I just want to cut it off: the weight-loss patients who no longer fit their skin
Bariatric surgery is a highly cost-effective way to lose life-changing amounts of weight but the NHS rarely removes the excess skin that is left behind. Desperate patients are now crowdfunding their operations while struggling with anxiety, depression and identity issues
When Haze Atkin passed the 32kg (5st) mark on her weight-loss programme, something strange began happening to her skin. First it grew softer. Then it grew emptier. By the time she had shed her 64th kilo, her body had shrunk so much that her loose skin needed to be folded into her clothes. Now, when Haze sits, a hovercraft of skin skirts her seat. When she takes a bath, her spare skin floats. In bed, her husband Chris accidentally rests an elbow on it; he cant always be sure where Haze ends. The edges of her have become mistakable.
To her childrens delight, Haze can wobble her skin and make it talk like a puppet. Sometimes her daughter holds out her hands like a set of scales and Haze places her stomach skin on them. She thinks it weighs a stone. It has become oddly plastic, so that Haze can gather it in her hands and stretch and shake it, fold and mould it. But the one thing she can never do with her skin is forget it.
Like many people with excess skin, Haze lost a lot of weight after bariatric surgery. In the 10 months following her gastric bypass an operation the NHS has come to see as highly cost-effective she shrunk from 149kg (23.5kg) to 70kg (11st). She met all her targets. Her surgeons called her a model patient. And yet, just when Haze should have felt she had achieved her goal, her skin held her back. The scales said she had reached the end of her journey, but the mirror told a different story.
Haze is one of the 9,325 UK patients who in 2013 underwent bariatric surgery on the NHS, according to statistics held by NHS Digital. The same year, NHS England reported that the price of keyhole bariatric surgery for diabetes patients with a BMI of 35, for instance, is recoverable in just 26 months. According to projections from the Department of Health, the cost to society and the economy of people being overweight and obese could increase to almost 50bn in 2050, so it is easy to see why bariatric procedures make financial sense. But is the surgery causing a different kind of health crisis? Is such massive weight loss MWL, as healthcare professionals call it solving one problem only to create a new one, a generation of weight-loss survivors tormented by anxiety and depression because they no longer fit their skin?
Haze has a simple message to the NHS. You dont just leave people half-done. Finish it.
The NHS does perform some skin removal operations. But the only mention of skin removal in all Nices recommendations is that a multidisciplinary bariatric team provide information on, or access to, plastic surgery (such as apronectomy) when appropriate (an apronectomy is a mini tummy tuck to remove the apron of skin that hangs over the pubic area). This provision varies hugely by region. In theory, a patient needs to show that skin removal surgery is a health rather than a cosmetic intervention.
In practice, the local clinical commissioning groups, which commission NHS healthcare, rarely approve such applications which is why crowdfunding websites are full of people who have lost massive amounts of weight and are desperate to remove their skin, even if it means posting explicit, naked or near-naked photographs that play to a sort of pornography of excess skin. Hazes page has raised 332 of the 6,600 she needs for surgery. She applied to the NHS she suffers from skin infections, anxiety and depression, and believes the extra weight exacerbates her fibromyalgia (she is registered disabled). But she was rejected.