You don't have to get stuck. You have less chance of getting stuck if you eat slow and take small bites (peanut M&M size). Right after a fill be careful and during your monthly cycle. Also, for some (me) tightness happens when you get upset and worked up as well as when you fly.

Getting stuck is no fun and it does hurt, but it is nothing to panic about. It is mainly pressure and the desire to throw up. If you do get stuck, just remember to stop eating, stop drinking, get up and move around- it will come up. Most of the time my is already coming up by the time I reach the toliet- I lean over spit it out and I'm fine.

I know that it may be different for different people, but I've had my band for 7 years, and I've never had an experience that was that awful. I remember right after I got the band and was first back on real food. I stopped and got a breakfast burrito. The first bite of the tortilla got stuck. It did hurt but it wasn't excruciating.

The hardest lesson for me then - and still is - that you can no longer just have a quick bite when you are in a hurry. No matter how late you are or how little time you have, you must eat slowly and chew well. As long as I do that, I don't have problems. There may be foods I have to be more careful with (such as steak, heavy bread, tortillas) but I have never found anything that I absolutely cannot eat. As long as I'm willing to chew enough, it's fine (maybe you could say tough steak or pork is out of the question for me if I just can't chew it up enough). Most of the time, though, I just try to avoid bread and stuff just because I don't want to work that hard.

As for "frothing" or "Sliming" - no one told me about that and I sort of discovered it on my own. It happens to me mostly when I've tried to go too fast. It's really not painful to me - as Kime-lou said it's more of a pressure. There is no nausea and I don't really throw up (as in when you have a bug and throw up). It's actually more like a cough and there it is. I think regular vomiting is much worse than the experience of "sliming." I think it must be alot like spitting up for a baby. There just isn't any more room and it can't go down so it must come up.

As I said, I've had my band for 7 years and never had a single complication or real problem with it. I never did any type of support group or online support until a few months ago when I started visiting this site to get myself back on track and focused. Yet even after 7 years of no problems, I started to kind of get freaked out and a little bit panicky as I read some of the horror stories posted here. I'm not doubting that the folks who posted them were telling the truth. It's just never been true for me and I have no real reason to expect that it will.

Try not to freak out because of some of the bad experiences others have had. For all the people that have had difficulties there are also those of us who have never had problems. I think the people who don't have problems just don't post as much because they don't think about it. Really - there does come a day when it's just a normal part of your life and you don't even think about the band at all.