Divorced at 42, one kid, 228 pounds. My sister kept saying "get back out there." I didn't know how to date a man when I couldn't stand the woman in the mirror. I had to learn to love her before I let anyone else try. This shot was step one.
Nobody told me about the sulfur burps. That's a burp that tastes like rotten eggs and burns the back of your throat on the way up — it comes out of nowhere, in the car, at work, in the middle of a sentence. The doctor who prescribed it said "some mild nausea." She did not say I'd be Googling "why do my burps smell like eggs" at 2am. I got a Reddit thread and an ad for a lawyer.
Week 4 is when they raise your dose. Nobody mentions that's when it gets bad. The nausea wasn't car-sick nausea — it was the kind where you can't finish typing a text. I went six days without going to the bathroom and didn't know that was possible. I missed my daughter's school play because I couldn't stand up straight. I sat on the edge of the tub with the needle in my hand and almost didn't. This is the week most women quit. I'm glad I didn't, because the answer turned out to be three small things — and none of them were in the paperwork.
The nausea finally eased, and then my hair started coming out. Not a few strands — a handful in the shower drain every morning, more on the pillow, more in the brush. People had just started saying "you look great," and I was standing in the shower crying and pulling hair off my fingers, wondering if I'd traded my body for my hair.
Thirty-one pounds down, and then the scale just stopped. Twelve mornings in a row, same number. I'd survived the burps and the tub and the drain for this, and now it felt like the drug had quit on me. I had the message to my doctor typed out, asking for a higher dose. I never sent it. The thing that got the scale moving again cost me four dollars at Kroger.
181 pounds. Forty-seven gone. My sister finally got her wish — I said yes to a date. I bought a dress two sizes smaller than anything in my closet, and I looked good in it. Then I leaned into the bathroom mirror to do my makeup and my mother's face looked back at me. Cheeks gone. Jaw gone. Three months ago I couldn't stand the woman in the mirror because of her body. Now I had the body, and I was standing in the same spot, hating something new. I went on the date anyway.
I'd gotten the prescription through a telehealth site — a ten-minute video call and a box in the mail — so when things went wrong there was nobody to walk into. The notebook started as what I'd hand my real doctor once I finally got an in-person appointment, so she'd believe me. Then my coworker Karen started her shots and texted me at 11pm: is it normal to feel like this? I photographed the pages and sent them. She sent them to her sister. Her sister sent them to a Facebook group. When strangers started messaging me for "the pages," I typed them up properly. This is that.