Jean McMillan

In almost 5 years of banded living, I drank copiously up until about 5 minutes before starting a meal. Since I got to my weight goal a year after my surgery, I don't think that hurt my weight loss. However, I didn't drink while eating or for 30-60 minutes afterwards (depending on the circumstances).

The official reason for the no drinking while eating rule is that filling your stomach pouch with liquid changes solid food into a sludge that doesn't provide the early and prolonged satiety that the band is supposed to give you. In Australia, where the band has been in use a lot longer than in the USA, current thinking that drinking (that's sipping, not chugging) and eating during a meal are OK. Dietitian Helen Bauzon wrote an interesting article about it: http://www.lapbandtalk.com/page/index.html/_/healthy-living/food-nutrition/yes-you-can-drink-and-eat-at-the-same-meal-time-r63 My own experience was that when I drank while eating, there was nowhere for the liquid to drain, so it came right back up and out my mouth, like a baby spitting up. The resulting fountain (or at times, drool) was not at all socially desirable.

Oooooh! Half a cup of potato salad! Honey, you don't need to kick yourself for that. How much potato salad would you have eaten in one sitting as a pre-op?

My prediction is that your attendance at recovery meetings and your work as a peer counselor will help you tremendously as you move forward. Buena suerte!

I know one person who had band surgery the week after her initial consult with her surgeon, but that was in 2007, she had fantastic insurance, and the surgeon was a general surgeon, not a bariatric surgeon, so he had no hoops for her to jump through. My own band surgery was 4 months after the educational seminar required by my surgeon, and I had lots of hoops to jump through. But again, that was in 2007. Since then, the popularity of bariatric surgery has exploded, putting a huge burden on bariatric clinics who have to hire more surgeons and support staff to respond to the increased demand. Staffing up a bariatric clinic isn't as easy as (for example) hiring Christmas help at JCPenney. You need a highly-qualified staff, and even when they're all in place and ready to go, they can't process patients like widgets on a production line, because each one of us is so unique and our medical problems are usually complex. I know it's frustrating for you, but rushing through the qualification and education stuff before surgery would be a really bad idea. It's possible that your surgeon's office is taking its own sweet time, but it's far more likely that they're struggling to give each patient the attention they deserve. If you absolutely cannot bear another week of waiting, you can try contacting a second bariatric clinic to initiate the qualification process with them. Depending on your geographic location and your insurance requirements, that may or may not speed things up for you. In the meantime, hang in there, and try to distract yourself by learning as much as you can about the surgery itself and what your life will be like afterwards.

Welcome, Julie. Your surgery is just around the corner, how exciting!

Welcome, Mike, and extra congrats on your 2+ years of sobriety. The transfer addiction that you experienced after getting off drugs may challenge you again when you can't abuse food, so I hope you'll continue your addiction recovery work when you're banded.

What are trolls? Should we feed them like stray dogs, hunt them down, or ignore them? Is there anything we can learn from them? WHAT ARE TROLLS? Trolls were the underdogs of Scandinavian children’s literature, almost adorably ugly creatures who lived under bridges and whose bark was usually worse than their bite. Nowadays they’re also an internet phenomenon, armed with computers instead of wooden clubs, who growl when you cross the bridge into an online forum like LBT and seem to do their best to stir up trouble wherever they go. A troll that you rooted for while reading a J.R. Tolkien novel is much more fun than the one who answers your serious forum posting with a response designed to inspire fear, confusion, or panic (or all three, and apparently for his own entertainment), and it’s mighty hard to get away from them. Just when you think the last one has been vanquished, he pops up again with a new name and avatar, but using the same old attention-getting tricks. Since I had the misfortune of spending my childhood with a pesty younger brother on my tail, I feel that I ought to be able to deal with trolls. About the time my brother learned to walk (all too soon), he turned from my darling little baby doll into my personal troll, and he devoted a great deal of energy (of which he had an endless supply) to making my life miserable. My mom’s advice for me was invariably this: “Just ignore him and he’ll stop.” That’s good advice, in theory anyway. I was never able to use it effectively with my brother, and I’ve made many other attempts to use it since I left home at age 17. Every job, club, church and community I’ve belonged to since then has had its own resident trolls. Sometimes ignoring them worked, other times not. The age of the internet has transformed the lives of many trolls. They no longer have to wait until dusk to creep up out of the sewer or jump at you from behind a tree. Using the almost-perfect anonymity of the internet, they’ve created identities that seem to express the worst of their characters while giving meaning and purpose to an otherwise drab life. They’re quite a lot like the Wizard of Oz – a very smart but socially-disadvantaged wizard who seems big and important and powerful but is actually a nerd standing behind a curtain. And as freedom of speech issues burn ever brighter in the vast world of the internet, I personally don’t expect the trolls to go away. They may actually thrive and multiply. My grandfather, who was a kind and mild-mannered attorney (I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s true), would probably tell me to save my ammunition for issues that I have a prayer of affecting and leave the big, thorny ones to someone else. It won’t surprise you to hear that my brother has now, in his fifth decade of life, advanced to the level of Grand Poobah of Internet Trolls. Of course, he doesn’t call himself a troll, but he brags to me about online forum behavior that would instantly activate the Troll Alarm here on LBT. And while he devotes himself to stoking the fire under a vile, bubbling cauldron of politics, racism and 999 other ingredients of hatred in online forums I hope never to visit, I spend my time running my own virtual mouth in the forums here on LBT. Am I better than him, or just the same? It’s not for me to judge, is it? I’m hardly objective about this. It’s taken me decades to be able survive a five-minute phone conversation with my brother without having to hang up screaming. In a sense, the “ignore him” strategy has helped me get this far, not because ignoring him makes him stop but because it creates enough white noise to neutralize most of the vitriol I hear. At this point, it’s a blessing to be able to hear at least 10 calm and reasonable words from him while 1000 nasty ones buzz in the background. And that brings me (finally) to the take-home message of this article. It’s a lesson about how to hear and listen in a very noisy world of virtual and physical voices, a lesson about what we can learn from dealing with trolls. SAY THAT AGAIN? Although I fervently believe that I’m not a troll, the world of the internet is extremely important to me because it helps me connect with a world of friends and acquaintances that I might otherwise never have the privilege to know. The keys on my keyboard, and the text that magically appears on computer screens in my house and in the houses and workplaces of thousands of other people all over the world, are invaluable to me because I am hearing-impaired. In 1985, a hearing test required by my employer of all new hires (because our operation included noisy manufacturing equipment) showed significant hearing loss. I was 32 then and shrugged it off, but as the years went by, I suspected that my hearing was getting worse, and a hearing test in 2010 showed that I have moderate to severe hearing loss in the high frequency range (especially women’s and children’s voices). I’m not totally deaf, but the impairment is bad enough to turn even basic communication into a very frustrating (especially at my retail job) and difficult experience because even when I can hear a person’s voice, I can’t hear it well enough to understand what the person is saying. So instead of a simple string of words, what I hear is not words but noise, or what I call “word soup.” Also, if I can’t see a person, I can’t hear them, so that customers who come up behind me or summon me from behind a display fixture are likely to think I’m purposely ignoring them. Background noise, like the store “musak”, makes it even harder for me to hear properly, and I end up asking a person to repeat themselves 3 or 4 times, which is probably very frustrating for the poor customer who urgently needs directions to the restroom. Trying to get and decipher the answer to a question of my own is even more frustrating. It took me over a year to accumulate $3000 for the hearing aids I needed. After wearing them for just 2 weeks, I was amazed by them. Thanks to those tiny, marvelous gadgets, I can hear things I hadn’t heard for a long, long time, and things that I’d never heard before at all. The difference was so dramatic, I had to wonder how much harm my hearing impairment has done to my interpersonal relationships, not only in how others perceive me (they think I’m not interested, or ignoring them, when I just can’t hear them) but in how I perceive others. If I’ve understood only a fraction of what they’ve been saying to me, perhaps I don’t know them as well as I thought I did. HEARING VERSUS LISTENING At the heart of my personal story of hearing impairment is another story that applies to every human being. Because we are too hurried, overworked, stressed, or whatever, we tend to filter out noises that we don’t have the time or energy to decipher. And when we do slow down enough to hear the whole message, we’re still not going to “get” it unless we actively listen to it. Another human frailty is the tendency to personalize what we hear from other people. There’s nothing basically wrong with that. When encountering a new person or object or idea, we use the scant information we’ve gathered about it to try and fit it into our own frame of reference – our own experiences and world view. That’s okay until our own frame of reference begins to distort the new data by judging it as good, bad, relevant, irrelevant. It’s okay until our brains say, “I don’t like or understand what I’m hearing, so I’m not going to listen to any more of it.” We can make some big mistakes by doing that. A few days after I got my hearing aids, I heard a loud crackling noise coming from the kitchen and instantly concluded that the kitchen was on fire. In a panic, I ran out of my study and into the hallway, at which point I saw my husband running water into the stainless steel sink and, by connecting the noise and the sight before me, I realized there was no fire after all and skidded to a stop instead of spraying the room with fire extinguisher foam. I’ve had a similar experience when communicating with other people in the invisible but powerful world of the internet. I can’t see their faces or read their body language as they “speak” via text on a page. I don’t know most of them personally, have never visited the town they lived in, and don’t know if they speak with a western twang or a southern drawl. I’m blind to their personal histories except for what they choose to mention in a forum post or private message. So when they say something that’s foreign to me or that I don’t like, my so-called logical brain mulls it over and eventually sticks the person’s words in a mental cubbyhole, labeled anything from “stupid” to “crazy.” The next time that person speaks up, my brain already knows how to categorize their words, quickly sends them into the appropriate mental storage area, and moves on to something more interesting or compatible. Those of us with pet insecurities – and admit it, you have at least one or two of those – also misinterpret other people’s utterances by filling in all of the spaces between the words with our own ideas or our own feelings. So when Jane Doe says, “I hate the Lap-Band,” what I hear is more like, “I hate the Lap-Band and every other person who has one and especially Jean McMillan because she loved hers and wrote a book about it.” The instant I saw those words appear on my computer screen just now, they looked ridiculous to me. While it’s possible that one or two people are indeed thinking that very thing about me, it’s far more likely that their meaning was actually, “I hate my Lap-Band, I’ve had so many problems and disappointments I wish I never got it, and I want to make sure everyone in the universe knows what a bad choice it was for me so they won’t make the same mistake.” To assume that a stranger is talking about me when she’s talking about herself is a serious error in human communication. IS YOUR LISTENER BROKEN? Let’s put my hearing and listening speech on pause for a few moments so I can tell you a quick side story. When dealing with our gang of rambunctious dogs, my husband and I can often be heard telling the dogs things like, “Did you hear what I just said?” or “I just told you to….”, just as if they were human instead of canine children. One day I overheard (thanks to my hearing aids) a conversation between my husband and Teddy, who was overly (if understandably) interested in the sacks of groceries I’d just dumped on the kitchen counter. My husband shouted at Teddy, “Get!” (translation: “Get away from there!”) Teddy gave him a look that clearly said, “No, no, you don’t understand! There’s a box of Milk Bones in there and it must pass my personal inspection right now!” And my husband replied, “Teddy, I told you to get! Is your listener broken?” That’s not just a cute dog story (go to 9dogshowling.blogspot.com if you want more dog stories). There’s a message in there that we could all benefit from if we pay close enough attention. If you don’t like what you’re hearing online here at LBT (or at work, or at home), before you discard it altogether, ask yourself, “Is my listener broken?” Have you made a genuine effort to set aside your own opinions, ideas, and feelings long enough to hear and understand what’s being said? I’m not telling you to tolerate people who are abusive, racist, sexist, sizeist, or any other hateful or harmful behavior. I’m just suggesting that you give the ones you’re uncertain about at least a brief benefit of the doubt. If then you still can’t agree with or understand them, you can ask them questions (neutral, please) to help you understand, or you can just move on. ARE WE TALKING ABOUT ME, YOU, OR THE MAN ON THE MOON? My final suggestion for improved internet communication is that you make a conscious effort to draw a boundary between yourself and other people. Without that boundary, you’re going to have a hard time distinguishing between them and you. While it’s lovely to experience sameness or kinship with other people, it’s not so lovely when it means that you end up adopting their negative view as your own. Children are especially susceptible to that, but adults do the same thing. When I was growing up, I heard many, many times (hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of times) about how brilliantly smart my younger brother was. I spent a lot of time trying to be perfect enough and smart enough to crawl up on the pedestal with him. He consistently kicked me in the face and I ended up believing the family legend that he was a genius and that I therefore was stupid even though I managed to graduate from high school at age 16 and he dropped out when he turned 16. So if you’re hearing a message that reinforces your own fear that (for example) you chose the “wrong” bariatric surgery procedure, ask yourself first if the other “speaker” is talking about him or herself or about you. Chances are, she doesn’t know you and doesn’t care nearly as much about you as she does about herself. Nothing wrong with that. Most of the time, I, Jean McMillan, am the most important person in the universe. I don’t mean that as an illustration of vanity but rather of self-preservation and survival. NOW, BACK TO THE TROLLS So what can we learn from internet trolls? We can learn that what they say tells us more about them than it does about us. We can learn that taking trolls too seriously gives them power over us that they don’t deserve. Our listeners probably don’t work very well when trolls are “speaking”, so that their message comes out as disagreeable and annoying noise…that (again) tells us more about them than it does about us. We can learn that (as surely I’ve proven by now) employing a sense of humor when dealing with trolls can helps us keep things in perspective while at the same time stopping trolls in their tracks because laughter is probably the last thing they want to hear. We can learn that trolls are probably very needy people, hungry to be heard and understood, but without the social skills to get our attention in a healthy, helpful way. And finally we can learn – and this isn’t the fun part – that when 20 people angrily gang up on a single, silly troll, none of us is acting in an admirable fashion. Messageboard moderators are best qualified to deal with troll extermination. Let’s leave that job to them, so we can use our listeners for the really important stuff, like how to succeed with weight loss surgery.

Even if we never do understand the motivations of trolls or others, we can learn a lot about ourselves in the process. I'm glad your hearing loss was temporary!

Follow the instructions given to you by your bariatric surgeon. If he/she didn't give you any, ask for them. Every surgeon has a different pre- and post-op diet protocol. Some of them allow protein shakes, some do not.

Medical issues related to what? I mean, I have psoriasis, but even a dermatologist would be hard-pressed to blame that on bariatric surgery. So, do you mean medical issues as a result of having a gastric band? Or medical issues (co-morbidities) that would help one qualify for bariatric surgery? Or what?

WHAT ARE TROLLS? Trolls were the underdogs of Scandinavian children’s literature, almost adorably ugly creatures who lived under bridges and whose bark was usually worse than their bite. Nowadays they’re also an internet phenomenon, armed with computers instead of wooden clubs, who growl when you cross the bridge into an online forum like LBT and seem to do their best to stir up trouble wherever they go. A troll that you rooted for while reading a J.R. Tolkien novel is much more fun than the one who answers your serious forum posting with a response designed to inspire fear, confusion, or panic (or all three, and apparently for his own entertainment), and it’s mighty hard to get away from them. Just when you think the last one has been vanquished, he pops up again with a new name and avatar, but using the same old attention-getting tricks. Since I had the misfortune of spending my childhood with a pesty younger brother on my tail, I feel that I ought to be able to deal with trolls. About the time my brother learned to walk (all too soon), he turned from my darling little baby doll into my personal troll, and he devoted a great deal of energy (of which he had an endless supply) to making my life miserable. My mom’s advice for me was invariably this: “Just ignore him and he’ll stop.” That’s good advice, in theory anyway. I was never able to use it effectively with my brother, and I’ve made many other attempts to use it since I left home at age 17. Every job, club, church and community I’ve belonged to since then has had its own resident trolls. Sometimes ignoring them worked, other times not. The age of the internet has transformed the lives of many trolls. They no longer have to wait until dusk to creep up out of the sewer or jump at you from behind a tree. Using the almost-perfect anonymity of the internet, they’ve created identities that seem to express the worst of their characters while giving meaning and purpose to an otherwise drab life. They’re quite a lot like the Wizard of Oz – a very smart but socially-disadvantaged wizard who seems big and important and powerful but is actually a nerd standing behind a curtain. And as freedom of speech issues burn ever brighter in the vast world of the internet, I personally don’t expect the trolls to go away. They may actually thrive and multiply. My grandfather, who was a kind and mild-mannered attorney (I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s true), would probably tell me to save my ammunition for issues that I have a prayer of affecting and leave the big, thorny ones to someone else. It won’t surprise you to hear that my brother has now, in his fifth decade of life, advanced to the level of Grand Poobah of Internet Trolls. Of course, he doesn’t call himself a troll, but he brags to me about online forum behavior that would instantly activate the Troll Alarm here on LBT. And while he devotes himself to stoking the fire under a vile, bubbling cauldron of politics, racism and 999 other ingredients of hatred in online forums I hope never to visit, I spend my time running my own virtual mouth in the forums here on LBT. Am I better than him, or just the same? It’s not for me to judge, is it? I’m hardly objective about this. It’s taken me decades to be able survive a five-minute phone conversation with my brother without having to hang up screaming. In a sense, the “ignore him” strategy has helped me get this far, not because ignoring him makes him stop but because it creates enough white noise to neutralize most of the vitriol I hear. At this point, it’s a blessing to be able to hear at least 10 calm and reasonable words from him while 1000 nasty ones buzz in the background. And that brings me (finally) to the take-home message of this article. It’s a lesson about how to hear and listen in a very noisy world of virtual and physical voices, a lesson about what we can learn from dealing with trolls. SAY THAT AGAIN? Although I fervently believe that I’m not a troll, the world of the internet is extremely important to me because it helps me connect with a world of friends and acquaintances that I might otherwise never have the privilege to know. The keys on my keyboard, and the text that magically appears on computer screens in my house and in the houses and workplaces of thousands of other people all over the world, are invaluable to me because I am hearing-impaired. In 1985, a hearing test required by my employer of all new hires (because our operation included noisy manufacturing equipment) showed significant hearing loss. I was 32 then and shrugged it off, but as the years went by, I suspected that my hearing was getting worse, and a hearing test in 2010 showed that I have moderate to severe hearing loss in the high frequency range (especially women’s and children’s voices). I’m not totally deaf, but the impairment is bad enough to turn even basic communication into a very frustrating (especially at my retail job) and difficult experience because even when I can hear a person’s voice, I can’t hear it well enough to understand what the person is saying. So instead of a simple string of words, what I hear is not words but noise, or what I call “word soup.” Also, if I can’t see a person, I can’t hear them, so that customers who come up behind me or summon me from behind a display fixture are likely to think I’m purposely ignoring them. Background noise, like the store “musak”, makes it even harder for me to hear properly, and I end up asking a person to repeat themselves 3 or 4 times, which is probably very frustrating for the poor customer who urgently needs directions to the restroom. Trying to get and decipher the answer to a question of my own is even more frustrating. It took me over a year to accumulate $3000 for the hearing aids I needed. After wearing them for just 2 weeks, I was amazed by them. Thanks to those tiny, marvelous gadgets, I can hear things I hadn’t heard for a long, long time, and things that I’d never heard before at all. The difference was so dramatic, I had to wonder how much harm my hearing impairment has done to my interpersonal relationships, not only in how others perceive me (they think I’m not interested, or ignoring them, when I just can’t hear them) but in how I perceive others. If I’ve understood only a fraction of what they’ve been saying to me, perhaps I don’t know them as well as I thought I did. HEARING VERSUS LISTENING At the heart of my personal story of hearing impairment is another story that applies to every human being. Because we are too hurried, overworked, stressed, or whatever, we tend to filter out noises that we don’t have the time or energy to decipher. And when we do slow down enough to hear the whole message, we’re still not going to “get” it unless we actively listen to it. Another human frailty is the tendency to personalize what we hear from other people. There’s nothing basically wrong with that. When encountering a new person or object or idea, we use the scant information we’ve gathered about it to try and fit it into our own frame of reference – our own experiences and world view. That’s okay until our own frame of reference begins to distort the new data by judging it as good, bad, relevant, irrelevant. It’s okay until our brains say, “I don’t like or understand what I’m hearing, so I’m not going to listen to any more of it.” We can make some big mistakes by doing that. A few days after I got my hearing aids, I heard a loud crackling noise coming from the kitchen and instantly concluded that the kitchen was on fire. In a panic, I ran out of my study and into the hallway, at which point I saw my husband running water into the stainless steel sink and, by connecting the noise and the sight before me, I realized there was no fire after all and skidded to a stop instead of spraying the room with fire extinguisher foam. I’ve had a similar experience when communicating with other people in the invisible but powerful world of the internet. I can’t see their faces or read their body language as they “speak” via text on a page. I don’t know most of them personally, have never visited the town they lived in, and don’t know if they speak with a western twang or a southern drawl. I’m blind to their personal histories except for what they choose to mention in a forum post or private message. So when they say something that’s foreign to me or that I don’t like, my so-called logical brain mulls it over and eventually sticks the person’s words in a mental cubbyhole, labeled anything from “stupid” to “crazy.” The next time that person speaks up, my brain already knows how to categorize their words, quickly sends them into the appropriate mental storage area, and moves on to something more interesting or compatible. Those of us with pet insecurities – and admit it, you have at least one or two of those – also misinterpret other people’s utterances by filling in all of the spaces between the words with our own ideas or our own feelings. So when Jane Doe says, “I hate the Lap-Band,” what I hear is more like, “I hate the Lap-Band and every other person who has one and especially Jean McMillan because she loved hers and wrote a book about it.” The instant I saw those words appear on my computer screen just now, they looked ridiculous to me. While it’s possible that one or two people are indeed thinking that very thing about me, it’s far more likely that their meaning was actually, “I hate my Lap-Band, I’ve had so many problems and disappointments I wish I never got it, and I want to make sure everyone in the universe knows what a bad choice it was for me so they won’t make the same mistake.” To assume that a stranger is talking about me when she’s talking about herself is a serious error in human communication. IS YOUR LISTENER BROKEN? Let’s put my hearing and listening speech on pause for a few moments so I can tell you a quick side story. When dealing with our gang of rambunctious dogs, my husband and I can often be heard telling the dogs things like, “Did you hear what I just said?” or “I just told you to….”, just as if they were human instead of canine children. One day I overheard (thanks to my hearing aids) a conversation between my husband and Teddy, who was overly (if understandably) interested in the sacks of groceries I’d just dumped on the kitchen counter. My husband shouted at Teddy, “Get!” (translation: “Get away from there!”) Teddy gave him a look that clearly said, “No, no, you don’t understand! There’s a box of Milk Bones in there and it must pass my personal inspection right now!” And my husband replied, “Teddy, I told you to get! Is your listener broken?” That’s not just a cute dog story (go to 9dogshowling.blogspot.com if you want more dog stories). There’s a message in there that we could all benefit from if we pay close enough attention. If you don’t like what you’re hearing online here at LBT (or at work, or at home), before you discard it altogether, ask yourself, “Is my listener broken?” Have you made a genuine effort to set aside your own opinions, ideas, and feelings long enough to hear and understand what’s being said? I’m not telling you to tolerate people who are abusive, racist, sexist, sizeist, or any other hateful or harmful behavior. I’m just suggesting that you give the ones you’re uncertain about at least a brief benefit of the doubt. If then you still can’t agree with or understand them, you can ask them questions (neutral, please) to help you understand, or you can just move on. ARE WE TALKING ABOUT ME, YOU, OR THE MAN ON THE MOON? My final suggestion for improved internet communication is that you make a conscious effort to draw a boundary between yourself and other people. Without that boundary, you’re going to have a hard time distinguishing between them and you. While it’s lovely to experience sameness or kinship with other people, it’s not so lovely when it means that you end up adopting their negative view as your own. Children are especially susceptible to that, but adults do the same thing. When I was growing up, I heard many, many times (hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of times) about how brilliantly smart my younger brother was. I spent a lot of time trying to be perfect enough and smart enough to crawl up on the pedestal with him. He consistently kicked me in the face and I ended up believing the family legend that he was a genius and that I therefore was stupid even though I managed to graduate from high school at age 16 and he dropped out when he turned 16. So if you’re hearing a message that reinforces your own fear that (for example) you chose the “wrong” bariatric surgery procedure, ask yourself first if the other “speaker” is talking about him or herself or about you. Chances are, she doesn’t know you and doesn’t care nearly as much about you as she does about herself. Nothing wrong with that. Most of the time, I, Jean McMillan, am the most important person in the universe. I don’t mean that as an illustration of vanity but rather of self-preservation and survival. NOW, BACK TO THE TROLLS So what can we learn from internet trolls? We can learn that what they say tells us more about them than it does about us. We can learn that taking trolls too seriously gives them power over us that they don’t deserve. Our listeners probably don’t work very well when trolls are “speaking”, so that their message comes out as disagreeable and annoying noise…that (again) tells us more about them than it does about us. We can learn that (as surely I’ve proven by now) employing a sense of humor when dealing with trolls can helps us keep things in perspective while at the same time stopping trolls in their tracks because laughter is probably the last thing they want to hear. We can learn that trolls are probably very needy people, hungry to be heard and understood, but without the social skills to get our attention in a healthy, helpful way. And finally we can learn – and this isn’t the fun part – that when 20 people angrily gang up on a single, silly troll, none of us is acting in an admirable fashion. Messageboard moderators are best qualified to deal with troll extermination. Let’s leave that job to them, so we can use our listeners for the really important stuff, like how to succeed with weight loss surgery.

Wow, that's a lot of milestones all piled together. You're doing great, and you must feel great! The "normal" glucose reading when you're not even on diabetes meds is amazing.

Welcome, and congrats in starting your weight loss surgery journey. Maybe you can put some fears to rest as you read through other members' posts and post your own questions.

I haven't had the band with plication, but a member called CArolinagirl has. I'll ask her to pop in on this thread. I know her weight loss has been super, with no fills since her surgery in early June. She'll give you more details.

Another thing to consider...if driving one hour to McAllen is too far for you to travel for support group meetings (which are usually held once a month), how are you going to manage that for other post-op visits? Aftercare is crucial to success with the band. Most surgeons expect to see the patient every 4-6 weeks. Since the band is filled slowly, you'll need to travel to McAllen at least every 4 weeks (perhaps more often) for fills. I'd be a happy camper if my surgeon were located only one hour away. It's a 5-6 hour round trip journey for me. If I were still getting band fills, that would be a problem for me in terms of the gas expense, time off work, etc.

Gastric bypass is the #1 choice for resolution of diabetes. Many patients have normal glucose levels within days of gastric bypass. Other types of bariatric surgery, like the band, can also improve diabetes, but that usually is the result of the weight loss, not the surgery itself. I have no idea if the bypass can reverse or stop the calcification in your pancreas - you need to talk to your doctor about that. One other thing (for now) to keep in mind is that with the band, weight loss may not start until months after surgery, when you've gotten enough fill in your band to help it do its job of reducing hunger and creating early and prolonged satiety. For that reason, if I were in your position, I would strongly consider a different surgical procedure. I loved my band, and it did wonders for my diabetes in the long run, but the benefit only persisted as long as I made good food choices and exercised. I can't help you with your support group questions because I'm not even sure where Brownsville and McAllen are. Are they in Texas? There are 2 ways you could research support groups in your area. One is to go to the Texas forum here on LBT and post a question about it there. The other is to call the hospital nearest to you and ask if they have or know of any WLS support groups in your area.

The endoscopy is a good idea if only because it'll help your surgeon see if you have any anatomical quirks that he'll need to accommodate when placing your band. I know you want to just get all this over with and get your surgery scheduled, but it really is better to take care of ulcers and the like before you get into the operating room.

I strongly recommend that you drink some iced water before you start to eat. It's a MUCH lower calorie approach to produce the same effect.

No, I wouldn't attribute pain in your port area to the tightness of your band. I don't see how the pressure of your band against your stomach could be transmitted to the abdominal muscles surrounding your port. Not impossible, but extremely unlikely. Pain at the port site is usually related to healing of, or stresses on, that area. The Lap-Band port is sutured into the fascia that surround the abdominal muscles, and it's very hard to do any body movement without using those muscles. In the nearly 5 years I was banded, I occasionally had discomfort at my port site as a result of bending, moving, twisting, reaching, bumping up against the kitchen counter, etc. etc. However....if your port area is reddened, swollen, or hot to touch, those are signs of infection that need immediate medical attention. Try to baby your port area for now. You can try putting ice packs on it to calm down the pains there.

That hasn't happened to me, but I hear about it a lot, so you're not unusual. Is it your left shoulder that hurts? Irritation of the diagphragm tends to be "felt" in the left shoulder - that's just a peculiarity of the nerves in your upper GI system. If you had a hiatal hernia repaired when your band was placed, that would add to the discomfort. Can you see any pattern in the occurrence of the pain? Do you stop eating as soon as you feel the pain? Try this: weigh/measure your portion of food and put half of it on your plate. Pay close attention to how you feel as you eat and how much food is left on your plate when the pain starts. If you get no pain or other stop signal when the first half of the portion is gone, put the rest of the food on your plate and eat that until the pain starts. Let's say you measure out a 4-ounce piece of chicken, eat 2 ounces of it, and you're fine. So you start eating the other 2 ounces, but the pain hits halfway through. That's useful information: your body is telling you that you shouldn't eat more than 3 ounces of that food at a time. If your food intake drops drastically (let's say, to below 800 calories/day) when you stop eating at the first hint of pain, I'd suggest that you talk to your surgeon about it. Maybe you need an unfill or maybe you just need more time to heal. If your food intake drops moderately (let's say, to about 1200 calories/day), but you're not left starving hungry all the time, you'll know that you're in synch with your band and on your way to weight loss.

Sounds like you have what we call "soft calorie syndrome." It happens when your band is too tight and you end up favoring soft, often high-calorie foods (like ice cream) that provide little or no satiety rather than the solid, healthy food that provides satiety and gives your body the fuel it needs. If you can hardly even drink tea in the morning, I really think you need a slight unfill. I'd make an appt. to talk to your surgeon about this soon so the two of you can come up with an action plan and nip the weight gain in the bud.

Well, it's good that your doc is making sure you and your innards are in tip-top shape before proceeding with surgery. He'll probably biopsy the ulcer to be safe, and should test you for the helicobacter.pylori bacteria that's responsible for most stomach ulcers. Helicobacter pylori is treated with antibiotics. If you don't have the h.pylori bacteria, your doc may have you start taking an acid reducing medication. Try not to worry too much about the ulcer. As you said, the upper GI was not conclusive, and your doc really needs to see the ulcer close up to judge what's going on in there.

Hey! I just noticed that you reached your weight goal yesterday. Congratulations!

You could help "train" the new doc. Someone's gotta do it! Tell him/her that you need to test the fill before you leave the office and don't let him/her leave the room until you're both satisfied that everything's OK.