Last summer, as Kristen Penney prepared for gastric bypass surgery, her teenage son told her she was selfish. “You could die,” Seth Penney, 15, said.

Kristen said she quietly told her son, “Yes, I could die. Or I could wait 10 years and then die.”

When Kristen had that conversation with her son, she weighed 290 pounds. Even doing simple housework caused her heart palpitations. Her hands and feet were numb and she was chronically tired.

“I was so fat that I knew that when I left a room, people were asking behind my back, ‘Why doesn’t she do something for herself?'” the 38-year-old Pittsfield woman recalled.

In the United States, the number of gastric bypass operations performed has more than doubled in recent years. The complicated surgical procedure is considered a drastic measure to combat severe obesity. In the procedure, doctors close off most of the stomach with staples, leaving a small, egg-shaped pouch. The surgery is risky. One in five patients endures side effects ranging from vomiting and hernias to potentially fatal blood clots or infections.

Kristen saw it as a life-and-death situation when she opted to have gastric bypass surgery. To her absolute joy, it has had positive, far-reaching ramifications for every member of her family.

Today – eight months later – Kristen weighs 160 pounds, 130 pounds less than she did last summer. But the surprising bonus is that her two sons are exercising more, sometimes biking 10 miles on the weekends, and her husband has mirrored her weight-loss success. Through dieting, Dale Penney, 45, has dropped from 300 pounds to 160 pounds. He recently was given a clean bill of health; an amazing feat for a man who had suffered a heart attack and two ministrokes.

“We have a future now, where we didn’t before,” said Kristen.

The couple both can fit in a pair of Kristen’s pants from last year. Standing in their kitchen, they pulled on pants from “our fat days” and then let go. The pants fell down.

Kristen works in the management training department at MBNA in Camden.

“The hardest thing was giving up all my shoes,” Kristen laughed. She had gone from a size 8 to a 6; her clothes once were a size 28 and now are an 8. Dale has gone from a 42-inch waist to a 30. “The doctor says now I have to gain back some of the weight,” said Dale.

Kristen said she had been overweight all her life. “I seesawed in high school, gained a lot in college and gained even more once I got married – about 100 pounds in the first three or four years,” she said.

Dale said he just gained slowly over the years. With a chain of salvage stores from Pittsfield to Caribou – Penney Pinchers Discount – the family literally lived in the car.

“Fast food was our life,” said Kristen. It was a high-pressured, fast-paced life and no one had time to think about their health.

It was last summer when Kristen reached her limit. “I just felt there was no hope, that it was a life-or-death situation,” she said, so she opted for gastric bypass surgery.

The surgery, she said, is a drastic, difficult procedure. Having a support system is key.

“You can’t go into this lightly,” she said. “I suffered horrible depression, bedsores and I lost my hair.” After the surgery last August, she was placed on a diet limiting her to 600 calories per day. “I struggled to even eat that.”

“The first three months were the hardest,” said Kristen. “Plagued by infection, I took nothing by mouth for two months. I had feeding tubes in place. My boys called me the science experiment.” But it was the depression that Kristen and her family struggled the most with.

“I had to force her to get out of bed,” Dale remembered. “She had the surgery in August and didn’t eat anything until October. The first day she could have water, she sounded like empty pipes inside. You could actually hear the water going down.”

While Kristen recovered, it fell to Dale to run the household. Kristin had taken a medical leave from her job with MBNA and Dale had downsized his wholesale business and closed a store location in Dexter and another in Caribou.

“I was doing all the cooking,” Dale related, “and I was fixing three different meals a day: one for Kristen, one for the boys and one for me.”

Kristen suggested her husband start eating what she was eating.

“He began eating salads with me and immediately he started feeling better,” she said. As his wife became stronger, Dale began exercising. The couple now leaves home each morning at 4 a.m. and heads to MBNA’s exercise center, Point Lookout.

“We’re obsessed now,” said Dale.

“Yup, we’ve lost it in more ways than one,” added Kristen.

Dale said the family still keeps junk food in the house. After all, he said, they have teenagers who bring their friends over. But it is fresh food, fruit and vegetables most of the time.

“I graze,” said Kristen. “It takes me all day to eat one sandwich. My weakness used to be pizza and cheeseburgers. Dale and I share a cheeseburger now.”

The couple said they have more energy and confidence now, as well.

“I can sit down and cross my legs,” said Kristen. “It is the little things that really mean so much. When you are fat, you don’t get respect. People pretend they don’t recognize you. And yet there is not a minute that goes by that you don’t think about how you look.”

“I’m in better shape now than when I was 25,” said Dale. But it’s his state of mind that he is more proud of.

“I discovered that when it comes to your health and your family, everything else can wait. We used to have eight cell phones and now we have three. We used to have six phones in the house. We had all the money we wanted and no time to enjoy it. Now, it’s hard to picture the way we were.”

Sharon Kiley Mack can be reached at 487-3187 and bangordaily@downeast.net.