step 16: before the surgery

This is what my stomach looked like just before the surgery. For me personally, this was grotesque, as I usually have a board flat belly. It looked as if I were pregnant, and was very hard and uncomfortable. Cutting my toenails was a nightmare.

If I had been carrying a lot more weight I probably wouldn’t have noticed the lump, and the surgery would have been done a lot later. This would have meant that the mass would have had time to spread further into my abdomen and cause more damage than it did.