DeniseK
I have been overweight my entire life. Oh sure as a kid I was the heaviest of all my friends at a size 14. But I felt like a huge monster compared to all the skinny girls. I grew up in the age of Twiggy. So maybe it was a self fulfilling prophecy to gain as much weight as I did as an adult. I don’t know, but now I look how I’ve always felt.
I have been researching the Lap-band for about a year now. I actively started pursuing it in March of 2004. I have been officially denied by my insurance for the last time. I believe in this surgery so much that I am going to pay for it myself. I am scared, but I feel like this is my only hope. I've tried everything to lose weight. I feel like the band will be an empowering tool. I just hope all goes well as I can't afford any complications.
Had Surgery on 09-08-04. No complications. Everything went very smoothly. Today is 10-14-04 I am 5 weeks post op and ready for a fill. I am finding it is not easy to get in for a fill with Dr. White which is very frustrating. The fills are what make this band work and right now I feel like I have no restriction what-so-ever. I know this is normal in the beginning, but I am ready to move on to the next stage. It is getting very hard to not get disappointed. I have lost about 20 pounds, but lost that with the pre-op diet and 1 week post-op. I have been stuck here every since then. Luckily I am still maintaining that loss, but I'm ready to lose some more!
I finally had my fill on 10-27-04. I have started losing again and I think the longer I have this fill the tighter I am getting. Sounds crazy, but as time goes on it seems I can eat less than before. This is a good thing as I'd like to wait until January before getting another fill. So far I have lost about 30 pounds. This past weekend was Thanksgiving weekend and how awesome it was to not overdo it as I would have in the past! I love my band!
Not anymore, fast forward to summer 2005, my band slipped. I didn’t really know it. I just kept going in for fills and it didn’t really seem to do anything for me. Then my surgeon would say well it looks like the band has slipped a little. I’ll add just a little more saline and see if that helps. Well then I started having bad problems with reflux at night. So I went back and he took most of my fill out in late Nov. 2005. I went back late Jan. 2006 to get refilled. The band had not migrated back to where it is supposed to be. Doc says I need surgery to reposition the band.
Great! I was a self pay because my insurance wouldn’t cover the original surgery. So I start checking into having the revision. It’s going to cost as much as the original surgery! This is simply because it is essentially the same surgery all over again. Well I start thinking if it slipped once, why won’t it slip again? My husband thinks I did something wrong to make it slip, so that is hard to deal with. He is very supportive of me; however he thinks I need to get my head fixed before I can lose the weight. Funny thing is, once I started struggling when my band was slipping I started seeing a counselor. So I’m working on the head thing too. He’s been thin his whole life and just doesn’t understand how some people’s bodies like to hold onto the fat. My entire family is obese on both sides of my parents’ families as well. He says he understands the cards are against me, but then he just doesn’t really get it.
So all of this brings me to researching other options. For a while I was reading about something called a mini bypass. I know someone who has had the RNY, so I think I know about that. Then I started reading about this DS. All of the surgeries have their risks and complication factors, however the DS sounds like it might be the most livable and provide a better quality of life. And isn’t that what we’re all really after, a better quality of life?
That is where I am now, reading profiles of DS’ers and going to see Dr. Anthone for a consult on July 10, 2006. I hope he will accept me as a patient and can remove my band and revise me to a DS. I also hope the new insurance we are on will cover the procedure. Wish me luck!
Well no such luck. My insurance would not pay for the DS and I needed to have my band removed. So I went to Mexico and had Dr. Ungson perform my revision surgery on 09-20-06. I am going to paste in here a recap I did of my trip to Mexico.
Well here it is finally, a recap of our trip to Hermosillo. Hopefully this will be helpful for people that are going soon. We made it safely to Mexico on Monday 09-18-06 without a problem from the airlines at all. No delays or lost luggage or customs issues. However, when we arrived Silvia was supposed to pick us up at the airport and we were to recognize her from a sign with our name on it. There was no lady holding a sign that had my name on it. There was a lady holding a sign with someone else’s name and from how she looked, I figured she must be Silvia. I asked her and she said yes. However she doesn’t speak English and it was hard to convey to her that I was a second patient she was to pick up. Her notes only showed the other one and her car was too small for all of us. We found the other patient who was looking for Silvia as well. Well anyway Sylvia rented a van and got us all to the hotel but the other patient seemed to not want anything to do with us. Kurt (my husband) and I felt bad about that. Here we all are in a foreign land where few speak our language and a fellow American didn’t want to speak to us either. Oh well. So Kurt & I went to Wal-Mart to get some supplies. Wow what a trip, we were the only gringos there! We found him some snacks for the next few days. It’s an easy taxi ride over which costs 30-40 pesos. Then there are taxis waiting outside the Wal-Mart and you can get one of them to take you back to the hotel. Then we came back and rested a little, and then we hit the pool! It’s a very nice pool. When Sylvia dropped us off at the hotel she told me she would be back around 4 or 5 pm the next day to take me to the hospital. Through Salvador, the front desk clerk who is ever so helpful, I explained to her that I was supposed to have some pre-op testing done so was she sure she would be back so late. She said she would check and call me back if things were to change. Guess what, she showed up at 11 the next day to take me to the hospital. Then she seemed mad because I was sipping on a protein drink and one of the tests was an upper GI that I was supposed to have done. Well no one told me not to drink anything that day and no one told me she was going to be there at 11. We were not packed, I was hanging out in the computer room and Kurt was in the pool. So I ran and told him I was leaving and he would have to pack and come later by taxi. Then Sylvia took me to the hospital and dropped me off at admissions. This was hard because I was upset and the admissions lady didn’t speak much English either and I don’t speak hardly any Spanish. I was all alone and frightened that I screwed something up by drinking and I was very upset. Then when we were about finished with that, the wonderful Dr. Soto showed up to take me to have the upper GI. Dr. Soto is the anesthesiologist. He saw that I was upset and talked so kindly to me that it made me cry. So then he took my hand and put his arm around me and I just said I wish my husband was here. Anyway Dr. Soto chatted with me and put me at ease and was able to keep my mind off of everything that was going on. I got changed into a gown then went into the room where the upper GI would be done. (I had to have an upper GI because I was converting from the band to DS) Dr. Soto started an IV on me then Dr. Ungson arrived. This was the first time I met him in person. He was super nice. He did the upper GI himself. It only took a few minutes and he said everything looked good. He said he would come to my room later and discuss the procedure with me and my husband. Well of course by the time he came to my room, Kurt had just left to go see what he could get for supper at the cafeteria. So Dr. U visited with me about the procedure and answered all of my questions. Then he said, well I’ll go look for your husband and see if he has any questions. And by God he went and found him in the cafeteria and Kurt said they had a nice little chat. I thought that was so cool. The next morning I went into surgery. I wasn’t nervous or anything cuz everyone seemed so nice. Dr. U was able to remove my band and convert me to the DS. He told us later that I had an extra thingy on my intestine that he went ahead and removed while he was in there. It was called a Meckel’s Diverticulum. I did have an NG tube when I woke up. I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t that bad. I think it was making me sort of nauseous though. After 24 hours they removed it and I was glad. I also had a catheter that they removed the day after surgery. At first I hated having it, but then when they removed it I had to make the trek to the bathroom when I had to go and they put a bucket like thing in the stool to catch your urine so they can measure output. That wasn’t fun, but at least it got me up and moving. The first day I was too dizzy from the morphine to do much. I would stand up and feel like falling down, so they would let me sit down again. I didn’t actually walk until the 2nd day. After the first day, they do let you have some ice chips. That felt good, I was sooooo thirsty. I had to wait an extra day before I could start having liquids due to being a conversion from the band. There was some scar tissue that they wanted to make sure had time to heal before putting pressure on it. On day 4 I was released from the hospital and Sylvia took me & Kurt back to the hotel. She then wrote down Dr. U’s prescription for me and went to the pharmacy to order it for us. The pharmacy then delivered it to the hotel. We paid for it and all was good. We did not get a suite; we just went with the regular room and had them bring in a recliner. I can relate to all the talk lately of back aches and not sleeping. I had a hard time just because I’m used to sleeping on my stomach so spending the past 4 days in the hospital in a recliner on my back and the next week at the hotel in the recliner just got old. My back also got covered with lots of little zits and that really itched then. Also once we got back to the hotel, I only took like 2 or 3 pain pills the whole rest of the time. I was amazed at how good I felt other than tired all the time. Anyway once we moved back into the hotel we sort of established a little routine. Every day we would get up and get showered at our leisure. Then we would go to the cafeteria for breakfast. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is included in your room price. Kurt would have something really delicious looking and I would have hot tea. Then we would get a key for the computer room. Check e-mail and chat with anyone that was available. Then we would go hang out by the pool until Erika the wonderful nurse would come around 3ish. She came everyday to check on us and gave me my heparin shots and showed Kurt how to do it because there were more shots than days left in Mexico. I also lost some blood during the surgery which caused my hemoglobin to go down. So instead of having a transfusion, Dr. U put me on iron shots. These are no fun, they are in the butt! Erika also showed Kurt how to do those for me. Now that we are back in the states I am taking iron by mouth and checking in with my doc to get the levels back up. Back to Erika, she is the kindest person there is. We always had nice chats with her and she even made a phone call for us to look for something that Kurt wanted. She saved us a trip because they didn’t have it, but it was so nice of her to do that. She didn’t have to take the time to make the call for us, but she did because she is so nice. Anyway, then after she would leave everyday we would go back to the pool and I would usually nap on one of the lounge chairs once they got in the shade. Then we would get cleaned up and go back to the cafeteria for supper. Again, Kurt would have something wonderful looking and I would have hot tea. I told him they probably thought he beat me because I was going in there all bruised from all the shots and only having tea while he ate like a king. We’d laugh about that. The food at the cafeteria is wonderful according to my hubby and the wait staff is very nice. Most don’t speak English, but you can get by. They do have English menus which helps a lot. Then on Wed, which was 1 week post op we went to see Dr. U to have my stitches out. That was uncomfortable but not bad. Only took a few minutes. We had a nice chat with Dr. U and he showed me pictures of my Meckel’s Diverticulum. Yuck! That’s why I’m not a surgeon. Anyway he also explained to us that part of the reason he is so successful and quick at doing the DS is because he always uses the same team. So everyone has their job and they know what it is and how to do it well and so it’s like a well oiled machine. They work well together. After seeing Dr. U he said I could advance my diet to chicken broth and cooked veggies and stuff like that. I was so excited to get to order something besides hot tea at the cafeteria. The soups there are wonderful. I tried 2 or 3 of them and they were great. The next day we went to the post office to look at and buy some of the wood carvings there. Then we went to a little curio shop nearby. Then we walked over to the Cathedral that I’ve read about on this board. It was pretty and sits right next to a nice park. It was fun to sit in the park and watch the locals and the pigeons. There are vendors with food and jewelry and stuff there too. Also Erika told us it was decorated while we were there because September is Mexico’s independence month so it was decorated for that. We stayed there about an hour then got a taxi back to the hotel. The next morning we got up, had breakfast and headed off to the airport. We were supposed to fly on Mesa airlines. When we got there they told us that flight had been cancelled, but that they transferred us to Aero Mexico which was to leave about the same time. So that ended up not being a big deal. We had a 4 hour layover in Phoenix which was good because if the flight change had made us late we would have had time to make up there. But also when you fly into Phoenix from Mexico you have to collect your luggage and re-check it in basically to get back into the states. It was kind of confusing, but there are plenty of people to point you in the right direction there.
