theantichick

There are treatments. Most work best if there's just a spot (or multiple spots) when you have totalis or universalis the options get fewer. And the side effects from systemic steroids aren't worth it in my opinion. Sometimes it just goes into remission. And when my daughter starts biologics for her arthritis it's likely her alopecia will stay in remission. sent from mobile device

I haven't read all the responses yet but I'll join in that your surgeon is an ass. I wasn't losing weight at the time but I had a knee reconstruction and due to pain and weight I had to do most of the rehab in the pool. When it gets easier there are ways to increase the intensity and it is absolutely a good workout. sent from mobile device

My list includes a bunch of dancing. And being able to walk a few blocks workout my heart racing and being drenched in sweat. But I'm on a business trip this week and hadn't flown since before 9/11. So I'm adding to my list getting through security workout looking like I've run a marathon, and fitting more comfortably in airline seats. I didn't have to ask for an extender but it was a near thing. I will always be to tall for the stupid seats but it would be nice to not have to squish into the seat. I loved flying when I was younger. Now between those gods awful seats and the security theatre, I don't enjoy it anymore. sent from mobile device

I'm a computer geek, and while I don't have my date yet, I am planning for one week completely off, and one week working from home. I hope that's sufficient. I'm not eligible for FMLA because I haven't been with my company a year. But my boss is totally supportive, and I can extend the work from home period if I need to, and if I have serious complications she'll approve time off without pay. I had a knee reconstruction done back in '98 and was off work for 2 full weeks, and then worked from home for another 3 and I was in massive pain and dealing with physical therapy.

Everyone who's tried to talk me out has had moderate weight loss success the "natural" way, and in my circle of friends and family we have a couple of people who sabotaged their surgeries (lap-band), a couple very serious complications post-op (also lap-band), and a bunch of medical issues that people attribute to the surgery even though they're likely not connected. (Or if the surgery contributed, it was in addition to a bunch of other factors.)

My first rant (well, here at least)!! I started typing all of this out in response to another thread, and realized I'd gone off on a rant. Decided it was better to move it here. So I have a psych that I"m seeing. She's actually really great for what I'm seeing her for. (I have a ridiculously deep aversion to eating most vegetables that stems from my father force feeding them to me as a child.) My rant is about her determination to make me accept the healthy at any size stuff. Now, don't get me wrong, I agree with and support the general concept. Being overweight does not mean you are automatically unhealthy. Being thin doesn't mean you are automatically healthy. BMI is crazy stupid as a measure of anything. Doctors all too often focus on the weight and don't give heavy people the same treatment options as thin people. People are not bad or lazy or whatever because they are heavy. People should not be treated as less than, no matter what weight they are. I absolutely 1000% support all of that. My problem is that the HAES movement wants to make people think that they can be healthy at 300, 400, 500 lbs. I'm a nurse, and you will never convince me that anyone 300+ lbs (unless they're over 6' tall and play defensive lineman) is healthy. You can show me all the normal bloodwork and normal blood pressure and normal glucose/A1C in the world, and you will not convince me that you're healthy if you're that heavy. All it means is that your body is coping with the weight. And it will keep coping with the weight until it can't anymore. Some people's bodies can cope longer than others. But it is going to all fall apart, and while weight is not the only factor, it is a big one (no pun intended). I've always been heavy. The idiotic charts say that at 5' 9" (though I swear I was 5' 10" through my 20's) I should weigh some ridiculous amount like 140 lbs. I weighed 160-180 through most of high school. Once I lost down to 160-165 and looked and felt amazing, but it was hellish to maintain and I kept it up less than 6 months. When I was a Paramedic, I gained weight and got up to about 210. I got down to 185 for about 2 years after I quit emergency medicine, but then life happened and I was at 230-ish when I got pregnant 19 years ago. I bounced around between 220 and 240 for many years. I felt pretty good, liked the way I looked (mostly) and could do whatever I wanted to. I used to belly dance, go roller skating, hiking, whatever. Honestly, if all I manage with the surgery is to get back down to below 230, I'll be happy. (Though I'm really going to try hard for 185.) I felt sluggish but mostly OK and still was able to do most things when I was ranging from 250-265. Once I pushed past 270, I've felt like absolute crap. Now I'm hovering around 300, and I feel horrific. Any level of exercise, no matter how moderate, pushes my pulse up past 150, and I am out of breath and drenched with sweat just from walking in from a parking lot. I can't go dancing, I can't even go to a festival because I can't walk that much. My blood pressure which had been textbook 120/80 for all of these years heavy is pushing into hypertension territory. Every medical condition I have has worsened exponentially with the last 50 lbs.... allergies, IBS, arthritis, etc. I barely have the energy to get through my day, much less clean or cook or do any normal thing when I get home in the evenings. I do NOT accept that this is healthy, normal, or desirable. I don't hate myself, or even they way I look. I hate feeling this way, and I am NOT healthy. Why in the heck are people determined to make me feel good about the weight I'm at, and convince me that my weight isn't affecting my health adversely??

What really made me believe it wasn't healthy was the BodyWorks exhibit (hope I got the name right) - it's the one where people donated their bodies and this guy plasticised them and turned them into models of the various body systems... it was awesome. But they had one exhibit where they showed what visceral fat looks like inside. Wasn't enough to push me to do anything about it back then, but it made a huge impact on me. I don't think I'll ever be in the "normal" BMI range, but I'd sure love to get down to the "just overweight" category.

That's what I keep hearing from the majority of those who had bariatric surgery. I have been avoiding this for so long, at some point I'm going to wonder why I waited so long when I could have been living my life.

Yeah, the long term effects of steroids are serious. NSAIDs don't have a lot of long term issues, except a slightly higher tendency to ulcers for some, and at high enough dosages kidney issues. But I know when I was hurting bad, and got relief from steroids, I didn't care about the long-term effects. I wanted to quit hurting so I could work (I was an ER nurse at the time) and move without hurting. It's a long slog getting a diagnosis and moving on to drugs that can help and prevent joint damage. Keep at the docs until they give you an answer.

My hubby finds me attractive at 300, and since I don't think I'll ever look like "oh my gosh that girl needs a sammich" I don't see that changing. I agree that we need a lot of research into weight gain, especially in light of the research on the biggest loser contestants and their metabolic rates. I hope that my childrens' generation will have better options for weight control than surgery based on things they're learning about weight gain in our generation. Right now, we have to do the best with what we have. I think some things we never really gain a taste for. I was raised in a religion that doesn't eat seafood, and though I don't practice it anymore, I just can't develop a taste for it. (However, I have noted that I was raised not eating pork either, and I had no issues learning to eat ham and bacon!!) I don't expect to ever LOVE vegetables. I just want to get to a point where my body isn't revolting (gagging and throwing up) when I decide for whatever reason I am going to eat them.

LOL. My Ex-SIL (divorced the guy, kept the sister) says "stoopid" that way, so I heard this in her voice.

YMMV = Your Mileage May Vary. (Haven't seen that one much on this board, but it's common on others.) WTG = Way to Go!

The "arthritis of unknown origin" is a common bucket to toss those of us without specific blood markers in until another symptom or test points the way. I went through years of my doc telling me that it was depression, putting me on anti-depressants, and eventually an anti-psychotic (sounds worse than it is... they've found that some of the atypical anti-psychotics help with untractable depression when added to an anti-d) and eventually she just put down "arthralgia" which is the $15 medical term for joint pain. I insisted on getting referred out to a rheumatologist after steroids took my pain level down from a 6-7 to a 1. Rheumatologist couldn't find any specific blood markers, and eventually after finally seeing some joint swelling after 3 months off of steroids (ouch) diagnosed me with non-serologic RA. Prescription NSAIDs failed, methotrexate failed, and I had partial success with sulfasalazine. Then I sent my daughter in to my rheumy, and she has been diagnosed with non-radiologic SpA (spondylarthropies) because the rheumy right now can't differentiate between psoriatic arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis (kiddo's dad has AS, she has the gene for both PsA and AS) so she's about to start the medication train to try and get her some relief. After seeing my daughter, rheumy looked more closely at my nails and found pitting (pitting is a sign of PsA, kiddo has it but she also has alopecia which can cause pitting) and then went back to my original worst pain which is these knots in my feet. She had originally said it wasn't related, but now with the pitting decided I have PsA, even though I've never had the skin symptoms. So she says I need to move straight to biologics, and that's when I asked about VSG. She was very excited about it for me, because apparently some of the hormones that directly affect PsA are altered by the removal of most of the stomach. And, fat cells secrete lots of estrogen which is part of the inflammatory factor. So we're putting off biologics while I get the surgery, and will start as soon as I'm recovered.

So much this. When I was at my best weight (and a size 10-12), I had a 15 inch difference between my hips and waist. I never found a jean that didn't gap horribly. When I got heavier, Lane Bryant used to have a pants/jeans sizing system that had colors for the different body shapes and single digit size numbers. The Blue 3 Tall fit me like a dream. But then they discontinued those, and none of their new stuff fits right. I'll be checking out some of the brands you guys recommended, so thank you!!

Cool. I also noticed that from the group homepage there wasn't a link to discussions, so I added a news item with the link. Hopefully that will help as well.

For some reason, there's not a link on the group home page to the discussion board. So here ya go. http://www.bariatricpal.com/forum/1258-sleeved-spoonies/

Shouldn't require any approval, everything was set to open/public. Did you try both links? Apparently one works better on phones and one works better on computers. I've moderated a lot of different forums before, but don't know this one very well. If we're having consistent issues I may need to forward them to support. But I'll need to get specifics about what's working and not working.

Since I'm on marriage #3, I don't feel like I should be giving marital advice. I certainly won't tell you to stick with him because you made a promise. I believe marriage is a contract, and when one side isn't living up to their end of it, the other side isn't obligated to keep their end up. However, I'm also not going to tell you to bail, because there is a "sickness and health" kind of thing going on. Ultimately, the fate of your marriage will depend on a lot more than you can convey here, and only you will know what choice is right. That being said, I have been to a lot of counseling and learned a lot through my 2 failed marriages. I highly recommend a book called Boundaries by Henry Cloud. Many of us in today's society don't know how to establish healthy boundaries. What is me, what is you. Ultimately, your husband will have to decide for himself to make a change. Whether surgery or not, he is the only one who can change him. You are only in charge of you. You can choose to stop engaging in behaviour that is destructive to you. You can ask for what you need in the marriage. Not things he has to change about himself, but what you need. And you can establish what your deal breakers are, and communicate those in a loving way. Focus on becoming a healthy, self-actualized human, and see where that takes you. I hope the best for both of you!

I'm showing my age here, but I've been on the internet since the AOL message board days. Online communities have ALWAYS been a mixed bag. Between the lack of a sarcasm font, lack of sub-text, differences in communication styles, and just flat out personality differences... I've seen message boards blow up in a hail of obscenities and all-out war. You want to see bare knuckle fighting posts? Go to a parenting board. It's like sharks in a feeding frenzy. The best advice is the same I got when I was pregnant and everyone I met was telling me how to do it "right"... Say "thank you for the input" and then take what works for you and discard the rest. I'm new to BP (lurking since Jan, posting for about 2-3 weeks), but what I've seen so far is pretty mild as internet community boards go.

I'm a nurse and have given my share of Lovenox. About 1/2 my patients say it doesn't hurt at all (are you done, I didn't feel a thing) and about 1/2 say it stings like heck. I will say it's important to not stick the exact same spot over and over. They taught us to rotate sites, different side each time and look for a spot that doesn't appear to have been stuck. It does cause a little bruising in a lot of people, which makes it easier to see where not to poke. We were taught to keep the injections to the "love handles" and not toward the center of the stomach, and stick it quick like a dart and it helps it sting a little less. Good luck!!

I think it's an individual thing, and different from NUT to NUT and MD to MD. I've asked the question of my surgeon and my NUT because I made myself physically ill trying to do Atkins. I cannot tolerate my carbs going low enough to put me in ketosis. We've all agreed that we'll take the approach of trying to moderate carbs and stick with complex carbs as much as possible instead of simple carbs, and we'll see how it goes. Neither my surgeon nor my NUT is in favor of extreme carb restriction to start with. But I know a lot of people do best with a very low or no carb level, and some docs insist on it, so I'm not knocking it, just saying it doesn't work for me. I would say try to follow what your MD and NUT say, and if it's not working for you, talk to them and work out what will. Best of luck!!

You go, girl! Keep reminding yourself that his situation is no longer your circus, and no longer your monkeys. And yeah, if he already has a lawyer, you'll need to get one too or they can pull some fast and loose stuff on you. Hopefully he'll realize that contesting things just makes it more expensive for himself too, and it won't cost you an arm and a leg.

I have seen a few threads about adding a doctor to the directory. I thought there might be a place to send an email but I can't find it, so I'm posting here. My surgeon is Melanie Hafford in Irving, TX. http://lascolinasmedical.com/physicians/profile/Dr-Melanie-Hafford-MD Is this the best way to get her added? Thanks in advance for any help!

Thanks! I see her now, and have added her to my profile.

I'm pre-op, but have psoriatic arthritis, and my docs say that the VSG will help with some of the inflammatory factors that are giving me such grief, in addition to taking some load off my poor joints. One of the things I was worried about is the trauma of surgery causing a flare. I have found lots of people here who have auto-immune, diagnosed either before or after surgery. It's hard to try to eat right and exercise when you're struggling just to get through the day. I started a support sub-group for us spoonies with WLS, if you want to hang out there as well. http://www.bariatricpal.com/forum/1258-sleeved-spoonies/ http://www.bariatricpal.com/groups/455-sleeved-spoonies/ (both links are for the same place, but apparently there's more than one way to get there.) Huge hugs!