BrandonKea

Hello!

I actually just stumbled upon this page tonight looking for general information, and I'm happy I did. I can already tell this is a wealth of information.
 
I'm 28 years old, married with a 2 year old daughter. I've been overweight for most of my adult life, but only within the last few years has it really gotten out of control. I had been successful with many efforts to lose weight, such as basic calorie counting and portion control, exercise, and (especially) the Atkins Diet. I say successful but with that caveat, it was only at losing weight. Eventually, the pounds came back, and they usually brought friends.
 
Almost 2 years ago, I went to the doctor for a routine check-up. Not news to me was that I was overweight, what was news is that I was in a range of "morbid obesity" that also came with high blood pressure (likely the cause of my ongoing, near-daily headaches.) I immediately started lisinopril to manage the HBP, and basically didn't change much.
 
A few months later, I noticed simple tasks were getting more and more difficult to accomplish. Trying my shoes, zipping up my pants, getting in and out of bed. It was time for me to jump on the scale and see how bad I really had it. That was the second alarm; 390 pounds. As recently as 2008, I was only 300 pounds, relatively in shape, and considering a career as a Police Officer or serving on the Border Patrol. Now, I was carrying around an entire extra person.
 
One of my bosses at work had recently had success in meeting with a dietician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center Bariatrics Center. Seeing how much weight he had lost, I immediately made an appointment. Rather than see a dietician, however, I went right for the medically supervised weight loss program. After a brief assessment, I was prescribed Qsymia, a relatively new (and thus, expensive) drug that combines phentermine and topiramate. Starting with the low dose, I progressed to gradually more potent combinations of the same drugs, but eventually quit because the side effects were very challenging to cope with on top of a lot of work stress at the time.
 
Did I mention work stress? I'm a 911 Dispatcher, a job not noted for its low levels of stress. I do suffer from PTSD due to some calls that I wish no human being would ever have to listen to again. You name it, I've heard it. The worst part about this job is that you aren't there to witness anything, so your brain has a tendency to fill in the blanks with the most graphic visualizations you can imagine.
 
So, after the stress of work and some very drastic side effects from my medications became too much for me to handle, I slipped back into my old routine of eating bad food and lots of it. Working the afternoon shift means no time for a nice sit-down dinner, it means a cold dinner at your desk scarfing down take-out between phone calls and radio traffic.
 
Fast forward to the summer of 2015, and I noticed my weight was creeping back to unhealthy ranges. I had actually lost almost 40 pounds fairly quickly, but by now had put all but 9 pounds back on. I went back to my doctor and asked what it would take to be a candidate for gastric bypass. Surprisingly, I didn't have much left to do.
 
I had completed a new sleep study, quickly got back into eating well and losing weight, and was on a semi-regular workout routine (just walking, nothing crazy like P90X which I was doing before.) My doctor told me at the end of August that surgery before the end of the year was completely possible. I wouldn't have believed it, but as I'm writing this, it's the 28th of November, and I had surgery a few days ago.
 
Opting for the Gastric Bypass over a sleeve or Lap Band, I knew that if I was going to resort to surgery, I wanted the tried and true method that would offer me the most results. Despite some mild complications during surgery, I survived, spent a few days in the hospital, and am now home recovering. I'm looking forward to learning from others on here as I go, and can't wait to see how much healthier I will be post-surgery.