At 30 years old, Matt Fanning battled sleep apnea and high blood pressure, but those were not his primary health concerns. At nearly 700 pounds, Fanning felt he had “one foot in the grave.”
He desperately needed help.
It wasn’t always this way. Fanning’s weight spiraled out of control in his 20s, but even then, he enjoyed life – going on outings with his mother and family cruise trips. Yet, with each cruise, his mobility worsened until he finally bought a heavy-duty wheelchair for his last trip, which was postponed because of the pandemic.
Now, more than two years after starting his search for a bariatric surgeon willing to help, Fanning is no longer on the brink of death. He’s embracing better health and rediscovering activities he hasn’t done in years: fishing, bowling, going to the movies, and cheering his nephew on at a baseball field.
The turning point came after his mother died from chronic health issues. In the months that followed, he was also fortunate to find a bariatric surgeon more than 1,100 miles away who would help him.
Growing up in Texas
As a child, Fanning lived in “the middle of nowhere” outside Angleton, Texas, but he had two neighborhood friends that he spent hours with outside. About the time he turned 10, his friends moved away and outdoor adventures all but ended. Fanning began playing video games inside, watching endless hours of cooking shows on television and snacking on unhealthy foods.
He still played soccer, though, and in the eighth grade, he joined the football team. His coach nicknamed him “man child,” and he only played that one year.
By high school, Fanning was 5-foot-9-inches tall and wearing a 4XL shirt.
Academically, Fanning was always at the top of his class, and his teachers loved him. After graduation, he attended the University of Houston, about an hour’s drive from his hometown, but it did not go well.
“I didn’t want to go to class – I think I was depressed. I just couldn’t get up and do it,” he said. “But there are only so many days you can tell your parents that class got canceled, so I’d get up, get ready and leave but not go to class. I’d go to a movie or somewhere else.”
Fanning spent his afternoons enjoying all-you-can-eat shrimp at Red Lobster or pasta and breadsticks at Olive Garden. Then he’d hit up a matinee at a nearby movie theatre, ordering chips lathered in creamy nacho sauce.
“That’s when I skyrocketed out of control,” he said, noting that he never weighed himself but figured he must have been approaching 600 pounds.
He left college to pursue full-time work as a yard driver with a railroad subcontractor.
Finding and keeping employment when you’re experiencing severe obesity
In train yards, the conductor inspects the entire train before departure. In some cases, a train could be two miles long, so Fanning’s job was to drive the conductor in a shuttle van back to the main engines, saving valuable time, or drive the conductors to a different train yard to meet with their next engine.
Fanning always enjoyed his job, but it also meant spending hours cramped behind a steering wheel. In 2020, when he began driving for a new Union Pacific contractor, he couldn’t fit behind the wheel of the company’s shuttle van. Luckily, the contractor had one vehicle in its fleet that would work for Fanning, but asking for that accommodation caused him concern. He worried about losing his job if that vehicle ever broke down. Without a job, he feared he might never leave his house again.
“I want to go to work. I don’t want to live off the government,” Fanning said. “I was staring at the fact that if I’m not leaving my house to go to work, I would be in my bed the rest of my life and die in a year or two.”
Then, one day, his fear nearly became a reality.
“I was getting ready for work,” he said. “I put on my shoes and walked out of my room. Walking down the hall, I started to get really dizzy. I got to my chair, but the room was spinning. It wouldn’t stop.”
He called his boss to tell her he couldn’t drive, and he stayed home from his night shift. When the dizziness hadn’t subsided by the next afternoon, he went to the emergency room.
“They wanted to do an MRI to rule out things like a stroke, but they had to get a weight on me to know if they could use the MRI,” he said.
Doctors used a platform scale to weigh Fanning. He was 695 pounds – too heavy for their MRI machine.
“They spent over an hour calling every hospital in the Houston area, and no one had an MRI machine that could hold my weight,” he said. “That was a big awakening for me.”
Fear drove Fanning to begin looking for help to control his weight. He looked for bariatric surgeons, who would not take him as a patient because he weighed too much. He would need to lose several hundred pounds before any of them would operate.
Fanning felt hopeless.
In January 2023, a year after his search began, Fanning came upon the story on UCHealth Today about Katie Peterson, a nearly 900-pound woman in rural Wyoming who got bariatric surgery from a doctor at UCHealth in Colorado.
“I thought, ‘That’s where I need to go,’” Fanning said.
With so many miles between Angleton and northern Colorado, that was easier said than done. Peterson’s physician, Dr. Robert Quaid, was a two-day drive away for Fanning, and his health insurance through work only covers preventative care and wellness visits. Fanning did not think he could afford bariatric surgery.
“I’d given up,” Fanning said. “And I thought it didn’t matter anyways because my mom’s health was in bad shape at that point, and I knew I couldn’t do it by myself.”
Motivation to take the next step in his weight loss journey
Sadly, Fanning’s mother, Frances, died in May 2023. She was just shy of 70 years old. Her death devastated him. He and his mother were quite close, and they did many things together.
“She was my cruise partner for our first three cruises,” he said. “I had given her the first (cruise trip) as a Christmas gift. Then, the second, more family (members) came. But mom was always there.
“Dad doesn’t always like to go out and do things, so I’d go with my mom to the Renaissance festivals and casinos. To get out of the house, we’d head to Dallas for a drive-thru safari or visit venues with medieval themes. We didn’t talk a lot about our health – she liked to live in the moment,” he said.
His mother also struggled with her weight, which Fanning said contributed to a multitude of health issues that eventually led to her death.
When she died, Fanning again became motivated to take his next step.
Getting the help needed for weight loss
In June 2023, Fanning called the UCHealth Bariatric Center of the Rockies – Harmony Campus in Fort Collins, Colorado.
“You can imagine how defeated he felt,” said Michelle Carpenter, the center’s bariatric program nurse navigator who first talked with Fanning. “He reached out to me to see if Dr. Quaid would consider him for bariatric surgery. Of course, Dr. Quaid said ‘yes.’”
Dr. Quaid has performed more than 3,000 bariatric surgeries in 28 years and has listened intently to the stories of the patients who have sought his help.
“There is always a medical reason for the patient’s extreme weight,” Quaid said. “I want to take the shame off the person and tell them not to give up hope. Maybe some will say no to helping you – Matt got that – but keep the hope, and you can be helped.
“For people struggling, we all need that hope.”
Quaid stressed the importance of having a good support system for anyone having bariatric surgery, and Fanning had strong support. But he still needed to pay for the surgery without insurance.
Fanning’s dad, David, looked into loans and credit card opportunities to help his son.
Then, out of the blue, Fanning’s nephew got in a terrible crash while driving David’s car. Fortunately, Fanning’s nephew walked away with minor injuries, but the vehicle was totaled. With the car insurance money and the self-pay discount offered by UCHealth, David had the funds for his son’s surgery.
“Call it divine intervention, but that’s what happened, and so we were able to pay for my surgery, and my nephew was lucky as well to walk away from such a bad accident,” Fanning said.
Fanning and David scheduled their first trip to Colorado in August 2023.
Coming to Colorado for Bariatric Surgery
Fanning met with Quaid and his team for a preoperative visit before surgery could be scheduled.
“It was a long week of being poked and prodded, but I got it all done,” said Fanning, who weighed 692 pounds during the visit. “Surprisingly, there was not a lot wrong with me. I had sleep apnea and high blood pressure, but my heart was strong, and I had no diabetes. So surgery was scheduled.”
Fanning and David returned to Colorado in mid-November, a few weeks before Fanning’s 32nd birthday. In preparation for the surgery, Fanning had followed a liquid diet for two weeks, a necessary step to shrink the liver and make the procedure easier for the surgeons. By the morning of the operation, Fanning weighed 636 pounds.
Quaid performed a robotic sleeve gastrectomy, a procedure to remove 80% of the stomach and leave it as a small tube. This limits the amount of food a patient can consume, but more importantly, it causes many changes in the body that improve medical problems and reset the body’s desired weight to a lower level.
“The only pain I had from surgery was heartburn,” Fanning said. “It was a breeze.”
Although Fanning said he didn’t experience any adverse side effects from the surgery, many patients experience gas and other pains. Of all bariatric surgeries, sleeve gastrectomy surgery has the lowest morbidity and mortality rates. That’s one of the reasons why it has become the most popular weight loss procedure in the United States during the last two decades. Its popularity is also due to favorable outcomes, including the resolution of comorbidities.
Fanning stayed in Fort Collins for his post-op visit a week after surgery. He left with strict instructions on what and how to eat, along with a regimen of bariatric vitamins and a walking schedule.
“One time, I did eat chicken soup too fast and threw up, but ever since it has been good, and I haven’t had any issues,” Fanning said.
On July 2, 2024, Fanning weighed 416 — 276 pounds less than he weighed the day of his surgery.
“I’ve been doing things I haven’t done in years,” Fanning said. “I took my sister and her kids to the ‘Inside Out 2” movie. ‘Avengers: Endgame,’ in 2019, was the last time I went to the movie theater.
“Then I took my niece and nephew fishing a couple of weeks ago… I hadn’t fished in about six years. And I went bowling a few weeks ago, and it’s been even longer since I did that.”
“At six months, his labs were all perfect,” Quaid said. “He is doing everything right.”
Fanning is also spending days on the beach and at the pool with his family. He even had the energy to accompany his nephew’s team on the baseball field to celebrate their championship win this spring.
Before surgery, he was quickly exhausted.
“I didn’t have the energy, but now I do,” he said.
Everyday tasks are easier, too.
“I walk every day and can shower without having to sit on the side of the tub,” he said.
But there are more challenges ahead.
Fanning’s skin, which used to hold considerable weight, hangs around his waist, causing him back pain. He cuts through the pain with humor but hopes to save enough money to have the extra skin removed.
“My stomach hangs down because I still have that loose skin,” he said. “I laugh because it floats up like a big life vest around my middle when I’m in the water.”
Like Katie Peterson in Wyoming, Fanning may need a second bariatric surgery at some point, though Quaid said they will wait and see. In the meantime, Fanning continues to follow his doctors’ instructions and enjoys his new freedom.
By September, he had reached new milestones. He had lost more than 300 pounds, dropping his weight to under 400 pounds for the first time in decades.
He’s also planning another cruise trip—this time, he said, the wheelchair will stay home. With newfound energy, he envisions himself strolling through vibrant port towns and diving into the ship’s diverse activities. His journey to a healthier life is just beginning, and the horizon looks more spectacular than ever.