at a time! I love the person that I have become. And I can't wait to see the person that I will become in the future. But it is our choices that we make NOW that will affect our self in the future. So I plan to start taking batter care of myself now.
