Too Much To Think

You knew if I sat still for five minutes with the TV on, I'd find something to rant about.

Tonight's starting point: the commercials for "Nuvaring", which offer a valuable (and fairly-unflattering) insight into our culture, if you ask me.

Scene: Perky "modern-woman" type bubbles rhymingly. "Back in the day, birth control seemed like the answer to our prayers... We thought, 'pregnancy protection? okay, no objection!' But now we're chained to the everyday. Worry about forgetting? Upsetting! Raise your voice for a new choice: Nuvaring. A flexible, comfortable vaginal ring. Every week? Every day? No way!" (That's a paraphrase, but it's close.)

I've seen this commercial half a dozen times in just the three hours I've been watching Discovery Health Channel, and every time I see it I'm just amazed at what it says. In the past, we were happy with this new thing we discovered. Now, we're no longer satisfied, so we've invented this NEW thing that does the same thing more conveniently.

Which is fine; it's how progress happens, I guess. But what slays me, every time I see this commercial and most of the other commercials for health-care products, is this: We are allowing convenience to dictate our choices in one of the most important areas of our lives: the care and maintenance of our bodies. Where is the long-term data regarding the potential effects of this type of birth control? My guess: there isn't any. This is a new product, and the way that health products are sped through the regulatory process and into the market these days, it seems like "shoot first, ask questions later...and keep those attorneys on retainer, just in case."

Those commercials for "Yazmin" are another thing that bugs me. Yazmin, which I believe is now being marketed as "Yaz" (which makes me wonder how Alison Moyet is feeling these days, but I digress)...anyway, "Yaz" promises "fewer periods"--four a year, to be exact. Basically it's like the regular regimen of the traditional pills, except you only get the week of "blue pills" every third month. And it may be perfectly healthy; there may be nothing wrong with it. But though it certainly sounds good--who wouldn't want fewer periods, given the choice?--it just seems to me like they're opening a Pandora's box. Since we already know we can't trust the pharmaceutical companies, with their profit motive, to safeguard our health...and we already know the government's safeguards have been grossly inefficient even on the few occasions when their judgement hasn't already been swayed by lobbyists, PACs, and under-the-table money...and since most of us aren't ourselves experts on womens' health, reproductive endocrinology, or any of the other biological processes involved in menstruation...what are we using to make our decision as far as the safety and efficacy of these "improved" birth-control options? In short, who is both able and willing to give us an honest evaluation of the possible long-term effects of having only four periods per year as opposed to the normal twelve? Who can we trust? The companies don't have to be responsible because even if they're sued, it's barely a dent in their profits; the government doesn't have to be responsible because they're the government, both parties are pretty much the same, and what other choice do we have? The doctors have to be responsible, but even the specialists couldn't possibly keep up with every new development, nor is there enough time in the world for each doctor, or even each group of doctors, to do their own independent research sufficient to counter every piece of profit-driven misinformation they're given.

And so, faced with the choice of what to put into our bodies, and with few trustworthy and well-informed sources of solid, factual data, we make our choice based on the bubbly rhymes of an ad agency spokes-model, who tells us that convenience is the most important factor. That seems wrong to me, somehow.

I think I'm a little more focussed on questions of health and what motivates our decision-making at the moment. One of my dearest friends is about to do something which scares the hell out of me--Debbi, who I've known since I was five and she was four and we lived down the street from each other, goes into the hospital next week for gastric-bypass surgery, and I'm really scared for her.

Debbi is a big girl. I'm substantially overweight for my height--I could probably stand to lose between 80 and 100 pounds--and Debbi has got 50 to 75 pounds on me, easy. She's had health problems--joint pain, bone spurs, apnea--but like me, she's so far escaped most of the worst demons of obesity. Still, she's not happy with herself as she is, and she's never been able to find a diet and exercise program that works for her. She also has PCOS, like me, which can make it much harder to drop the weight. Mostly, though, she has the same problem I have: she likes food, and doesn't like to exercise. I've known her for long enough to understand her relationship to food; when we were young, Debbi ate largely as a rebellion against her mother, who spent all of Debbi's childhood harping on her weight and comparing her unfavorably to little sis Mary, who was a skinny-Minnie like their mother. Though I didn't have a skinny little sister, I could certainly empathize with the maternal weight-obsession, and so Debbi and I became partners in gluttony--sneaking off to McDonalds for burgers and fries, then to 7-11 or Reilly's for mountains of sweets and candies. We'd hide out in my room, play board games, listen to the radio, and munch on all our forbidden loot. There was some rebellion in my candy-feasts too, but mostly I just had the same horrendous sweet-tooth that follows me to this day.

Still, we both stayed pretty thin through grade school. There's a picture of us, taken the summer I was eleven; when I look at it now I get so angry at everyone who ever told either of us we were fat. We were two cute, normal little girls. I see Debbi with her pageboy bob and her 1981 big-frame glasses, and myself with pigtails, a new cast on my arm, and a "there goes the summer" expression, and I want to go back in time and hug both of us, and tell our little selves, "They're wrong about you. You are both amazing, both beautiful, and both perfectly all right exactly the way you are." There's another picture, taken during my senior year of high school, and still we were normal-looking, still we were pretty. And underneath those normal, pretty exteriors, both of us were convinced we were ugly, gross, obese. We weren't. We never talked about it, either. There was a lot we never talked about; everything we knew about each other til adulthood, it seems sometimes, was unspoken.

We drifted apart shortly after I left for college. There was a party, and a guy, and I needed validation and took too literally Debbi's declaration that she "didn't care" who this guy went after. It made a big split in our group of friends, and then there was real life, jobs and live-in boyfriends and misunderstandings. She sent me a card when I got married the first time.

The next time I saw her was at JP's funeral. She was living at home again, and so once again we were down the block from each other, and I honestly think she and Cowgirl saved my life that fall and winter. I was newly-clean, newly-bereaved, and my old life had been completely torn away from me. Debbi and Cowgirl stepped into that empty space; we went out to dinner, and did crafts in my mother's kitchen, and watched movies in Debbi's parents' room--the same bedroom in which years before we'd sneaked peeks at the Playgirl magazines her mom kept hidden in the bottom of the bureau. And we laughed, Debbi and Cowgirl and I; they kept me laughing, and I don't think I could even begin to tell them how absolutely vital the two of them were, through those last months of 1995 and the first months of 1996.

But in the years since I'd last seen her, she'd packed on at least a hundred pounds. I noticed, but I didn't NOTICE; I'd done the same thing, after all, and the only reason I was skinny again that fall was my ten months on the Heroin Diet. Once I started eating again, the weight started to come back.

We kept in touch sporadically once I moved to North Carolina, and then when I moved back to Chicago. Debbi generally knew when I was getting high again, because she wouldn't hear from me til it was over. She knew a little bit about CR, but he was just as bad as the heroin; when he was around, no one else heard from me either. I think it was my way of performing damage control, but I lost a lot of people during that time. It was during the CR years that I gained back all the weight I'd ever lost and more. Food was a comfort during that time, the one reliable thing that couldn't be taken away or tainted by CR's sick manipulations.

Once CR was gone, once I had the house, once my life was back on track again, Debbi mentioned that she and Cowgirl and a few others had established a Girls' Night Out; once a month, they'd meet at a Mexican restaurant in the suburbs, drink margaritas, and eat delicious food. I gladly became a part of it, and the three of us have carried it on even when the rest of the group crumbled. Through all this crap with LJ, they've once again been a thread connecting me to my real self--the self that laughs, the self that can be silly or serious, the self that's been here all along, no matter what.

All along--for years, now--Debbi has been trying to get approved for gastric-bypass surgery. The insurance company put her through a bunch of red tape; she had to have tried X number of diets without success, and Y number of alternative options, and so on. I think all the red tape lulled me into a sense of complacency, thinking it was never going to happen and so there was nothing to worry about. Debbi has had millions of plans that have never come to fruition; I thought this would be no different.

She started on her liquid diet today, and she goes into the hospital in about 10 days, I guess. She'll be staying with her parents for a couple of weeks after the operation, and the doctors have given her a litany of things she can't eat for two weeks, six weeks, six months, two years. I asked her if she was going to have the reversible surgery--the one with the Lap-Band--but she said no, she's going for the permanent one. I'm skeptical, and deep down I wonder if this isn't really just a last-ditch, throwing-up-the-hands gesture: I can't do diets, I can't do exercise, so just staple my stomach so I don't have to worry about it. I'm afraid the convenience, the magic-bullet-ness of it that you see on all the plastic-surgery shows, has seduced her into thinking that after surgery, everything will be exactly the same--except she'll be skinny.

I'm scared for her. I'm scared that something will go wrong, first of all; I'd be scared of that no matter what surgery she was having. But I think I'm even more scared of what will happen later. I know Debbi well; I've been her friend through many, many diets. I know her mental-health issues, as well, and I know that they're not well-controlled. I know that despite knowing better, despite being in health-care herself, she's not always been medically compliant as far as taking her meds, or regulating anything about her food intake, or...anything. And I'm terrified that even after the surgery, that's not going to change.

I hope I'm wrong. I really, really, REALLY hope I'm wrong. I hope she knows everything about this procedure, backwards and forwards; I hope she's planned for every contingency, knows how she's going to handle every temptation. I hope she'll have a perfectly uneventful operation, and that she'll have a quick recovery, and that she'll be perfectly compliant with all the new rules, all the new orders that the doctors are going to impose on her eating. I hope she realizes that this operation isn't magic, and that she's ultimately responsible for what happens next. And if I'm wrong, I'll be glad to admit it; and whether I'm wrong or right, I'll be there for her if she needs me. It's the least I can do.

I hope I'm wrong. But I know Debbi--I've known her for thirty-one years--and I'm scared for her.