Gastric Bypass

I’ve been considering gastric bypass surgery seriously for about three years. For the past eight months, I’ve been jumping through the necessary hoops.
The necessary hoops include the information meeting, the meet-the-surgeon meeting, the support group meeting. I lost the 12 pounds the surgeon required me to lose. Then I met with the psychiatrist to see whether I was mentally and emotionally stable enough to have the surgery and succeed at the weight loss. I’m ready to go. I just need to schedule a surgery date.
Now, let’s be honest here. Gastric bypass surgery is nothing more than surgically-enforced portion control. It’s the surgical removal of 90% of a perfectly healthy, optimally-operating organ because the patient can’t keep her big mouth shut.
Sure, it works, although the literature they give you is quick to point out that you’ll lose about half of what you want to lose, and then you’ll gain half of that back. Math has never been my strong suit, but this works out (trust me) to a sorta-kinda promise that you will probably lose about 25% of what you fantasized you would lose.
So, utopianly, I’d like to lose 100 pounds. Given the above math, I’ll eventually go from 220 to 170 and then gain back up to 195. That makes no sense whatever. But let’s just say I was able to lose and keep off the 100 pounds. Let’s just say I could live the rest of my life at 120 pounds. Wouldn’t that be the greatest thing in the history of the entire world?
What I wouldn’t give for that!
It gets better: the whole thing is free to me. It’s all covered by our health insurance. I wouldn’t have to pay a nickel.
Even better—I’m so on track with this that I could schedule my surgery before the end of 2012. I could be thin by next summer. Really thin. After all these years—these decades—of hoping and trying and praying and working and depriving myself, I could be thin.
That kind of thin—that 120 pounds thin—is something I have not been since one freakish summer starvation diet in college. I was thin for about six weeks. To get there again, to be thin for real would be amazing. Would be life-affirming. I don’t know if such a thing can be overstated. Thin people won’t understand this, but every fatty does: to be thin is something we would do almost anything to achieve.
And yet, I don’t think I will do it. It seems somehow wrong to cut out a perfectly good organ (and yet I made my husband have a perfectly healthy function disabled a few years ago). It seems like giving up. It seems weak—like I should be able to lose this weight on my own—with my own effort, through my own vigilant self-control.
Or is it that I so identify as a fat person that this “easy fix” would somehow invalidate me?
I’ve jumped through the hoops. I can schedule the surgery. I can be thin by spring. I could go to Hawaii next summer and not be the fat one on the beach. My boys could go to their sports activities and not have kids say, “Why is your mom so fat?” I could go through my day unashamed, not worried that people are disgusted. I could feel pretty.  
It’s entirely my choice. I just have to make the call. I don’t know what to do.

-Olivia