Doctor to Patient: Lose weight or I won’t operate

A local doctor told this woman that he could not and would not help her with the surgery she needs until the weight came off. And that’s a tough thing to hear. As you can imagine, she was really mad when she heard that. She was ticked off. Yeah. So Kendra Conlan shows you what happened after the doctor’s painful words actually sunk in.

I started at 397. This is Maryland Fontana at nearly 400 pounds. I could hardly even stand on my legs. I mean that’s how bad they were. So that is bone on bone, severe arthritis.

She turned to Dr. Grant Garlick at Florida Orthopaedic Institute for what Maryland thought would be a quick fix, total knee replacement surgery. He told me he wouldn’t touch him, touch me in surgery if I didn’t lose some weight.

She was overweight to a certain extent. And the problem with that is that it puts extra stress on the joints. So whether or not a joint is replaced, the extra weight still can cause knee pain. I actually had to tape two measuring tapes together.

Dr. Garlick solution, he referred Maryland, she was 74 inches around, to health coach Lisa Shaker-Knopp at Shake It Off. But you were about that big around. And this is Maryland now. It’s very crazy, very crazy. 74 inches around and now not even one measuring tape.

Two months later I’m at 197 down 200 pounds with a little hard to hear motivation. He said he wouldn’t touch me in surgery and I’m going to be very honest. It was very hard, hurtful. I appreciate now that bluntness. I didn’t then, but I do now.

If this represents five pounds of fat, Marilyn has already lost 40 of these and now she finally has her surgery scheduled. She’ll get it done in two weeks, but she says she’s not done taking off the weight yet. She wants to lose about another 30 pounds about this much and has big goals what she’ll do when she loses it. And we’re going to Italy and so I said, I’ll have two good knees to start walking around all of Italy. It was a little tough love, but in the end she’s happy because it’s been life-altering and life-changing for her.

I thank him and I think Lisa, because if it wasn’t for those two, I wouldn’t be where I’m at right now. So proud of you.
So proud of you. Thank you for everything. I love you. I’m so excited. Thank you.

In Brandon, Kendra Conlan, 10 News.

That is absolutely outstanding. That is not an easy thing to do. It’s not an easy thing to hear. And Kendra just came by and she told us that the brochure that he sent her home, she threw it in the garbage and she was mad and it took that night to just kind of think about it a little bit and look what it did for her. Amazing. And Dr. Garlick’s actually going to be the one that performs Maryland’s surgery. A patient has to have a body mass index less than 40 before he’ll operate. She’s there now. She did it otherwise he says there’s a 30% chance of very serious complications. It drops to 4% with all that weight loss, it’s huge. Percentage drop. One seeing Kendra pick up each of those five pounds of what she had on her. Good for her.