Skin Tight
Gravesend resident Marilyne Walker, 37, wishes she could sell her skin. “It’s the only thing I have too much of. But I can’t afford to get rid of it,” she said. “People buy hair, people buy internal organs, but only Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs had a use for human skin—and then he wasn’t paying for it.” She chuckled but it tapered off quickly. Walker’s situation is actually quite serious.
Walker has several square feet of excess skin that she needs removed, but she can’t afford the surgery. At the Starbucks where we met near her old office—a now shuttered real estate firm in Midtown—she sipped on a grande drip coffee of the day.
“Two years ago at this time, I could barely finish a short 8-ouncer,” she said with a hint of nostalgia and disappointment.
Two and a half years ago, Walker underwent gastric bypass surgery. She had been morbidly obese at 347 pounds and just 5-foot, 3-inches tall. She had trouble breathing and moving quickly. It had gotten so bad she stopped traveling on the subway during rush hour because she needed enough room to sit. “People don’t look at obesity as a disability. So they wouldn’t offer me a seat, even though I was medically disabled,” she said. Walker would go to work at 6 am, leave around 3, and go to bed before prime-time shows were over at 9:30. Her general practitioner suggested the surgery.
“I had already tried every diet. The South Beach Diet, Atkins, The Cookie Diet, I tried it all and didn’t lose an ounce. I tried walking one subway stop further away in the mornings, get myself a little exercise, but it took just too long. I have battled with my weight since puberty, and it really felt like it was out of my control.”
She took out some pictures from her wallet. The edges of the photos were pulpy, the plastic sheaths ripped. It looked as though she’d been carrying them around for a very long time.
“Here I am when I was 9, skinny as a twig.”
In the picture she wore a sunshine yellow T-shirt, a pink tutu and white tights. She was standing on one foot as though ready to do a pirouette. In the lower left hand corner was a close-up, blurry pair of clapping hands.
“And here I am when was 13.” She put the photo on the table.
It looked like a wholly different little girl. In this shot, she was sitting on a piano bench smiling. But her cheeks protruded so far it made her forehead appear too short. Her breasts looked as though they had grown straight into a D cup. A roll of fat spilled out between her T-shirt and her pants.
Surgery was her last resort, but an essential move if she wanted to live a full life, her doctor said. Statistics show it’s an increasingly popular decision. The Imaginary Medical Association of New York reported that ten years ago only 1,300 gastric bypass surgeries were performed in the state. In 2009, this figure was up to 35,000.
When her doctor suggested the surgery, Walker bristled in agreement.
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