onikenbai

Ontario... I can work with that. The biggest clinic in Ontario is the Surgical Weight Loss Centre in Mississauga and it has a very good reputation. It's probably your best bet because of its size. LAP-BAND®® Surgery Clinic | Weight Loss & Gastric Balloon in Toronto, Canada I go to CIBO in Toronto. Overall I give it a meh. I am not terribly disappointed but I'm not stunningly thrilled. LAP-BAND® Surgery Weight Loss Surgery Clinic Toronto | CIBO There are two other clinics in Toronto. Nobody I know has gone to the Yorkville one downtown and I haven't heard anything good about Slimband. Laparoscopic Band Surgery – (Gastric Band – Slimband) Again though, if you're just looking for fills you may have different priorities.

You probably were suffering from a bit of dehydration after exercising which caused you to be tight. I appear to be fairly sensitive to this sort of thing and I have to be careful to have lots to drink before I even think of eating my first meal of the day.

Canada is a BIG country. You are going to have to narrow down where you are going. Overall you may have trouble finding a doctor for fills only as lapbands tend to get sold in a package deal of band and support services. We tend to get unlimited fills and unfills as a part of our package deal. There is no harm in trying though, I admit.

That's totally swelling as it takes a couple of hours to kick in. Can you go for less aggressive fills more often? Maybe see if you can get the doctor to give you some sort of anti-inflammatory if you are prone to more than average swelling?

I had my fourth fill on the 10th. All was fine and I ate a full chicken breast and mashed potato on the 14th and felt just fine. Since the 15th though, every bite I have put into my mouth I have thrown up. Doesn't seem to matter what I eat, it comes back up after the first bite. I can get all the liquids down I want (although not with food because it just makes me throw up all the faster). Last night, I managed to get down about a cup of mashed potato and some meat loaf. I was stunned that it went down and stayed down. Today, back to one bite and puking. What's going on?!? I've always been a very slow eater, so that's not the problem, and I'm eating suitable foods. The only thing I can think of is that I'm just a little too tight, but then why was I able to get down more than a cup and a half of food the two times I managed to keep something down?

If I could get down 5-6 bites and then not be hungry for the rest of the day, I'd be happy. My problem is that I can barely get anything down but I'm freakin' hungry!

It's not unreasonable, but it also depends on where you are going. I don't think I would travel to any place where medical care isn't reasonably available, or to a place where the water may be iffy. Other than that, it's probably better to go while your band is unfilled rather than starting the filling process and then going.

Best advice is not to wait until the first day of your pre-op diet to try out the protein shakes. Test a few out before hand and ease into it. Hitting the wall with a sudden change in diet is literally like hitting a wall.

Once your BMI hits 50 the risks of anesthesia go up significantly, which is probably why many of the doctors may be refusing you. This doesn't really change if you opt for RNY or VSG, although they often have more specialized clinics for high BMI clients and may consider people with BMIs higher than 50, but it's a much higher risk and you will literally have to sign your life away. Considering you can lose 30lbs without huge difficulty in a strict 3 week pre-op diet (and not necessarily an all liquid one), it really isn't that much of a stretch to get down 50lbs before the surgery. It sounds insurmountable, but it isn't.

On Saturday I had some jam that had fruit pieces in it and a piece of peach slid down my throat before I could chew it. Curse you, slippery jam! The bit of fruit was just a little too big but it wasn't big enough to get royally stuck. There was a bit of PBing but the bit wouldn't come up. I even tried the large glass of Water trick to encourage it. PBing stopped and I assumed the bit had worked its way through. I still went to liquids afterwards because of potential swelling. Since then though, anything I put in my mouth, including liquids, hasn't really been sitting well. I feel vaguely nauseated most of the time. I had a couple of crackers today and that triggered the PBing, but again, I couldn't get the crackers up, just a whole lot of slime. I'm wondering if that bit of peach is still kicking around in my pouch refusing to come up or go down and is causing the problem.... kind of like a marble in an hour glass. Is it possible to get a not quite stuck but not going through bit of food in your pouch? Suggestions other than the gasx or papaya enzyme?

Band size is determined by your surgeon during the procedure once they get inside and see your stomach. Not everybody is built exactly the same and a small band may be too small to fit around your stomach. According to my surgeon, both the small and large bands inflate to the same internal diameter. The bummer about the large band is that it generally takes longer to get up to a good restriction but once you hit restriction there shouldn't be too much difference between the two.

Stay far, far, far away from popcorn! Corn on the cob too. Once your teeth settle down from the trauma of getting the braces on, you should be able to eat just about any food, although unpeeled apples and the aforementioned corn on the cob will be a nightmare. I always had a bit of trouble with strawberries, kiwi and poppy bagels because the seeds get stuck in everything. That doesn't mean you can't eat them, but if you're going to have them you will probably have to brush your teeth soon after. Start carrying a small toothbrush kit with one of those collapsable toothbrushes. Usually the ortho gives them out for free. When I got my braces my ortho decided to go with a very heavy gauge wire and brace. I didn't eat for three weeks. To this day I've never seen another person who had the same braces I did, with the exception of Ugly Betty.

You had a fill yesterday and you were eating solid foods? Usually it's liquids only for two days after getting a fill to let the swelling go down.

I just don't get why you need to be on your parents' insurance at all. You are a Canadian citizen and presumably qualify for your own provincial health care card unless you've given up your residency to avoid paying Canadian taxes while living overseas. When I moved to Japan I lost my OHIP because I no longer met the residency requirements to keep it in place. You said you haven't been home in years so it is entirely possible your universal health care card has become invalid, but it's also likely that you won't be eligible for your parents' plan as you haven't lived there in years and you are no longer a student. If you are moving back to be a student, most universities include supplemental health care as a non-optional part of tuition, so you'd still be covered anyway. I'm not trying to be a pain in the butt and I'm not attacking you, I'm just trying to understand why you would need to be affiliated with your parents' insurance in any way:confused:. Health insurance isn't a private thing in Canada like it is in the US. We get hit by a bus, the ambulance comes and gets us and takes us to the big building where they make it all better, basically for free. That's why we pay the big bucks in taxes. If you had some sort of major complication related to your band which required a surgery, such as an erosion, it should still be covered provincially as it would become a necessary procedure to have it removed. An ulcerated stomach is what it is, regardless of how it got that way. Worst case is that you move back, wait your three months (or whatever it is in your province) to get your provincial health card and you're all covered again, completely independent from your parents, free of charge. Pre-existing conditions are irrelevant to the eyes of provincial health care so it's not like they can turn you down. Even your parents should have insurance completely independent from each other... such is the nature of the universal health card. I get why SoExcited was under parental insurance until 27. It was a private policy in the US. Canada has a completely different system for paying for health care which is not based on private family policies. That's where I'm getting confused. I also don't know which province your Canadian household is in, so there is a possibility of you working to a slightly different set of laws than I do.

I take my pills regularly and I'm on my third or fourth fill... I've actually lost count. My pills are small though, probably only about 4mm across. My surgeon told me that once you are properly restricted, anything you ingest has to fit through a hole roughly the size of a chick pea. Chick peas are a good 6-7mm across. You can buy a pill splitter at the pharmacy for like $3 to quarter your pills and swallow them fairly normally instead of crushing them, which will improve in the taste department. Quartered, you should be able to get them in just fine and I don't see why they wouldn't be absorbed normally. As for the powder pills... you might be SOL there if they are big capsules and there's no equivalent tablet or liquid. My best advice there would to be to mix the powder into something with a really strong flavour. How do you feel about blue cheese dressing?

Could just be your body flushing the drugs out of your system. If it's been happening since immediately after your surgery, it's not likely a virus that you caught at the hospital because they rarely work that quickly. I know my tummy wasn't happy with me after the anesthetic and there was much heaving involved. Just keep drinking so you don't get dehydrated. If it persists though, you need to get back to the doctor before you turn into a raisin.

Haven't we already covered this before? I know I've written this post before, but maybe it wasn't to you. You are over the age of 18. As a Canadian resident you shouldn't be under anybody's insurance, you should have your own provincial insurance card completely independent from your parents'. Or are you talking about paying for fills? Provincial insurance doesn't cover lapband after care because it doesn't cover lapband. Then I could see how your parents' insurance might enter the picture... but at 24 you likely are far too old to be registered as a dependent on a private health care plan. If it's a private plan you're speaking of, it's not going to cover anything. That's just how they are right now in Canada. If you need fills or something, I think you're stuck paying for it. Provincial health care should step in if you have a major complication requiring immediate medical care but, other than that, I think you're boned.

I didn't see the movie because I was so offended by the trailer. The message of the movie is that normal people have to rise above the dispproval of the general populus to be with a person who is overweight and that they should be considered virtuous to have overlooked this obvious flaw. If the scenario were changed from fat to some sort of ethnicity this movie would never have been made. Maybe seeing the whole movie makes a difference but from the trailer alone, I didn't want to go anywhere near allowing this movie to make money.

Gatorade and orange juice?!? Those are LOADED with sugar. Kind of defeats the purpose of having all that other sugar free stuff and definitely won't help in the liver shrinking department. I had to cut out all fruit juices, sports drinks and any beverages with sugar in them, including natural sugars. If you really need a sports drink for the electrolytes, Nestea makes a sugar free powder.

Tell him you'll have one with your coffee later then put them in the break room. There's a fairly high chance that by the time you get around to coffee, the donuts will be all gone. I wouldn't pretend to eat the food and thow it out... that's just wasteful.

That would puff up in your stomach like crazy! I'm impressed you were only sliming, not hurling your guts out. I'm not sure I could have taken that pre-band, nevermind post. It sounds yummy but I have a touchy tummy.

Ask your doctor to look into your stomach enzymes. I too could not tolerate shakes in any way shape or form. I tried the non-gluten, no soy, no dairy, no preservatives... absolutely everything under the sun. When I mentioned to my mother the shakes making me sick as a dog she said it wasn't surprising given the fact I was missing enzymes . Apparently it was discovered when I was a baby that I am missing an enzyme in my stomach. Most people have 18, I have 17, and the one that I'm missing specifically is for the digestion of protein. I had a special diet when I was a baby because of it and, to this day, I cannot tolerate concentrated proteins such as large amounts of beans, dense meats and protein shakes. Maybe you too have this problem. Then it would be a simple case of supplements to cover off the missing protein. I'm still working my own problem out yet so I can't really say how that's working out for me, but it nicely explains why I've avoided the high protein foods my whole life.

Nope, that EXACTLY the dumping I get.

Gaining after surgery is not surprising if you look at the biology of the pre-op diet. You starved your liver of its short term energy resources and shrank it. For every unit of energy stored in the liver TWO units of Water are stored. This is partially why you drop weight like crazy during the pre-op: you're losing water from your liver. As soon as you go back to eating carbs and sugars of any form, your liver hoards the energy and stocks up again. It's supposed to do this. So a lot of the weight you gain right after surgery is water back into the liver. Water is very heavy... one cup is 250g, or a little over half a pound. If you weighed yourself throughout the day, your weight could fluctuate by a couple of pounds depending on how much water is in you. The little fluctuations do not matter. Go with the bigger trend. Stay off your scale until you have restriction or you will drive yourself batty. Been there, doing it now.

I have this problem except for me can take only 5 minutes from my first bite to my first dash to the loo. I have IBS too so it's not exactly a novelty to me but I thought it would slow down with the band because food theoretically should remain in the pouch for a bit. Guess not eh? There doesn't seem to be a particular food that does it, and sometimes it takes only water!