thecooley

Thanks for the recommendations on alternate doctors! Depending on how my appointment with Dr. Mailapur goes this week, I may follow up with you folks. Queenvaruk, I'm sorry if my criticism of the seminar caused offense. It was totally not my intention. I wanted to document my impressions of the seminar for other people who may be starting out, so they would know what to (or not to) expect. It was based on my doctor's and your recommendation that I decided to give Dr. Mailapur a try. I value your experience, and it has been encouraging to me. I have thought about it quite a bit over the last few days, and I think several factors contributed to my negative feelings about the seminar. 1) The doctor showed up over 20 minutes late. Not a good first impression. 2) The $200 fee was stressed over and over again, but was never explained as an industry standard. I think a better explanation yould have made it easier to swallow, and seem less pretentious. 3) The doctor blew my question off in front of a lot of other people, who were probably interested in the answer. It gave me the impression that he is not interested in the patient's opinion or input. 4) The information given in the seminar was mostly a sales pitch for bariatric surgery, and was nothing more than what I had already gathered from this site and others like it. I'm a firm believer in second chances, so I'm chalking the experience up to a bad day. I'm going into the consultation with a positive attitude (and my credit card!!).

Well, I went to Dr. Mailapur's seminar on Tuesday night. My husband went with me for moral support. It was at the Dowdle Center across from Huntsville Hospital. It was really easy to find and we had no problem getting in and finding the room. I already had all 9 pages of paperwork filled out and ready to hand in. We ended up getting there way too early, but I definitely didn't want to be late! I wanted to be the nerd in the front row. :rolleyes2: It turns out that I had no competition for the front row after all. What is it with people always wanting to sit in the back? Apparently the doctor was running late, so his office manager got up and started the seminar with all the insurance info we needed to know. The good thing is that his office pretty much takes over your paperwork for you. All you have to do is provide the details. When you've met all the requirements on their checklist, they submit it to BCBS online and have an answer within hours. Pretty cool. The uncool part? He requires $200 (cash or credit card only) upfront for the consultation appointment. This was stressed several times, and is most certainly NOT refundable. :cursing: For that price, I'd better get a FULL HOUR of undivided attention. And a cookie. The doctor showed up 20 minutes later and flew through a Powerpoint presentation about the various means of bariatric surgery. A lot of the presentation was statistics and quotes from medical journals in support of surgery. I thought that was just fluff, considering most of the people who took time out of their lives on a weeknight for this seminar had already decided to look seriously at a surgical option. He had about 3 slides on lap-band and its pros and cons. Then he got to "The Gold Standard" slide i.e. gastric bypass, and spent the rest of the presentation on that. I'd say there were at least 10 slides on gastric bypass. It is obviously his preferred method. We had a pretty shy crowd, and I didn't want to seem like I was monopolizing his time by asking a bunch of questions. I had already asked several questions when the office manager was doing her spiel. Plus, he didn't really seem like he wanted to commit to an answer for anyone, which I can understand, because every case is different. There was at least one other young couple in the audience, so I wanted to ask a question that might benefit them too. So I asked how he felt about someone my age who wanted to have kids in the next couple of years getting a lap-band. He dodged the question by saying he's had plenty of patients who got gastric bypass and had kids. I told him that was too permanent for someone my age. He said something to the effect of "whatever" and moved on to the next question. Sigh. Really makes me look forward to the office visit. Overall I feel like the seminar was kind of a waste of my time, considering all the information I already found on my own. I had to wait two weeks for the seminar to roll around, which is two weeks sooner that I could have been working on the 6-month program. Considering you have to attend the seminar before you can even walk in the door, I think it was really designed to cut out the riffraff from filling up his appointment books then never going through with the surgery. It's a sound business decision, but it inconveniences everyone to stop the few who cause him problems. Just my opinion though. I went ahead and made an appointment for next week when my husband can come with me. If I'm going to have a battle, at least I'll have reinforcements. I'm hoping that he is better to talk to in a one-on-one environment, though. I don't want to have to fight tooth-and-nail for something I know is right for me. I'll let you all know how it goes...

Congrats on getting banded! Glad to know you're doing better now. If you don't mind me asking, why did they decide to keep you overnight? I am concerned that I might have some complications due to past experiences. I have had surgery twice in the past, and both times, I experienced gratuitous vomiting almost immediately after coming out of the anesthesia. I imagine that's not the best outcome for someone who is essentially having stomach surgery. I'm told that it was a reaction to demerol, but I don't know what that really is, or if it's necessary during surgery.

Thanks for the warm welcome and info on Dr. Mailapur. It sounds like he is finally warming up to the lap-band. Since I'm pretty much a perfect candidate for it, he would be hard-pressed to find an argument against me getting it. I'm going to his seminar on December 9, then I get to start the fun hoop-jumping process for BCBS.

Hello everyone! I'm a 26 year old female in Huntsville, AL. I had never considered weight loss surgery in the past, but a visit to my OBGYN this week scared me enough that I've decided I need to do something drastic and take control of my life. Here's my story. I was always the "fat girl" growing up. My mother was always on some crazy diet, and she needed "moral support", so I usually got roped into the fray with her. When the diet fad of the month failed, we would end up gaining more weight. What a vicious cycle. When I started college, I weighed 190 pounds (at age 17!!). By the time I graduated, I was at 265. In January 2007, I topped out at 320 pounds. My back hurt, I was tired all the time, and I was ready to do something. The doctor I was seeing at the time told me that with enough diet and exercise and discipline, I could get rid of all that weight. Haven't we all heard that before??? I immediately went on Weight Watchers and lost 50 pounds over the course of six months. I went down two sizes, and I went on a clean-out-the-closet shopping spree. I was ecstatic. Then I hit a plateau. Month after month the scale wouldn't move, and finally after eight long months of anger, depression, deprivation, and agony, I gave up. The weight started creeping back up immediately. Over the next 9 months, I gained back 30 pounds, eating what I considered to be "healthy" food during the week (i.e. starving myself and trying to subsist on those stupid Lean Cuisine meals), and whatever I wanted on the weekends. All those cute clothes I bought now languish in the corner of the closet, and all the "fat" clothes I never thought I would need again came out of the storage bins. I went to the OBGYN for my yearly exam this week. As part of the usual barrage of questions, I was asked when we are planning to have children. I casually answered that we were looking at maybe in a year or two. What came out of the doctor's mouth next scared the crap out of me. She said that if I tried to have children at my weight, I was guaranteed that something bad would happen to me or the child. She said that given my family history, I would absolutely have gestational diabetes and high blood pressure, plus a very high risk for pre-eclampsia and a high birthweight baby who would most likely be injured during the birth process. I was stunned. I love my doctor, by the way. Instead of dropping the bomb on me and walking out of the room, she sat down, looked me straight in the eyes and said, "what can we do to get you healthy?" So we talked about weight loss strategies. I told her about my multiple past diets, my recent attempt at Weight Watchers, and my current state of affairs. She thought for a second and said, "normally I don't recommend bariatric surgery. But you seem to be such a good candidate for it, so I say go for it!" She gave me the phone number for Dr. Mailapur, and told me to ask for the lap band, since that's the preferred method for people who plan to get pregnant. So I'm going to one of his information seminars next month, and I guess we'll go from there! I plan to do lots of research before then, of course. I'm so excited about the prospect of a plan I can stick to, get results, and not feel like I'm depriving myself all the time! I know I can do it!!

Hi everyone! I'm new here, and thought I would check in on the HSV thread. I am considering lap band, so I joined this board to get as much info as possible before making my decision. My OBGYN recommended Dr. Mailapur, so I am going to one of his info sessions next month. Glad to see there are other North Alabama folks here!

I'm very new to this process, and am researching doctors in my area. My OBGYN recommended Dr. Mailapur at Huntsville Hospital. She says he's the "cat daddy" of lap band surgery. He has an info session every other Tuesday, and I think I'm going to attend the next one. Has anyone out there had any experience with him? Is there anything I should look out for?