Jean McMillan

Try not to get tangled! LOL! I hear ya! Just want to say that sleep apnea is only one of a variety of sleep disorders. Some are treated with a CPAP, some are treated with a BiPAP, and some aren't treated with a machine at all. I hope you find out what your sleep problem is and get it treated soon, because even if a sleep disorder isn't required for WLS qualification, poor sleep has been proven to contribute to obesity.

It's a very personal decision, but I'm a bit surprised that you won't go ahead with the surgery if your wife doesn't also qualify. If I were your wife, I'd want you to do anything possible to improve your health, even if it meant my own weight issues weren't being immediately addressed. But hopefully you'll both get approved and make the journey together.

Aw, c'mon. Taking that nail off won't hurt that much. At least they didn't make you take the acrylic off all 10 nails. And just think of all the benefits you'll gain when this sleep test pushes you that much closer to weight loss surgery! Edited to add: don't eat beans the day before. During my sleep study, there was a microphone on the head of the bed so they could hear me snore, fart, and ask to go to the toilet.

Click on your name at the top right side of the forum page Click on My Settings Under Profile Settings (left side of the page), click Signature Paste your ticker into your signature window Click Save Changes Then your ticker should show up in every post you make. And I believe that when you update your ticker at Ticker Factory, it will automatically update your ticker in your signature at LBT.

Whether you can fail it depends on why you're having it. If you need to prove co-morbidities to qualify for surgery, and sleep apnea is the only possible co-morbidity you might have, I guess you'd fail the test if it showed that you don't have apnea or any other sleep disorder. Other than that....? You might fail if you refused to remove the acrylic from that finger, or freaked out and had to be disconnected from the monitoring equipment....but otherwise, it's a hard test to "fail" because all you have to do is lie there for 6-8 hours. I've heard people say that they didn't sleep at all during their sleep study, but apparently the monitor showed that they did sleep in some fashion.

Ask any question, big or little, that you need to ask. As the old saying goes: the only stupid question is the one you don't ask!

How fast you'll recover from surgery will depend on a number of things, but if you're accustomed to a lot of physical activity in your job, I would think you'd spring back fairly fast. Recovery time is generally 1-2 weeks for people who have a sedentary job and/or lifestyle. A bigger concern is that in order to allow your body to heal, especially your port site, you're going to have to be very careful for 4-6 weeks after surgery. Low-level, steady activity like walking isn't a problem, but sporadic, short-term, high-strength activities could be a problem. Just because you feel OK doing them doesn't mean you should be doing them, you know? I had my port repositioned 2 years ago. I was lighter, healthier, and a LOT more physically active than I'd been before my original band surgery, so I assumed I'd bounce right back. I was wrong. The trauma to my port site and the sutures stitched in to my abdominal fascia made it extremely difficult to do even light-duty stuff. So I think you're going to have to talk with a bariatric surgeon about what to expect for your own recovery and return to work. Good luck!

Congratulations on starting your weight loss surgery journey! This is a great place to get answers to your questions, especially on life with the band.

You are so right: we shouldn't take no as an answer, though even the best docs may not be able to immediately figure out what's going on. I think patients need to be assertive in dealing with health care professionals. I'm glad you finally got your tubing problem fixed.

It's normal for me.

Possible causes: EROSION - immune system response to the presence of the band; trauma to the stomach during band placement; stomach ulcers from medication or the pressure of the band against the stomach; aggressive over-filling of the band. SLIP - vomiting, overeating, failure to follow the post-op diet progression, poor eating skills, over-filling of the band; untreated hiatal hernia; suture failure or surgical error during placement of band

LOL!

WATCH OUT! The Food Police are watching you, and if they catch you misbehaving, you’ll be dragged off to prison, where you’ll have to subsist on stale melba toast and lukewarm water. The Food Police are every dieter’s nemesis. They’re relentless and sometimes cruel, and they surround us. You know them. They're the friends, relatives, and coworkers who watch as you eat a meal and say things like, "Should you be eating that?" I actually enjoy dealing with that kind of comment. Depending on my mood and the circumstances, I might give a mind-your-own-business answer ("What's it to you?") or I might say, "So, where did you get your degree in nutrition science?" The existence of Food Police implies that there are some hard-and-fast Food Laws that the Food Police enforce as they prowl the weight loss community, maintaining order and detecting crime. Although I wouldn't want the job of a police officer, I know the police are necessary, and I believe that without them, chaos and anarchy would probably ensue. But in the world of weight loss, there are at least a thousand sets of Food Laws, and they change by the moment according to whatever new scientific discovery or not-so-scientific fad is being publicized. If you listened to every member of the Food Police, you'd probably end up feeling like a citizen of a Police State, where the police not only enforce the law but create it. That's truly a scary thought. I can snap out smart-aleck responses to Food Police interrogations all day long, but I'm not always so clever at dealing with the special squad of Food Police who live inside my brain, monitoring every bite of food, every minute of exercise, every food choice, every ounce on the scale. They've been there a long, long time. The summer I turned 14, when wearing a cute bikini was the most important goal in my mind, I kept a food log and graded every bite of food I took. I knew that a chocolate donut had 310 calories, and since that was one-fourth of the total calories I had allotted for each day, that donut got a low grade. I knew it was a "bad" food choice, so I decided to eat only a quarter of a donut (77.5 calories) for breakfast at 8:00 each morning, but since I'm a notorious Food Criminal, I'd end up eating another donut quarter at 8:30, and another at 8:45, and the last at 9:00, at which point I would view the empty donut box with deep regret and the three empty hours until lunch time with deep dread. That was not a happy summer for me and the cute bikini I sewed for myself would have caused the Fashion Police to arrest me if they'd been out cruising our neighborhood. FOOD CHOICES: GOOD, BAD & INDIFFERENT The Food Police can make us miserable, it's true, but can we live entirely without them? One of the lifestyle changes I committed to when I had bariatric surgery was to make a sincere effort at making good food choices from now on. Since I don't have a degree in nutrition science, I decided to follow my bariatric nutritionist's Food Laws. I think highly of Susan but as the months went by, I realized that succeeding with the band actually involved several types of "good" food choices. The two most important categories for me are: 1. Food that's nutritious. 2. Food with high satiety value. The pre- and post-op nutrition classes Susan conducted emphasized food choices and behaviors that would support good health ("nutritious") and prevent eating problems (like stuck episodes, PB's, sliming), but I don't recall any mention of eating for satiety. Susan is a smart lady but she's not a bariatric patient, and I learned gradually, through trial and error, that food consistency could turn a "good" food into a "bad" one in the satiety sense. For example: 1. An apple is "good" while applesauce is "bad". 2. Baked chicken is "good" while chicken salad is "bad". 3. A bowl of chickpeas is "good" while a bowl of hummus is "bad". 4. Hard cheese is "good" while cottage cheese is "bad". 5. A granola bar is "good" while a bowl of cooked oatmeal is "bad". Provided that all of the foods mentioned in the examples above are prepared in a low-fat, low-sugar manner, all ten of them are nutritious, but only five are good food choices in terms of satiety. How so? Solid food has the greatest chance of triggering the nerves in your upper stomach to register satiety and send a "had enough" message to your brain via the hormone called leptin. Soft and slippery foods, no matter how "healthy", can't be relied on to do that job. FOOD LAW AMENDMENTS I've also learned that appropriate enforcement of band food rules needs to be adjusted on almost a daily basis, because on Tuesday morning I can eat 2 cups of cottage cheese while on Wednesday afternoon I can eat only 2 tablespoons of it. As a result, I not only have to constantly monitor my body and my eating (which is not such a bad thing), I have to continually amend my Food Laws. The variability of restriction is one of the most perplexing things about living with the adjustable gastric band. It can be downright infuriating. But consider the alternative. The alternative is the way I ate and lived pre-op. I could and did eat anything I wanted, in any quantity, at any time of day. Three chocolate donuts every morning, three pounds of shrimp every afternoon, a gallon of ice cream every night. The price I paid for those food choices was obesity and all the painful, humiliating, and frustrating side effects and limitations caused by 90+ extra pounds on my short body. YOUR ASSIGNMENT, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT Do you have Food Police in your life? Who's wearing that uniform? A spouse, parent, coworker, friend or neighbor? Are they truly qualified to judge your food choices? How do you respond when they try to force a food law on you? And what about the Food Police inside you? What are they telling you every time you take a bite of food? Do they chastise you, or do they sometimes give you a good citizen award? Do you listen to them, heed them, ignore them, defy them? Make a list of 3-5 Food Laws that structure your post-op life. Are they serving your health and weight loss needs? Or do they need amending? Can you do that by yourself, or do you need the help of a professional, like a nutritionist or a counselor? At almost 5 years post-op, I still have my own in-house (so to speak) Food Police, but they're not as strict and punitive as they used to be. I keep them on the job because I'm so good at justifying the worst eating behavior and I sometimes need them to say, "Hey, hey, hey, little lady! What do you think you're doing? You know better than that!" The Food Laws that structure my life are: 1. Eat for good health. 2. Eat for good satiety. 3. Eat for pleasure. Did I really say "eat for pleasure"? I sure did. But that's a topic for another article!

Elysabeth, with the doctors, PA's and nutritionist, you might be better off saying, "You could be right," then smile serenely and go on eating. Or say, "That reminds me" and go on to talk about something entirely unrelated.

When I was choosing a WLS procedure, I was uncomfortable with the permanence and higher risks with the sleeve. I chose the band mainly because of its adjustability. I love my band, but now I'm revising to the sleeve because of esophageal motility issues from my band. All other things being equal, I think the sleeve might be a good choice for people who can't afford the time and expense of getting band adjustments (fills and unfills). The common belief that the band is better because it's reversible is ill-founded. Yes, the band can be removed, but not easily, and it may leave scar tissue behind. And if you don't revise to another bariatric surgery procedure, it's all too easy to regain the weight you lost. Edited to add: Also, the "foreign object" argument against the band seems blown out of proportion to me. Why is one silicone & titanium medical implant a lifesaver while another is an evil foreign object? The band is made of the same bio-compatible materials as artifical joints and other medical implants that have been used safely for decades. Unless the patient has a history of autoimmune disease, it's highly unlike that the body will "reject" the band the way it would reject an organ. Rejection of transplants that consist of protein (like a liver or heart) is a serious concern but it doesn't stop patients from getting desperately-needed transplants. The band contains no protein, so it's not subject to the same "foreign body" reaction as a transplanted organ.

I have the old 4 cc band that's not used in the USA any more. I had a band slip that was cured by a complete unfill. Two years later, I had another complete unfill to treat eseophageal dilation and motility problems. My surgeon refuses to re-fill my band now because she says that my band is too small, even without any fill in it. So your surgeon might be thinking the same thing of your band...that you'll do better, and be safer, with a bigger band. Apparently smaller bands cause too much pressure on the stomach and lower esophagus. I'm going to have my band removed and revise to the vertical sleeve gastrectomy because I'm afraid that even a bigger band can eventually cause problems.

It could be gas, but you should never ignore chest pain. Call your surgeon and go to the ER.

"THOU SHALT NOT?" Somewhere in the dark mists of my distance past, the term “reverse psychology” entered my awareness, especially as applied to child-rearing. The idea was that if you told your child “Please slam the door when you leave the house,” the defiant devil in that child would shut the door quietly in opposition to your instruction. I don’t have human children and never observed reverse psychology work magic in my childhood home. No matter how firmly you told my brother not to brush his teeth, his teeth went unbrushed. Telling him to jump on the bed would trigger a marathon jumping session (causing the box spring to violently part company with the bed frame) instead of a peaceful bedtime story. And I was no angel – I rewarded my mom’s laissez-faire attitude towards teen dating by involving myself with the worst losers I could find. Despite all that, I know there’s a kernel of truth in the concept of reverse psychology. If you told me I must never, ever eat chocolate again, I’d get started on a chocolate binge before you even finished your sentence. And if you told me, “Thou shalt not even think about potato chips,” my every waking and dreaming moment would be filled with potato chips. Unfortunately, this principle doesn’t work in both directions, at least not for me. If you told me, “You must eat nothing but ice cream this week,” I’d be happy to comply. I’d grab my car keys and ice cream scoop and race to the frozen foods section of the nearest supermarket (after a quick stop at Baskin Robbins). Author and eating disorder expert Geneen Roth tells a story about a mother who worried about her daughter’s weight. Even when the mom locked sweets up in a cabinet, the daughter managed to smuggle sweets into the house and hide in her bedroom to gorge on them. When the mom took Roth’s advice to give the child free access to sweets, the girl tired of them and began to make healthier food choices within a few days. This was a clear case of what I call Forbidden Food Syndrome, in which forced abstinence increases the person’s desire for the “bad” food. I don’t doubt that Roth’s advice in that case was sound, but in my personal experience, food rules aren’t the only cause of secretive food hoarding and gorging. My mom’s food rules had more to do with good manners than with nutrition. I had to take at least one bite of each food on my plate, chew with my mouth shut, ask for permission to leave the table, and dirty no dishes after supper. Other than that, I could eat whatever I wanted, in any quantity. Even with that much freedom, I would hoard and binge on sweets, alone in my room, at every opportunity. I wasn’t eating out of defiance, but neither was I eating for “good” or healthy reasons. Even at age nine, I was eating for emotional reasons – comfort, numbing, entertainment, you name it. As an adult, I have a better handle on my emotional eating than I did at age nine. I’m well aware of the food-obsessed Jeannie who will run without hesitation right into rush-hour traffic if a brownie might be waiting for me on the other side of the road. I know intimately the defiant Jeannie who insists on eating a piece of garlic bread even though she knows that the third or fourth bite could easily get stuck in her esophagus or stoma and cause a lot of discomfort. I have to monitor myself every day in order to maintain the delicate balance between choosing not to eat a piece of birthday cake because eating it doesn’t serve my weight management goals and choosing to go ahead and eat the entire cake simply because I know it doesn’t serve my weight management goals. Sometimes I feel like a freak because I have to deal with issues like this. I watch “normal” people making carefree eating choices and enjoying complete eating freedom with no awful consequences (or at least, that’s the way it looks to me), and deep down inside, I hate those normal people. They’re not yoked to this heavy burden of disordered eating like I am. It’s just not fair. But I’m gradually relaxing about my eating issues enough to be able to listen better and to hear more messages from my normal friends and acquaintances, and to realize that they too struggle with things like Forbidden Food Syndrome from time to time. I have a disgustingly healthy co-worker who told me once that she can’t eat chocolate because it gives her bad migraine headaches. She avoids chocolate, but she confessed that she wants it all the more because she can’t have it, and when she tells herself it’s OK to eat one small piece, she finds that she can’t stop – she eats three, five, seven pieces even though she knows she’ll pay for it sooner or later. She doesn’t pay with obesity, she pays with pain. She doesn’t know the pain of obesity as I do, but she and I struggled with the same basic problem. Little does she know how valuable her chocolate story is to me. It reminds me that I’m really not a freak – I just have a more intense and widespread eating problem than hers. It’s a matter of degrees. She’s five degrees off-center while I’m 45 degrees off. Neither of us is perfect. We both have to work at making good choices – not just in our eating behavior, but in every piece of behavior that could have good or bad consequences for us or for our family and friends. To my mind, this is just part of human existence, part of the responsibility that adult humans bear for maintaining a civilized and (we hope) peaceful co-existence with each other and ourselves. All this may be too philosophical for you, but I’m telling you about it because thinking about my eating problems this way has helped to put them in perspective, and putting them in perspective makes them a lot more manageable. Perspective is the art of seeing things in correct relationship to each other. As I wrote in Bandwagon, without perspective, my computer’s monitor looks ten times bigger than my neighbor’s barn across the road. In fact, my computer monitor is tiny compared to that barn. Without perspective, my weight management challenges seem enormous. I lost all that weight in just one year, but my maintenance job goes on forever. But consider the alternative. I could go back to obesity. I could have a stroke and become a human vegetable, reliant on others for everything from speech to toileting. I could lose my limbs to diabetes, reliant then on others for everything from tooth-brushing to transportation. I could suffer cardiac arrest and die at age 60. Or I can work at maintaining my weight and my health, with a huge payoff of mobility, independence, and longevity. So…back to Forbidden Food Syndrome. Although I’ve said that reverse psychology doesn’t always work with me, I must also say that one of the reasons I chose the band was that living with it would allow me to choose from a wide variety of foods I like. My nutritionist told me I might have problems eating certain foods, like celery or pasta, and I was willing to take the chance because life without celery or pasta still looked pretty good to me. But when my surgeon, speaking at the bariatric surgery informational seminar I attended, said that gastric bypass patients need to avoid all foods that are high in sugar, fat, or simple carbs because of the possibility of dumping, I mentally walked into a barbed wire fence and backed right off. At the time, I had one gastric bypass friend who didn’t dump, but the bypass patient who spoke at the seminar reported that he does dump, and when he described a typical day’s eating, I thought, “That’s not for me.” That guy was justifiably proud of his weight loss and didn’t mind a limited list of food choices, but I knew that limited food choices would send me running straight for the junk food if only out of sheer boredom. The night of that seminar, I hadn’t eaten a chocolate chip cookie for several months, but just the idea of giving up cookies forever made me want to stop at a bakery on the way home. I chose the adjustable gastric band, and the breadth and flexibility of my “OK Foods” list is one of the things that makes my post-op life enjoyable. I do overeat from time to time, but not because of Forbidden Food Syndrome. Taking foods off the Forbidden list has robbed them of some of their power over me. As a pre-op, I would attend a co-worker’s birthday party and eat two pieces of cake (Forbidden) because I’d been avoiding cake and missing it so much. As a post-op, I recently walked through the break room at work and saw a birthday cake on the table. I briefly wondered what flavor it was (impossible to tell from the decorative frosting, whose neon colors can’t be found in nature) and told myself I could try a little piece of it later, on my official break. Lo and behold, come break time I was quite hungry and not in the mood for cake. I wanted my chicken salad, and when I was done with that, I had no room for cake, so I went back to work without another thought about birthday cake. Now, that’s freedom!

LOL! Sounds like your PCP is cut from the same piece of cloth as my ex-PCP! "No, Jean, you don't need something as drastic as surgery..." "Jean, if you would just exercise...." "Jean, here's another diet to follow..." "And here's a refill for your cholesterol medication..." I did indeed prove him wrong, and I also found myself a new doctor. The only exercise I've ever seen the original one do was lift his fork from his plate to his mouth at a Mexican restaurant. He's morbidly obese himself...so if his approach doesn't work for him, why would it work for me?

Of course her opinion is bothering you....she's your friend! Avoiding her is OK, but if truly value her friendship, at some point you may want to ask her how she feels and if there's something you can do (besides sabotaging your own weight loss) to help her and to renew the friendship.

If you're following your surgeon's instructions and feel good, no, you're not losing too fast. Your weight loss will probably slow down eventually as your body adjusts your metabolism, but there's nothing wrong with a quick start like yours. So your weight loss is not the problem here. The problem is your friend's negativity, which I suspect hides some envy of you. If she keeps on making critical remarks, I'd have a heart-to-heart talk with her, or at the very least, tell her, "I appreciate your concern about my weight loss, but my doctor says I'm doing great, and I feel great, so could we not talk about it any more?"

I know exactly how you feel, and I think that a lot of people have bariatric surgery (of any kind) hoping or believing that it'll work like magic without any effort on their part. Sometimes that's because of poor pre-op education...not that their doctor lied to them, per se, but the bariatric team didn't give them the whole story. But to be fair, I think that LBT members who are struggling, disappointed and suffering complications have as much right to post about their journeys as anyone else. If it seems that there are more negative posts than positive ones, it's probably because people tend to post more often when they're having problems than when they're doing fine. When I'm not in the mood to read the negative stuff, I do my best to ignore it.

Yes, learning when to stop eating is hard for most of us. Also, we have to redefine "satisfied". My pre-op idea of satisfied was Thanksgiving dinner full. It's not good to keep on eating after you've consumed 3 ounces of food because overeating can cause esophageal or pouch dilation and/or band slips. You may have to measure out your 3 ounces of food, eat it, and make yourself stop whether or not you feel "satisfied". Also, watch for satiety signals, such as a sigh, a hiccup, a burp, a runny nose, a tickle or fullness at the back of your throat, and stop eating as soon as you experience one. All of this should become a bit easier after you've had another fill or two, but in the meantime you'll need to be extremely careful and pay very close attention to how you feel when you eat.

I'm sure your surgeon or nutritionist would be glad to give you a refresher course in the post-op diet that worked well for you before.

I haven't been blessed with a baby since being banded (if I had been, I'd earn an entry in the Guiness World Book of Records), but I've had an experience that seems worth telling you about. When I was about 20 months post-op, my band slipped and I had a complete unfill. The unfill worked to cure the slip, but when I was in the middle of getting refilled, my port flipped so it was nearly impossible to get fills. I had to postpone surgery to fix my port because of personal stuff going on, including the deaths of my mom and my mother-in-law. So another year went by before I got close to the level of fill I'd had before the slip. And lo and behold, that time around, my experience of restriction was nothing like the first time. I felt like a baby bandster who had to re-learn all my satiety signals. Once I got it figured out, I started losing weight again. So, my message to you is that a fill level that worked before may not work later, but that doesn't mean your band is never going to work again. Maybe you just need another fill. Even a small fill could make a big difference, and if necessary, your band can be filled beyond its official 10 cc capacity. I know it's hard to return to the same level of excitement and commitment to weight loss as you had as a new pre-op, especially when your life has changed in such a major way. I don't know you and don't know what deeply motivates you, but if I were you, I'd want to become the healthiest woman possible so I could see that baby grow up. If you can't do it for you, do it for your child!