hey ladies, i just wanted to say a thing or two. i was banded in august at the third leading hospital in our nation. i had a lot of confidence in that.i went through about a year of visits at this hospital to prepare for this surgery. up until 5 days ago i had not had any restriction. and of course did not lose. i did not have a 52,ooo.00 surgery to completely try to lose the weight on my own. i think she's right about the fact that i was hungry and struggling for the past 4 months, but i had to follow the guidelines my surgeon set for fills.so i put some thought into this as i was really frustrated and thought i was a failure. my first thought was that my health proffessionals didn't care whether this worked for me. that they probably just were earning a great deal of money. but then i thought, this doesn't make sense. if they really wanted to just make a buck, they could and would fill and over fill and re-fill as many times and as frequent as a patient complained. they certainly would make more money if they didn't make their patients wait every 4 weeks for a fill,? right? i do believe that yes, we have to do our part but no, none of us should have to go too long without a fill to offer some help on our quest. those fills do not have to be aggressive ones, but just something so were not waiting months, and we feel were actually getting somewhere. also i'm sure that doctor's who are less aggressive with fills are probably concerned about problems arising from pb'ing and slippage. they don't want to be sued. yes some act like they are high and mighty and ultimately you are paying them for their service so if you don't agree with them-go elsewhere. i was thinking of this and i wish i too would of realized this a few months back. but now i am finally feeling this band at work. so maybe if you're trying to get fills to quickly and going in too often, then yeah that's probably not the way to go. but also, if your doc only allows fills for extended periods of time and there's no restriction there you should have some say as to when you can slowly build the saline up. waiting 4 months out to feel anything is too long. so i think somewhere there has to be a happy medium. maybe the rules for fills should be made on a patient to patient basis. and the time between fills based on your progress. we certainly all have different sized bands and we've all beeen told that our amount of cc's is different for the sweet spot person to person. so maybe they should treat us as individuals. thanks for listening. lisa6