This is my first time here. I am excited, scared, thrilled, aprehensive, and charging ahead! I am going with the lap band also because it is adjustable and the surgery does not remove body parts. Removing body parts is so very final. I have been obese fifty years now and want to live longer than my obesity will allow therefore the lap band. I medicate with food, fill emptiness with food, celebrated with food and feed depression (and lonliness) with food. It is only in the past few months that I have started to look at food as fuel. Through therapy, I believe that I can learn to work on lonliness, depression and emptiness. I can celebrate with exercise, hiking a path in the woods or walking beside the ocean. My insurance requires that I lose weight for the next 6 months while participating in the Oregon Weight Loss Surgery Clinic at Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland, Oregon. Today I met my bariatric surgeon: Dr. Emma J. Patterson at that clinic. I like her, she is very personable and quite knowledgable. She easily put me at ease and I am excited that she will be doing the surgery. It will not happen until September or October of 2012. I am on a journey and it is exciting. I really wonder how I will feel about how I look when I am 250 pounds lighter. I have not been below 200 pounds since I was in High School back in the 1960's.