Grace2009

If you're finding that you're not being able to eat things that you *know* you didn't use to have restrictions after, you might have a problem in the making. Let me tell a little bit of my story here: Got banded in June 2009, lost about 73 pounds and then plateaued and couldn't budge it. I wanted to lose more, but after I gained some and had to re-lose it, I made my peace with where I was. And then, two years after surgery, when I was an old pro at knowing how to avoid restrictions, I went through a very stressful time of my life, and started noticing that the lapband was putting me on a shorter and shorter leash. I had to have tiny amounts, sometimes work on even a band-friendly meal for close to an hour to eat it. Sometimes I was up until one in the morning just walking, standing, rocking back and forth, because I knew that if I went to bed with that "distressed lapband" feeling, it wouldn't go well. What I didn't really get is that I was starting to have a pouch dilation. It all happened so gradually, I didn't really notice it until a couple weeks ago when suddenly I had an episode like TammyLee -- couldn't keep anything down, and couldn't sleep because I could feel fluids backing up when I laid down. I had moved to a new area, away from my original band doctor, but I was lucky to get into a new one after just a day. (He told me to just sip Water every five minutes until I could get in, since the worst danger is from dehydration.) He unfilled me completely in just a minute, and I was able to drink a couple swallows of water -- thank God! I slowwwly worked myself back up to solid foods, and (thank God again), it looks like I'm lucky and it won't require surgery to fix the pouch. But in the very anxious down-time I've had, I've been doing a lot of research into the problems that people have with lapbands, and I feel that my original clinic wasn't really very honest or forthcoming with me either about my chances for total weight-loss success or about the percentage of people who experience problems with the lapband. (Check out this UK site for a kind of honesty that I haven't seen on any American sites). I asked two different doctors repeatedly for information about how many people gain back all the weight they have lost with the band, and they acted as if there was no information available on the subject. I have a hard time believing that, but if so, doesn't it tell you something? If the numbers were good, you *know* they'd be part of lapband's marketing efforts. Bottom line: If I had it to do over, I would STILL have gotten the band. I may have only lost about 70 of the 120 pounds I was hoping to lose, but it's 70 pounds I couldn't have lost without the band. So please, don't think I'm being negative. But I think that more people ought to be aware that there are some stats indicating that 1 in 3 bandsters will have issues with it. So stay aware -- get unfilled for a while if you're seeing these kinds of changes after you've had it for a year or more. And *if* you don't have this incredible success that some people post about, don't let it get you down. A lot of the people who post here are the happy success stories; folks who failed may be beating themselves up over it and not want to post in a forum. So it might paint an unrealistic picture about what you can really expect post-surgery. Just my thoughts.

I had it for a week or so, and only very occasionally after that. All in all, I wouldn't stress out about it too much. Goodness knows, everyone has a different tolerance for discomfort, but it wasn't much worse than the level of discomfort you'd get from a really strenuous workout. And you're ahead of the game by knowing what it is. My clinic didn't mention it -- one of my few complaints about them -- and so I was kind of scared until I found out it was normal and didn't mean there was anything really wrong. Grace