Obese Siblings Risk Home for Weight-Loss Surgery

Jan. 24, 2006 — -- For Cyrus and Sheila Tehrani, a brother and sister from Los Angeles, weight has been a lifelong enemy.

At age 11, an already pudgy Sheila was an experienced dieter. Her parents sent her to undergo electric-shock therapy to curb her love of sweets.

Later, Cyrus followed suit. The married father of six grew so large he could barely squeeze into his car.

"It's not that I feel responsible for his weight," Sheila said. "He's made choices and done that to himself, but I feel like I sort of set the tone."

By 2004, Cyrus and Sheila weighed in at nearly 600 pounds a piece. At their heaviest, Cyrus weighed 578 pounds; Sheila, 579.

The siblings were so heavy that doctors put them in a whole new weight category: super-duper obese.

"A cardiologist I didn't even know picked up my chart and started reading and said: 'I give you about five or 10 years, if that. You need to do something,'" Cyrus said.

With their weight severely straining their internal organs, gastric bypass surgery was too dangerous. They had one hope: lapband surgery -- a new procedure in which a synthetic ring is attached to the top of the stomach, reducing the size of the opening from a silver dollar to a dime.

But because Cyrus and Sheila were so heavy, Cyrus' insurance company deemed the procedure -- which costs $25,000 -- too risky.

"It's kind of incredible to say you weigh too much for weight-loss surgery," said Carson Liu, their surgeon at the Surgical Weight Control Center. "I'd never heard of that."

To get the money to pay for the surgery, Cyrus and Sheila refinanced the home they'd grown up in. If there were costly medical complications, they stood to lose everything.

"I had to risk and I have risked my childhood home," Cyrus said. "That's the only means that I had to accomplish this task."

Cyrus and Sheila owe $730 a month for the next 30 years to pay off the $100,000 home-equity loan they borrowed to finance the surgeries and additional operations they may need later to remove excess skin.

But they say it's been worth it. Since the operation on June 7, Cyrus has lost 150 pounds and Sheila has lost 118.

"It's increased at least 100 percent of what I can do as what I could do before," Cyrus said. "The fact that I'm not squeezing behind the steering wheel, the fact that I can stand up out of bed."

Sheila knows she has a long way to go, but says it's a good start.

"At Christmas, I went shopping with one of my best friends and went walking around the mall and I haven't done that in awhile," she said.

Cyrus and Sheila, always close, say today they're closer than ever -- that in the process of losing, they've gained something in return.

"This is a brother and sister team that really motivated each other," Liu said. "They put everything on the line. They put their house on the line. They put their life on the line."

Cyrus says that is the way they were raised. "It's all about family," he said. "If you don't got family, then you don't got nothing."