Absolutely. I gained maybe 15 pounds during 3 years of rehab after a serious leg injury, and it’s been a bitch to take them off. But in the grand scheme of things, that’s pretty minor, and I can now go out and bike 50 miles. Some people, however, allow medical issues to take over their lives entirely.
I had a friend/co-worker in her early 30s who developed severe rheumatoid arthritis in her 20s. I don’t know how much she weighed then, but last time I saw her, she probably weighed 350 pounds. She is a super-sweet person, and it was so frustrating for those of us who tried to be her friends to see her essentially killing herself through her poor lifestyle choices that we all gave up in frustration, and fell out of touch with her.
She eats nothing but crap – junk food, fried food, you name it. In the several years I saw her on a regular basis, and shared many a meal with her (both in the lunchroom at work and socially outside of work), I don’t think I ever saw her eat a vegetable or drink a plain glass of water. She has a really screwed-up relationship with food; she is obese, which puts a lot of strain on her already problematic joints, so it’s difficult for her to walk, let alone exercise, so she is depressed, so she eats, which makes it even more difficult for her to exercise – you get the picture. And she has a million excuses for the way she eats – “that’s what my mom cooks” (she had to move back in with her parents after she fell and broke a couple of vertebrae – her bones had been weakened by the steroids she takes for the rheumatoid arthritis) or “I don’t have the physical stamina to stand up long enough to cook healthy food” (when she was healthy enough to live by herself) or “the only food I can afford near work is fast food” (so then bring something from home, for chrissakes! The rest of us do) or “I can’t drink water at work because then I’ll have to use the bathroom, and it’s not handicapped accessible” (which was true, but hey, this was the year I spent on crutches and I managed it OK, even though there were steps up to the bathroom stalls because the building was an ancient semi-converted warehouse which was out of compliance with all sorts of building codes, but that’s another story).
When she fell and had major spinal surgery, we all saw this as her big chance to change her lifestyle and eating habits – the hospital sent her for a couple of months of inpatient rehab, which included frequent consultations with dieticians, exercise physiologists, etc. She actually started to lose some weight, because the rehab center was controlling her diet and her portions. We were all so excited – maybe she would get her act together, lose enough weight to take the load off her poor joints, and be functional again! But alas, once the rehab center released her to her parents’ house, she went back to eating crap (crap cooked by her mother, but crap nonetheless – I visited her there a couple of times, and saw that they eat – everything was either deep-fried or swimming in butter, and no vegetables anywhere to be found).
The whole family had weight issues, but my poor friend, only in part because of her medical problems, finally lost the battle. I hope she’s OK – haven’t talked to her in a while, and she started turning down our invitations because it was basically too big a hassle to go any where in the city (because she’s have to walk more than a few feet from her car) or anywhere with even a couple of stairs (she was using a walker for a while after the surgery, but mostly because it made her feel more comfortable and secure about her balance, not because she actually needed it to walk most of the time). So frustrating to see such a waste of human potential.
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