More and more seriously obese patients in the region are having surgery on the NHS. Health Editor Barry Nelson meets one patient who says her life has been transformed.

IT is still painful for Tracey Lyons to remember what it was like when she weighed almost 25 stones. That was two years ago, before an NHS “stomach stapling”

operation helped her to lose more than half of her body weight.

Now weighing just over ten stones, the 45-year-old, says she has “got her life back”.

She still doesn’t know how she managed to pile on so much weight that her health was suffering and her lifestyle was severely limited. She loved her food when she was growing up, but other members of her family did not put on weight the way she did.

Tracey, who lives in Seaton Carew, near Hartlepool, also thinks she turned to food for comfort after her husband, Leslie, suffered a brain haemorrhage which meant she had to care for him as well as their disabled son, Jack, who is now 13. “I had really bad depression, I wasn’t going out at all, I had really bad vertigo, terrible back pains and my knees hurt. I was only 43 but I felt about 60.”

She was also sick of being abused by total strangers. “I used to feel stared at and bullied. People were always making comments,” says Tracey, who remembers one nightmarish day when she was verbally abused and insulted on four occasions. “I had gone into a garage for petrol. I had my five-yearold son with me and was minding my own business when a car-load of lads started shouting obscenities at me because I was overweight. I was really upset and so was my little boy.”

Later that day, Tracey was in a clothes shop when another woman – a total stranger – leaned towards her and asked ‘do you like cream cakes… have you ever thought of going on a diet?’ “I had even more abuse shouted at me from a car as I was walking along and then another group of lads in a car shouted insults at me. It was an everyday occurrence,” she says.

She reached a turning point when she told a friend that she would be quite happy if she wasn’t around once her son had grown up. “My friend was horrified. It made me realise I had to do something about my weight.”

Tracey made some inquiries whether she could pay to have weightloss surgery privately but realised she could not afford it. “I went to see a surgeon who told me obesity was a disease and some people put on weight because they had a slow metabolism.”

About this time Tracey saw a photograph of the former lead singer of the British ska band Bad Manners, Buster Bloodvessel, on her computer.

“I couldn’t believe it. He was really overweight, but he now looked really thin. It turned out that he had had surgery.”

In the hope he might recommend her for a gastric bypass on the NHS, she sent her GP all of her details as well as information about the former Bad Manners front man. Her GP decided that Tracey met the strict criteria for NHS weight-loss surgery and referred her to the bariatric surgery unit at Sunderland Royal Hospital.

That’s where Tracey first met the man she describes as “my hero”, consultant surgeon Peter Small.

MR Small has built up the weight-loss surgery unit at Sunderland in recent years.

During 2007-8, the unit carried out 208 operations, at a cost of between £5,000 and £8,000, to reduce the weight of grossly obese patients, some weighing up to 40 stone. In the last financial year, that figure went up to 286.

The operations involve fitting a gastric band, which restricts the size of the stomach, or carrying out a gastric bypass – or stomach stapling – so that the patient eats less and absorbs fewer calories.

If the patient is serious about losing weight and meets all the criteria, Mr Small believes that weight-loss surgery can be a good use of NHS resources, improving the quality of life of patients and potentially saving the health service a fortune in caring for obese patients who would otherwise develop a range of serious conditions later in life.

When Tracey saw Mr Small for the first time she was told she would have to show she was serious about losing weight by shedding two stones. By cutting out fatty and sugary foods, Tracey managed to lose the required weight.

The next stop was to fit her with a ‘gastric balloon’ as a kind of dry run for the gastric bypass operation.

“It is inflated in your stomach and forces you to eat smaller portions. It helped me lose about five stone,” remembers Tracey.

Pleased at her progress, Mr Small booked her in for a gastric bypass on June 6, 2007. To prepare for the operation, Tracey had to go on a fruit and yoghurt diet.

After an operation lasting two and a half hours, she spent a week recovering in hospital before being allowed home.

When she got home she was allowed to eat small portions of mashed fruit for a month before being switched to a special diet. “I lived on cream cheese and yoghurt at first, you don’t go back to bread for about seven weeks,” says Tracey.

Two years down the line and Tracey’s weight has settled down and she can eat more or less what she wants – but in very small portions. “I eat like a small child,” she says.

“If I do a slice of toast for breakfast I would find it very hard to get the whole slice down. “If I cook a big dinner for the family now, I can’t eat much of it. Imagine the way you feel after eating a big dinner on Christmas Day – I feel like that after a few bites.”

Tracey can’t believe the difference the surgery has made to her life.

“I don’t have any more problems with my back, my knees stopped hurting, my ankles stopped swelling and I can play football with my son.”

She now swims three times a week and recently enrolled on a college cakeicing course – something she has always wanted to do.

“I could never find any boots that fitted me because I couldn’t zip them up. Now I can get them on without any problems, it’s great!”

All in all, Tracey says her operation has been “better than winning the Lottery”. “It is like Mr Small has given me my life back. I just hope a lot of other people can take advantage of this wonderful service.”