She had prepared a speech. Something about health, about quality of life, about wanting to see her forties without a CPAP machine and a cane. But what came out was: “I’m tired. I’m so tired of carrying all this weight. Not just the kilograms. The shame. The way people look at me on the subway. The way I look at myself.”
At forty-three years old, Mariana weighed 142 kilograms. The number lived in her head like a squatter she couldn’t evict. She knew it by heart, just as she knew the disappointed sigh of her general practitioner, Dr. Sosa, every time he read her blood pressure numbers. “Mariana, the heart doesn’t negotiate,” he would say, tapping his pen against her chart. “And your knees are those of a seventy-year-old.” cirugia bariatrica argentina
He pulled out a pamphlet. On the cover was a photo of a smiling woman holding an apple. “We require six months of preoperative preparation. Nutritional counseling, psychological evaluation, exercise therapy. This is not a shortcut. It’s a restructuring of your entire life.” She had prepared a speech