A woman who lost her kidney due to the side effects of life-saving weight loss surgery says she "regrets nothing".
Taren Maywald, 34, began putting on weight after childbirth when she had three children in the space of two years.
Her eldest daughter, Pryscilla, 15, was born in 2006, followed by her twin boys, Parker and Preston, 13, in 2008, which meant she had little time to shift her baby weight.
But the mum-of-four has struggled with her weight ever since, and over the past decade continued to pile on the pounds, with an unhealthy diet and worrying lack of exercise, HullLive reports.
In 2019 her youngest was born, and it dawned on Taren that if she didn't lose weight, her daughter's childhood would pass her by just as it had with her other children.
Weighing 420 pounds, she decided her best chance at losing weight was to travel to Mexico to undergo life-saving gastric sleeve surgery.
In August 2020, she went under the knife with the risk of never waking up from surgery, and came out the other side having lost 80% of her stomach.
Taren, originally from Tarboro, North Carolina, said : "I was told the surgery was a huge risk by the doctors but I didn't care. I wanted to give myself the best opportunity of losing weight, and the surgery was a tool which allowed me to do that
"The procedure literally shrinks your stomach and restricts what you can physically eat.
"It stopped me binging and forced me to eat like a normal person, and straight away the results started to show.
"When Alice was born it drove me to change my life, as I was faced with missing her childhood because of my weight.
"I already missed so much of my other three children's lives and I was determined not to let it happen again."
For a month after, Taren's surgery seemed to have been a raging success, as she was steadily losing weight with every day that passed.
However, at the end of September the stay-at-home mum started to suffer severe abdominal pain and gut-wrenching cramps.
When Taren went to the hospital, she was told that she'd developed kidney stones as a result of dehydration caused by the weight loss surgery.
After being admitted to the urologist, she underwent surgery on her left kidney to remove all the stones - but things didn't go to plan and several exploded inside of her.
The shrapnel from the stones buried itself in her kidney causing dozens of cists to develop - which in the end proved an inoperable condition.
Six surgeries and almost a year later, her kidney had "completely obliterated" and she was forced to have it removed.
Throughout the entire ordeal, despite living in excruciating pain, Taren was determined to build on the progress she'd made after her surgery.
She went to the gym three times a week in-between hospital appointments and maintained her strict reformed diet.
The results continued to show, and Taren now weighs a much healthier 178 pounds after shredding a whopping 17 and a half stone.
"It's been the toughest year of my life without doubt but I don't regret a single thing," she said.
"Going through this has made me a stronger person both physically and mentally, but most importantly it has enabled me to be a proper mom to Alice."
