ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 20, 1997 TAG: 9704180046
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY THE ROANOKE TIMES
Since she had gastric bypass surgery, Debbie Meeks is down from a size 26 dress to size 14 and has been able to stop taking blood-pressure medicine. But it hasn't been easy.
Debbie Meeks weighed close to 300 pounds. She'd taken diet pills and tried diets, everthing from Nutri-System to the grapefruit-and-egg diet. She'd attended Take Off Pounds Sensibly and Weight Watchers meetings.
All of the efforts worked for a while, but eventually she gained the weight back, Meeks said. Her blood pressure shot up and she was put on medication.
Then during a checkup, her doctor mentioned that it was important that she maintain good health if she was going to drive a school bus. She takes Franklin County students to the Roanoke Valley Governor's School each school day.
Meeks, 45, decided to consider gastric bypass surgery, but after deciding to go ahead with it, she said she cried for two weeks because she was afraid she'd die.
"I decided I was going to die from blood pressure or from surgery," Meeks said.
After the surgery, she was in intensive care for a day and then had to go through a period of complete fasting, followed by a period of receiving only liquids.
"It was 12 weeks after the surgery before I ate a meal," Meeks said.
She then began to add to her diet to see which foods she could eat.
"If it didn't work, it came back up," she said.
Vomiting is part of the surgery's aftermath. Initially, many meats made her ill. She also couldn't eat sweets containing sugar. Because portions are so small, a person has to worry about getting enough protein; too little causes hair to fall out.
"This is not just a physical change. It's a whole new way of life," Meeks said.
She had the operation in December 1994. Since then, she's down from a size 26 dress to size 14 and has been able to stop taking blood-pressure medicine.
But a person who's had the surgery still has to be careful not to regain weight.
"Potato chips and a lot of snack foods go down well," she said.
The weight drops rapidly after surgery, and most of it is lost in the first four to six months. Some patient support groups are mostly clothing exchange opportunities, Meeks said.
"You don't want to buy new clothes very often," she said.
Meeks said she and husband, Jackie Meeks, had a strong relationship before her surgery, but since then, he has "been drawn to me more, just like all other men."
Men who never considered asking her to line dance when she was large, ask now. That even irritates her some, Meeks said, because she thinks people often are offensive in the way they treat large people.
Meeks dropped 35 pounds the first week and was down to her current size, even a little smaller, in four months. She still maintains a regular exercise routine of walking in winter and swimming in summer after having lost more than 100 pounds.
Meeks also believes her reaction to the surgery has been less severe than what some patients encounter. Since she was featured in the ad for the surgery, - for which she receives no pay - Meeks has fielded calls from several women going through the adjustment period. Most have been calls of distress.
"One woman said: 'I'm starving. Tell me what I can eat.''' Meeks said.
Meeks also has had follow-up surgery, a tummy tuck to repair a hernia and tighten the skin on her shrunken body. The incision for that was from hip to hip and down the middle of the stomach. She said she's considering having her thighs tightened.
"It worked for me," Meeks said. "But I don't tell anybody to go have it done, because there's that risk involved."
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON THE ROANOKE TIMES. A slimmed-down Debbieby CNBMeeks is back driving a bus for the Franklin County school system.
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