Allison

Many of us have a mental yardstick against which we measure ourselves, weight-wise. Some recall their high-school-graduation weight; others, their military service or football weight. For Trumbull resident Allison, it was her wedding weight.

“One hundred five pounds,” she says with a little sigh. At 5’3” she was a slender bride. “Even after that, I was pretty much normal size,” she adds. “But the years went by and then … well, I wasn’t.” Of course, ‘normal’ means different things to different people. Still, it took her physician to alert Allison to the level of danger her weight had brought her. She had reached 210 lbs, and her blood pressure was 140/90. With borderline diabetes ready to go full bloom (she was taking 3 oral insulin meds), he suggested she look into weight-loss surgery in Connecticut.

“I thought, am I really that big?” Allison, a mother of three, remembers. “Sure, I felt pretty awful at times, but I told myself I should get a second opinion.” Then she thought about recent pictures she’d seen of herself. “Pictures don’t lie,” she says. So when her doctor talked about a bariatric surgery program in New Haven Connecticut, she signed up. After going through that program’s preliminaries, she was advised to go with the Lap Band. “I said no, I wanted gastric bypass,” Allison recalls. “Everyone is different, and I just knew a bypass would be better for me. But after almost seven months of waiting, they hadn’t even managed to get my insurance approved.”

Though laparoscopic techniques have simplified these surgeries in recent years, bariatric surgery is a serious step. It requires a program staff that is knowledgeable, conscientious and understanding of the range of emotions patients experience both before and after surgery. Knowing she needed a practice that would better suit her needs, Allison found Dr. Timothy Ehrlich and his program. His level of commitment boosted her confidence from the start. “And Kevin, Dr. Ehrlich’s practice manager, had my insurance approval in two phone calls!” she says.

With the support of husband and family (her 90-year-old mother-in-law told her, “Go for it!”), Allison had her gastric bypass. She followed the program, exercised, revised her eating patterns — and made it to her goal weight of 128 lbs.

Any setbacks along the way? “Only one,” she says. “I got overconfident about eating cereal containing too much sugar and didn’t drink enough water. That was the day I ended up hospitalized. You have to remember to eat and drink right.”

Nowadays she always does. A youthful woman in her fifties who is full of life and energy (“I unzipped that fat suit and walked right out of it!”), Allison often runs with her daughter who trains for marathons. “I can’t really keep up with her,” she laughs. “But I was able to run my first 5K this past December. I finished the whole thing — and I didn’t come in last!”