Bufflehead

Thank goodness for your very proactive and caring surgeon and entire medical team. A rare disorder like that often goes undiagnosed even after symptoms start showing up. You had a great team and awesome family support - I am so glad they came through for you. Best wishes to you going forward.

I take it your mother is the one paying for the surgery? I would make an appointment to meet with the surgeon and bring her along. Your surgeon should be able to discuss with both of you all of the scientific evidence that shows it verges on impossible for a morbidly obese person to lose a significant amount of weight and maintain that weight loss without surgery. If she has already met with the surgeon and gone over all of the evidence, then I guess just spend a lot of time talking with her. Tell her exactly how being so overweight makes you feel and impacts your life. I know for most of us there is a lot of shame and self-hate involved in that sort of discussion - if that is true for you, dig deep and keep talking. She's your mom and I am sure she loves you and wants you to be happy, but she's probably scared of the risks of surgery. Explain to her that sleeve surgery has the same risk of complications and death as gall bladder surgery -- she wouldn't be demanding you just keep suffering in pain if you needed your gall bladder out, right? She would accept the risks (very small!) and you would get the surgery you need to end the debilitating pain. Well, for most of us, being morbidly obese inflicts severe pain as well, we just mask it better. You can also talk with her about all your previous attempts to lose weight. Help her to see that you have tried, and struggled, and you need this tool to be successful. If your mother still doesn't want to pay for the surgery, that's her right -- check into self-pay options (there's a great board for self-pay patients here) and see what you can do to save up or finance it. Depending on where you go, it might be less expensive than you think. Good luck to you!

EBay, http://www.thredup.com, Onestopplus sales for undies & pants, JMS.com for bras and shirts, some local consignment shops, shopping in the back of my closet (the clothes I used to be able to wear eight years ago and could never throw out), and sales at Kohls and Dress Barn.

I'm going to live to be 150 at least!

I take a double dose of the Trader Joe's High Potency chewable - one tab with breakfast and one with dinner. No nausea or puking here.

I pureed salmon with a little bit of tartar sauce or remoulade. Go to the super market and find where they have all the sauces. Pick a couple that you think would be good on salmon and give them a whirl. You can buy the little pouches of salmon in the canned meat aisle, too. I found the lemon dill salmon was delicious pureed, I liked the little bit of extra flavor it added. I played around with the different flavors of tuna as well, like pureeing the thai spice tuna with sriracha sauce, and the hickory smoked tuna with low calorie bbq sauce. I pureed chicken with marinara sauce, then heated it up in the microwave and melted some mozzarella cheese on top for a kind of Italian style chicken. It was good!

What stage will you be on? At four weeks I was on purees and would not have been permitted anything on a standard Thanksgiving dinner table. I probably would have pureed some turkey with gravy and eaten that. If you are on soft foods, you can probably have a little (non-pureed!) turkey with gravy and a tiny bit of cooked green veggies if you chew them really well.

My surgeon's guidelines for puree are 3 meals per day of no more than 3 tablespoons each. No snacks other than protein shakes and other liquids.

I usually just order an appetizer, or if nothing looks weight-loss friendly, I order a main course (hold any grains, starchy veg) and take a lot of leftovers home. I can't eat an entire appetizer either but somehow it doesn't seem quite worth it to box up and take home a couple of ounces of seared tuna or something. I don't order off the kids' menu just because the stuff there as a general rule is not good - lots of deep fried white and brown stuff. Also, no matter what I order, I tip as though I ordered a main course. I figure it's not the waiter's fault that I had bariatric surgery and can't eat much!

I started taking whole 40 mg omeprazole the day after surgery (per my surgeon's instructions) and never had a problem.

McButterPants, when you get to the point of making your own Protein shakes, I found a great recipe for a Butterfinger flavored Protein shake. It's a little spendy in terms of calories and carbs so I only make it once a week, and budget carefully in terms of calories and carbs that day, but it's so good! 1 c. Hood Calorie Countdown nonfat milk 1 scoop unjury chocolate splendor Protein powder (or similar) 2 T. PB2 with chocolate 1 T. sugarfree, fat free instant butterscotch pudding mix Blend & enjoy! Numbers: 205 calories, 30 g. protein, 20 g. carbs, 1 g. fat, 2 g. Fiber.

My surgeon says no to soups and cereals because it is the same thing as eating with your meal. If you poured out the cereal dry in a bowl and ate it while intermittently sipping milk from a glass -- most people would say no, you can't do that, it's drinking with your meal. But just because you pour the milk on the cereal and consume it that way, it doesn't make it any different - you are still putting liquid and solid food in your stomach at the same time, just using a bowl and a spoon to do it instead of a bowl and a glass. So that is why my surgeon says no to cereal (at least cold cereal with milk) and no to soup . . . but I know he's an outlier here. He's very strict about building good habits, avoiding slider foods, and maintaining restriction.

I moved on to real coffee with real caffeine 3 months after surgery with my team's blessing. I keep it under 2 cups per day just because coffee is acidic, and that's not great for a tiny stomach. No problems so far!

The hard-and-fast rules are for the first six months after surgery, but they "discourage" their patients from eating soup or cereal on more than extremely rare occasions for the rest of their lives.

My surgeon says it's fine to drink before meals (in fact he encourages it) but no drinking during meals -- including NO SOUP and NO CEREAL -- and no drinking 30 minutes after.

I think the premixed Isopure drinks are revolting . . . so gross. But lots of people love them. I do like the Syntrax Nectar flavors. You mix them with water and they taste more like juice or lemonade or tea than the regular milky protein shakes. You can get sample packs of them -- just google Syntrax Nectar sample pack.

Ditto what mokee said. The formatting and wording of letters and documentation should not be your concern. Your surgeon's insurance coordinator is supposed to know all that and make sure that everything collected from other doctors etc. is correct and complete. If they are telling you that you need to be in charge of that, I would be very concerned.

perfectly normal - the more liquid a food is, the less it will fill you up. The pyloric valve opens right up for liquids and lets them pass through immediately. Definitely a good thing to measure out the correct amount and stop when that is gone.

Your reproductive tracts and digestive tracts are not connected -- nothing involving bleeding from surgery would come out of your vagina in any way that I can imagine.

I have dreams like that too. My first night home from the hospital I dreamed I found three king-size Snickers bars in my bathroom and ate two of them before I remembered that I am sleeved and can't do that. Lately I've had a couple of dreams about finding/being offered trays and tables and platters of delicious cookies and I start eating them. So obviously there's stuff floating around in my brain somewhere about all this! But on the good side, I've been sleeved for four months and not taken a single bite off plan, or been seriously tempted to (while awake!). And yes, I keep the fear of past failures repeating themselves front and center, to remind myself that I am not invincible just because I am sleeved. I don't know if what we are feeling is "normal," but at least so far it is working for me . . . good luck to you!

Hi Stephen, I don't have any specific reading material that my surgeon gave me. I just read this forum and a couple of others (obesityhelp dot com and gastricsleeve dot com) as I was making my decision. There are also some good vloggers out there on Youtube as well as informational videos -- and videos of the actual surgery itself if you are into that kind of thing I'm glad I realized that surgery is NOT a cop-out from diet and exercise. Studies show that only about 5 percent of obese people can lose a significant amount of weight and keep it off. I would love to be in that five percent, but the fact is I'm not. Taking advantage of modern medicine is not a cop out from diet and exercise, just like having anesthetic at the dentist when you get a filling is not a cop out from taking a shot of whiskey and having someone hold you down like they did in olden times. Besides, sticking to a proper diet and getting exercise after surgery will be a big part of your life, trust me (especially the diet)! If you have insurance, definitely check your member benefit handbook to see if it is covered. If you don't have insurance, you may want to check to see whether Obamacare insurance includes bariatric surgery coverage in your state. Some states include it, but I think most do not. Self-pay is another option. Prices range from about $4600 (and up) in Mexico to maybe $25,000 for a top surgeon in a big city here in the US. I considered self-pay in Mexico for a while when my insurance was being a jerk and personally I think it's a good option. There is an excellent sub-forum here for self-pay and Mexico patients that you should check out if you decide on this route. And a final note of caution for you and anyone else new to reading these boards - keep in mind that this surgery has about the same rate of complications and death as gall bladder surgery, which means: not very high at all! But people tend to post on these forums when they feel like something is going wrong, not when everything is going perfectly. So just reading online forums can give you a warped sense of what surgery and post-surgery is going to be like. If relied solely on these posts, you'd think that your post surgery days would necessarily be filled with pain, vomiting, trips to the ER for dehydration, leaks, strictures, constipation, and worse. While some people do have these issues, the quiet majority of us do great without complications. Good luck to you!

My surgery took 90 minutes. I had a hiatal hernia repair plus my surgeon says he likes to take his time to do the most precise work with the minimum amount of trauma necessary, so he takes longer than some.

I agree with the others above, you will feel more restriction with denser foods. That said, this may be a case of just because you can, doesn't mean you should. At this stage, especially because you won't be feeling much restriction, you should measure or weigh out what you plan to eat and not eat any more. Did you surgeon give you any guidelines as to how much you should be eating at this phase? Mine allowed 3 tablespoonfuls of food per meal while on purees, so I would have measured 3 T. of scrambled egg, eaten that, and stopped.

The ricotta bake from Eggface was on my dietician's list of suggested puree foods. I loved it! I only made 1/4 recipe at a time though. There are lots of other recipes here! http://theworldaccor...reed-foods.html I was only allowed Protein rich foods on purees, no fruits, veggies, or grains, so I did a lot of refried Beans, cottage cheese, Greek yogurt, and poached eggs in addition to different kinds of meat that I would puree in my food processor with some sort of tasty sauce/liquid. Some of my favorite combos: --thai spice tuna pureed with sriracha sauce --sweet & spicy tuna pureed with low carb bbq sauce --rotisserie chicken (no skin!) pureed with low carb bbq sauce, sriracha sauce, or peanut satay sauce --chicken pureed with marinara sauce and nuked in the microwave with mozzarella cheese --ground beef pureed with vodka sauce or tartufata sauce --lemon dill salmon pureed with olive oil mayo (the types of fish are those flavored tuna and salmon pouches you can pick up at the grocery store). --sauteed shrimp sauteed with garlic aioli & mayo or remoulade

I was given omeprazole in a capsule the day after surgery in the hospital . . . no problems.