I meant to post this sooner, but, you know, life happened.

My appointment and the paranoia-inducing spot on my thumb update:

I’m so ready to punch my GP right in the balls. Yeah, I said it. You see, when I sat down to get The Spot looked at, I told him that I had concerns about cancer. Breast cancer that morphed into liver, bone, etc cancers killed my grandmother. My mother has a freaking brain tumor. Weird little spot in the country where skin cancer is the big cancer?

I’ll take ‘how to freak JM out for $500, please’. Instead of reassuring me, my GP had me freaking out even worse. That’s why I was so nervous! And why I wanted my appointment moved ahead. He told me how weird it was to get a spot on my thumb and how it looked odd, etc, etc.

Lo and behold…

I went to the dermatologist who didn’t even think it was worth removing. ‘Just a mole. Looks like any other, and it’s not odd to have it on your thumb. If it keeps getting bigger and you’re worried, come back to see me.’

Simple as that!

So on one hand, I am relieved that I don’t have anything to worry about. At least for a long time yet. On the other hand, I don’t want to see a doctor who is just going to play up my fears. I wonder if he got some sort of referral fee…

Life moves on and the typing is as fast as ever. Phew!

I called the skin clinic and asked them to notify me of any cancellations. My little sunspot is getting darker and growing, so waiting another few weeks was beginning to grind on me.

Lo and behold, someone cancelled! I’ll be getting it removed on Thursday. Woot!

A while ago, I heard the word ‘liposuction’ and was surprised when I had an ‘oh, hell no’ reaction. Why was I surprised? Because I had no information whatsoever. I didn’t know how it worked, what the doctors did…

And so I went on a quest for knowledge. I asked around at all my weight loss support groups, on my blogs, and even on my work forum.

The number of responses has been fantastic. Thank you to everyone who voted and/or commented.

I was expecting the results somewhat, but I was quite surprised at the strength of the responses.

More people than not are saying that they would have weight loss surgery and 65% percent of the people who voted said a straight yes.

I grew up with the mentality that anything that wasn’t worked for with blood, sweat and tears isn’t something anyone deserves to have. Thus, for a long time, weight loss surgery seemed wrong to me.

Then I started meeting people who couldn’t lose weight. They faced their addictions, their psychological ties to food, ate right, exercised, and yet they couldn’t lose the weight. Were they to be condemned because their bodies didn’t work quite right?

I feel much better having a wider vision of what weight loss surgery is, how it works, and what life is like for people afterwards. I hope you feel the same.

You hear about it all the time. From women getting boob jobs on their lunch breaks to the ‘extreme makeover’ generation completely changing their looks through various procedures and surgeries.

Given how hard it is to lose weight, it’s no wonder a lot of people look to weight loss surgery as a quick and ‘easy’ solution to the whole weight loss thing.

I’ve been asking around on my other sites, and now I’d like to ask you – would you ever have weight loss surgery of any type?

I used to think my answer was a simple one: No.

However, as I keep working at losing weight and talk to other people, I find that I can’t say a simple ‘no’ anymore.

What if you find, due to some twist of fate or a medical condition, you simply can’t lose the weight? You eat right, exercise every day, all the things that should help you with a slow and steady weight loss…and one or two years later you’ve lost nothing.

Would that change you from the against side to the for side? Would you ‘keep on truckin’ with tradition or try weight loss surgery?

On the other side, there are, of course, who don’t try traditional diet and exercise and go straight for the knife.

What do you think? Where do you draw your line in the sand? What do you think about people who don’t have the same line as you?