Missy E.
My name is Missy. I live in Belton, MO with my husband, 2 kids, 2 dogs and a tortoise. My husband and I having both having lap band placed. He is scheduled for May 24th, and I am scheduled for June 14th.
I have been overweight since I was 12 years old. Once I hit puberty it was all uphill from there. I was able to lose 50 lbs with my first pregnancy (un-diagnosed gestational diabetes, I suspect) and then lost another 50 lbs after I gave birth on a strict low fat, low calorie diet. I kept that weight off for a year, but started quickly going back up after not maintaining the diet. I have been over 300lbs now for probably 10 years – I seem to stay “comfortably” around 326. I did lose weight with my 2nd pregnancy because of the strict diabetic diet I followed to make sure my baby was healthy, but of course I didn’t stick to that after her birth.
My husband was the first one to broach the idea of weight loss surgery. I am an OR nurse or was until I changed jobs, so there was no way I was going to let him have an open procedure and I was not hot on gastric re-routing of any kind. When the lap-band became more prominent, I started researching it. It seemed to be the best fit for our goals and the safest option for both of us.
We went to a seminar with Dr. Malley in Nov 05. We made an appointment that night for both of us to see him. I obviously met the BMI requirement and so did my husband along with him having co-morbidities. We went through everything and figured out we were going to have to have a 6 months monitored weight loss program to meet our insurance requirements. There was some confusion on this and some miscommunication, but we finally got this started in June 06. We went to weekly WW meetings and saw our PCP each month. My company switched insurance for the new year, but carried over the same requirements for surgery. Our surgeon also had to re-apply for the new insurance, so finally at the end of January 07 we were able to submit everything. Both of us were approved in 2 days! That was amazing and very exciting. We can only have surgery at 1 facility to have it covered by insurance and our surgeon only operates there once a week, so we didn’t get schedule until May and June. We would have liked to be sooner obviously, but happy to have approval and surgery dates.
We are both looking forward to our journey and are dedicated to making it work. My husband has more will power than me, so I am hoping he can pull me along! We both want to be healthy for our kids and are trying to make positive changes to their diets also. We don’t want them headed for surgery when they are older.
Good Luck to Everyone!
