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PART 1 OF A 2-DAY SERIES
Surgery helps woman find her inner princess by shedding nearly 300 pounds
Saturday, April 26, 2008
As little girls growing up in New Lebanon, Heather Grill and big sister Amanda fantasized about finding Prince Charming and dressing up like a princess in a fairy-tale wedding.
Somewhere along the road, Heather lost sight of that dream.
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Get latest headlines via RSS feedsShe knew that nobody would ever marry her. The only attention she got from boys was mean-spirited.
When she was 4, a little boy told her she could never get to heaven because "fat people can't wear angel wings."
In sixth grade, the same bully pushed her down the stairs, just to watch her roll.
At 12, she struggled to breathe one day on the soccer field. She stopped playing her favorite sport.
By the time she turned 17, she weighed 535 pounds.
Her life constricted as her waistline expanded. Her daily routine devolved into a complex regime of 26 pills and hanging out at home with the family cats and dogs.
She couldn't swing on a swing. She couldn't ride on a roller coaster. She couldn't buy clothes at Wal-Mart, but paid $60 for size 36 pants at specialty shops. She couldn't paint her toenails or tie her shoes.
"A good outing for me is not to get made fun of," she said in 2004. "I can sit on my front porch and people driving by will throw stuff at me, call me a fat ass, point and laugh."
Four years later, no one is laughing — except for Heather, now 21.
Instead of 535 pounds, she weighs about 250.
And she no longer fantasizes about a fairy-tale wedding; she can just look back on her actual one. On Nov. 9, 2007, she married Sanford Gruber, 27, the man she calls her soulmate.
"Three years ago, we couldn't have foreseen this day," her father, Russ Grill, said before the ceremony.
A short time later, he led his newly married daughter onto the dance floor, where they waltzed to Tim McGraw's "My Little Girl."
"She is so beautiful," her grandmother Oretha Grill whispered. "Just like a princess."
Sept. 28, 2004: Kettering Medical Center
As Heather is wheeled in for bariatric weight-loss surgery, her father holds up her good-luck charm — an orange stuffed monkey named Bananas.
Russ Grill is crying as his daughter strokes her treasured childhood toy, but Heather flashes her killer smile. "I know God brought me to this place," she tells her father.
Russ has been waiting for this day — fighting for this day — for so long.
And now he's scared to death.
Heather is undergoing a risky weight-loss surgery known as a Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, which will shrink her stomach by more than 90 percent.
"If anything happened to her, I could never forgive myself," Grill says as he and his wife Michele wait for Heather to come out of surgery.
Although Heather's obesity presents serious health issues, Grill's insurance company refuses to cover the nearly $30,000 bill for the operation.
"That was like saying my life wasn't worth the cost of the surgery," Heather says.
For her family, the surgery is anything but cosmetic, as the insurance company contended. It is lifesaving. Heather's health has been ravaged by her persistent weight gain. Her heart is enlarged, her blood pressure too high. She has developed circulation problems in her legs as well as extreme swelling. "Monstrous," she calls them.
She never lies down without being hooked up to her CPAP breathing machine to treat severe sleep apnea. "My biggest fear is not waking up," she says. "I'm only a teenager. I don't want to die. I haven't done anything with my life yet."
For years she has struggled with depression, sometimes cutting herself lightly with a razor blade. "It came from not having a normal life, from all the teasing and tormenting and bullying over the years," she explains. "I cut myself to ease the pain. It was a kind of personal therapy, I guess."
Observed her father, "She hasn't gotten to be a teenaged girl. She always had to wear older people's clothes. She couldn't go out dancing and have a good time with her friends."
As he witnessed his daughter's suffering, Grill vowed, "I'm going to dedicate my life to make sure this gets done."
He lobbied his congressman, talked to anybody who would listen. At times even he felt deflated. "We were up against 14 lawyers for an insurance company," he recalled.
The solution came from an unlikely source: Russ' father, Dan Grill, bedridden with emphysema, tethered to oxygen 24 hours a day. The 72-year-old Brookville man brainstormed the idea of contacting Dayton Daily News columnist Dale Huffman.
Thousands of readers were moved by Huffman's July 13, 2004, front-page story about Heather's plight — among them Dr. John Maguire, who had been performing gastric bypass surgeries for 27 years. He offered to perform Heather's surgery for free.
"My angels," Heather has taken to calling Huffman and Maguire and the staff at Kettering Medical Center, many of whom also donated their services.
Heather isn't worried about the risks, even though the Roux-en-Y gastric bypass carries a 1-in-300 risk of death nationally. The mortality rate for Maguire's practice is 1-in-1,000, according to Kim Hedgcorth, his certified medical assistant. The leading cause of death: a pulmonary embolism.
"I have complete confidence in Dr. Maguire's staff," Heather says. "I'm tired of living a life where I'm always wanting to be someone else."
No one doubts Heather's determination. She dropped 32 pounds before the surgery, weighing in at 503 that morning. "I don't think she'll do well, I know she'll do well," her father says. "She is so dedicated to this."
Heather's role model is her aunt, Danetta Grill Brubaker, who has kept her weight off for more than 20 years after having gastric bypass surgery.
"You're my hero," Heather tells her before the surgery.
"I'm not your hero, I'm your aunt," Brubaker replies.
Upon reflection, Aunt Danetta decides that Heather is her hero: "She had to wait so long and yet never lost her faith it would happen."
After one hour and 15 minutes in surgery, Heather smiles and waves as orderlies bring her into the recovery room.
"Are you hurting, sugar?" her mother asks.
"A little," Heather admits, still smiling as she adds, "This is my new birthday."
Oct. 5, 2004: First post-surgery appointment
The two weeks since the surgery have been far from easy. Retention sutures and staples run from beneath her breasts to her belly button, crisscrossing like railroad tracks. "They hurt," Heather says.
It hurts to cough, it hurts to breathe and it definitely hurts to walk.
She knows, however, that she has to fight through the pain. She is up and walking within 12 hours of her surgery, to prevent blood clots, and by the second day she is doing 10 laps around the nurses' station.
By the time she makes it to her first post-surgery appointment with her surgeon, she has managed to walk a half-mile to the park, stopping only once. For her that's the equivalent of running a marathon.
The digital scale in Dr. Maguire's office blinks red: 479 pounds.
Heather steps off the scale, beaming.
"It's the first time I've been below 500 in two years," she says.
"That's a pretty good start," Maguire tells her. "I don't want to disappoint you, but you won't lose that much each time. The stress of the surgery jump-starts the weight loss."
He is preaching to the converted. Heather has memorized all the literature and religiously attended pre-surgery classes.
"Bariatric surgery is not the easy way out," she declares. "It takes time and conscientious effort to lose the weight. If you cheat or don't do what you're supposed to do, you gain everything right back."
Maguire said surgery should be the last resort, particularly with such a young patient. In Heather's case, he said, the risk of death from morbid obesity far outweighed the surgery risk.
Heather said she "tried everything" before signing on for the surgery. "Every time I lost weight, it would come back with friends," she lamented. "People who have never had a weight problem don't understand — they think you eat Twinkies all day."
Obesity runs in Grill's family, but Heather's condition was far more extreme than any of her relatives'.
"It's not her fault, it really isn't," her father said. "She tried everything. She went on a protein diet and lost her hair."
In fourth grade she weighed 300 pounds. By seventh grade she was 380, before finally topping 500 as a high school sophomore.
Maguire said Heather's weight problem most likely stemmed from a combination of unlucky genes and unhealthy habits. "There's more that we don't know about obesity than we do know," he said.
The excessive weight made it difficult to exercise, creating a vicious cycle of weight gain.
"I can get around a lot easier now," Heather says two weeks after the surgery. "I still get the usual stares, but I've just got to keep going."
She misses nothing about her old life.
Well, maybe one thing.
"I miss Twizzlers," she admits.
May 15, 2005: Her first fashion show
Heather never went to her high school prom, never felt good enough about her body to shop for a pretty, feminine dress.
But by mid-May she has lost 143 pounds and is ready for her first fashion show — "A Celebration of a New Life" — featuring models who are Maguire's bariatric surgery patients.
Heather already has dropped from size 36 to size 26, and enjoys strutting her stuff in an elegant black silk dress with a white lace shawl.
The bariatric patients form a tight-knit group who swap clothes when they no longer fit. "It's too expensive to buy new clothes all the time when you're losing weight that fast," Heather explains. They meet for monthly support groups in what they call "the safe room."
Here everyone knows the language of weight-loss surgery. They understand that Splenda is OK but sugar is to be avoided at all costs to avoid the dreaded "dumping syndrome" — flulike symptoms combined with diarrhea. They know that they'll forever be a cheap date, because alcohol is verboten: empty calories.
The hardest part for Heather, as for many bariatric patients, is getting enough protein with a stomach shrunk to the size of a thumb.
Initially patients can consume only one to two tablespoons of food at a sitting. "I have to force myself to eat sometimes," she says.
The fashion show is just one of many landmarks in Heather's post-surgery life.
In January 2005 her sister Amanda gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth.
Heather now frequently baby-sits her niece, chasing after the active toddler.
Another highlight: going to Kings Island for the first time. "I rode every single roller coaster and wanted to go back for more," she said.
She now fits comfortably in a seat at the movie theater and can slide into a booth at a restaurant. Nobody stares.
Five months after the surgery she earns her temporary driver's license. It was made possible because, for the first time in years, she can buckle her seat belt.
She soon crosses another hurdle. Heather played trombone in grade school but by eighth grade she was sidelined to the pep band, unable to march or to find a uniform her size.
But in October 2005, she proudly takes her place beside her mother and sister and marches in the Dixie High School alumni band in New Lebanon.
She marks milestone after milestone, never suspecting the biggest is yet to come.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2209 or mmccarty@DaytonDailyNews.com.
