The Decision I Made on a Hospital Trolley
On what turning points actually look like, and why willpower was never the problem.
The decision I want to tell you about was made on a hospital bed, in a corridor, being wheeled toward an operating theatre. I was not on a trolley. At 158 kilograms, that wasn’t an option.
Let me back up.
My GP had been my doctor since I was a teenager — a little older than me, someone I thought of, and still think of, as a friend who happens to have a medical degree. After years of watching my weight trend upward through the fluctuations, he sat me down for a conversation of a different kind. Not the usual review of blood tests and medication adjustments. A proper one.
He said he understood that losing weight was hard. That the conventional advice — eat less, move more — was a gross oversimplification that failed to account for the reality of what my body was actually doing. He was not there to make me feel worse about what I had tried and not achieved. But he was also not going to let me leave without being clear about what the numbers were telling him. At 158 kilograms, carrying the metabolic load of advanced Type 2 diabetes, my life expectancy was, in his professional judgement, severely compromised.
Not a lecture. A fact, delivered with the directness of someone who cares enough about you to say the hard thing.
I asked him what else there was. He thought for a moment, then told me about a procedure beginning to produce notable results — new enough that he wanted to refer me to the leading practitioner rather than attempt to summarise it himself. The procedure he was talking about was laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding, or what is now commonly referred to as a lap band.
My wife and I did our research. We attended presentations. We spoke with people who had already had the procedure — early recipients, willing to answer questions from strangers about something deeply personal. The picture that emerged was honest about the trade-offs. Certain foods would cause problems. Meals out would carry a background level of anxiety, indefinitely. The band could not stop liquid calories, so the discipline still had to be there. It was a structural constraint, not a substitute for judgement.
None of this was disqualifying. But it required honest consideration, and we gave it that. Several months of it. Weighing the risks against the alternative. Sitting with the question of whether this was the right thing to do.
In the end, we decided to go ahead.
I remember lying on the hospital bed in the pre-surgery bay, in the standard-issue gown that hospital gowns have apparently been since the beginning of time, waiting to be taken through to theatre. Two orderlies arrived with a narrower wheeled trolley — the kind used to transfer patients into the operating room. One of them asked me to slide across.
The other stopped him, took him a few steps away, and said, in the tone of someone who doesn’t think they’re being overheard: patients over 150 kilograms cannot be transferred on the trolley.
I heard it. He didn’t intend me to, and there was nothing malicious in it — just a practical observation between two people doing their jobs. But I heard it.
They wheeled the hospital bed itself into the theatre instead.
I have thought about that moment many times in the years since. At the time it hit me with a force I hadn’t expected — a sudden, stark encounter with what I had become, delivered without commentary or judgement, which somehow made it worse. I made a decision in that moment, lying on that bed being wheeled through the corridor: I was going to do whatever it took. Whatever discomfort, whatever inconvenience, whatever the procedure demanded. I was going to get my weight under control. That was not negotiable any more.
That was probably the real turning point. Not the surgery. The moment before it.
The years that followed involved karate — which deserves its own post, and will get one — and a weight loss, over time, of around 60 kilograms. My insulin requirements dropped, then disappeared. The other medications followed. For six years I managed Type 2 diabetes on no medication at all. The disease is progressive, and it came back. But those six years happened, and they happened because of a decision made in a hospital corridor that nobody planned and nobody witnessed.
What actually moved me was not discipline. It was a moment of clarity, arrived at sideways, in a context I couldn't have predicted.
Here is what I want to say about that. We talk about decisions to change as though they are acts of will — as though the problem is simply that people haven’t decided hard enough yet. That has not been my experience. What actually moved me was not discipline. It was a moment of clarity, arrived at sideways, in a context I couldn’t have predicted. The orderly wasn’t trying to help me. He didn’t know he did.
And the other thing: at no point in this story did the answer turn out to be trying harder at what hadn’t worked. It turned out to be a medical intervention. Obesity is a disease. It responds to medical treatment. The fact that we spent decades treating it as a character flaw has cost a great deal — in suffering, in shortened lives, in patients told to try harder at things that were never going to be sufficient.
I was one of those patients. For a long time.
Next week, Ground Truth moves on to another topic. If you are interested in reading more about my story dealing with diabetes, my book “The Long Road Down” is a first-hand account of what 30 years living with Type 2 diabetes is like. It is available now on Amazon.
I write about my own experience managing Type 2 diabetes — thirty-plus years of it. None of this is medical advice. Your situation is not my situation, and nothing here should be a reason to change your treatment without talking to your doctor first.