ouroborous

From what I know, it is possible to stretch the sleeve, but not really easy. I was told that the part of the stomach that's cut out -- the fundus -- is the stretchy part. The remainder is roughly the consistency of football leather -- yes, it IS possible over time and with effort, to stretch it a little. But NO, one carbonated beverage or the occasional overly fast meal is NOT going to stretch your sleeve. Most of the "stretching" talk comes from lap band and bypass patients, who DO have a serious problem with stretching their respective "pouches." We sleevers aren't immune to the problem, but it's much less of an issue.

Folks, repeat after me: As long as you are getting enough Water, and enough Vitamin B12, you cannot suffer from malnutrition at a week out from surgery. You could fast completely -- nothing but water -- for a couple of weeks before you'd start to suffer from serious malnutrition (although you'd feel miserable after a week or so). Does this mean you SHOULD do this? No. But a few days with less-than-perfect nutrition is NOT going to hurt you, especially if you (like most of us heavy people) had lots of "reserves" to live off of.

Botox can help with fine movement-based wrinkles; so, crow's feet if they're the "fine line" variety, and not the deep creases that we get as we get older. Of course, the tradeoff is that the way you're "fixing" these wrinkles is basically by paralyzing your face so that you can't move it and make the wrinkles appear; it doesn't actually make the wrinkles go away (nothing will do that short of some kind of deep peel), but it keeps you from showing them. Honestly, I'd just wait if you're young and have fine crow's feet. They'll either resolve on their own if they're truly weight loss-related, or they're just a part of getting older.

With due respect, those symptoms (nausea, dizziness) are not symptoms of a drug allergy. Drug allergies produce itching, hives, and (in bad cases) anaphylaxis -- an inability to breathe, which can be fatal. I'm not sure what your symptoms would represent. It's possible that the omeprazole was causing upset stomach due to blocking too much acid, but usually blocking acid causes the opposite effect (ie, it's the acid that causes the nausea, etc.) Since you mentioned hypoglycemia, I should note that both symptoms (nausea and dizziness) can be caused by hypoglycemia. It's possible that when you resolved the hypoglycemia just happened to coincide with switching the acid blockers. Bottom line is that I'm glad you're feeling better, but you should be careful with the term "drug allergy" since I'm pretty sure this isn't one...

Drink Water. Dehydration will lead to fine wrinkles and "crepe paper skin" in even the youngest of us. And moisturize. And be patient; some of these changes will improve with time, and others... well, you'll be so happy to lose a lot of weight that you'll put up with the little things.

You are probably carb deprived; I went through this exact same thing, and my nutritionist gave me the same advice -- make sure to eat more (healthy) carbs with your meals. Everyone around here is so rabidly anti-carb that it's easy to forget, but carbohydrates are a necessary part of your diet. Just make sure to eat healthy, complex carbs (fruits, vegetables, milk products, etc.), not sugary carbs (sugar, refined white flour products, etc.) Introduce them slowly (to avoid the potential of carb dumping), and ramp them up till your energy improves. It will produce a dramatic, rapid turnaround in your energy level. Edit: oh, also, make sure you are drinking enough Water. We have so many nutrient needs to juggle that it's easy to forget about plain old water!

Yeah, the emotional/psychological stuff is really important. I really don't like all of the addiction/recovery language, but the fact is that many of us ate to soothe our emotions rather than to fuel our bodies. Ultimately, you have to find out what's going on in your mind that's leading you to self-destruct like this, and figure out how to fix it. Makes it sound simple, and it's NOT, but... it's what you have to do if you want to be healthy. For me, I've long had problems with depression and anxiety, and I often soothed both through food. I've been learning other, healthier ways of coping with depression (and also anxiety, since the two go hand in hand), and the good news is that most of those coping mechanisms are also good for my general health -- exercise, healthy sleep schedule, avoid excess caffeine and alcohol and carbs, etc. I get the double benefit of a healthier, more balanced, happy mind, as well as a happy sleeve that works with me to keep my weight down! Good luck, and congratulations on your progress so far!

The study that feedyoureye posted concludes this: Parsing that out, it means that yes, SOME people do regain weight. But EWL -- excess weight lost -- was still >50% at over 5 years. This means that for MOST people, MOST of the time, MOST of the weight will stay off. Realistically, most of us will probably drop quickly, then plateau, then stay at low weight for a while, perhaps with a long slow drop to a "real" low weight. Then, most of us -- again, speaking statistically -- will probably regain 10-30 pounds over a long period, because that's just how the curve seems to be shaped. A lot of that is genetics, a lot is age. If you look at the weight curves of NON sleevers over the same time span, you'll see about the same curve! So, statistically speaking, the sleeve IS durable weight loss, compared to ANY other method of weight loss that is current known. This doesn't mean that you'll never regain any of it; you likely WILL regain a little from your absolute low (if you think about what "absolute low" means, you'll realize that that means there's nowhere to go but up, since that's your ABSOLUTE low). And of course, if you sabotage yourself, you can regain quite a bit. But with the durable ghrelin loss, and with the determination to work WITH the sleeve instead of sabotaging it, yes, you can lose the weight and keep almost all of it off.

To be honest, if you can't abstain from drinking for a month or two in order to recover from a major surgery (and don't let anyone fool you, VSG IS a major surgery), you may have more serious problems than obesity. You're just asking for problems -- serious, life-threatening medical problems -- by drinking this soon out from surgery. If you manage to dodge the bullet, well... you're lucky. But if you keep drinking and, you know, develop a staple-line leak because you've irritated your incision, or ruin your liver because you've stressed it out too much, well... you really have nobody to blame but yourself. However, as Tiff said, it seems like your mind is made up, so this is all probably just a waste of keystrokes...

http://www.scienceda...10811100939.htm Since Barrett's (and its related concern, esophageal cancer) is a concern for sleevers, this is promising. ...

Society teaches us that "real men" don't ask for help, "real men" don't admit that they're sick or not doing well or are scared or struggling. Society teaches us that women only want "real men" who never get sick (or at least, admit it when they are), who never talk to their doctors, who never have surgery. Society teaches us all those things about "real men." Statistics, on the other hand, teaches us that "real men" die about ten years younger than women. I'd rather have an extra decade of healthy, happy, productive life, than the small vanity of thinking that I'm a macho man.

Unfortunately, the only really good advice we can give is to see your doctor, as this isn't normal. You could do a testes self-check, since this is the only really at-home test you can perform, but the odds that this dark semen is due to testicular cancer are vanishing. Hopefully this has self-resolved. Should still see the doc, though.

Yeah, this is abnormal, and I WOULD talk to your surgeon and/or PCP about it, as it is a bit of a concern for pneumonia. Most likely, some of the nerves connecting to the diaphragm were injured or cut. I've never heard of this before with the VSG. My experience is that neither of these things (laugh tone, cough strength) have changed for me.

It's important to remember that medicine is a game of odds; there is ALWAYS a chance of a bad reaction or bad surgical outcome, even with the best doctors. When a doctor has a complication rate at or below the median rate for that procedure, it shouldn't be seen as a negative for the doctor; nor should a zero complications rate be seen as a positive. Complications are due to individual physiology -- e.g. my body may be more aggressive with infection and inflammation than yours, and yours may be better at building fibrous scar tissue quickly; how could the doctor know that before hand? -- and pure old random chance. So I'd say that your task in picking a surgeon is to look for one whose complication rate isn't ABOVE the median rate. Beyond that, I would just not worry too much, since it's all a game of chance as long as you're following the post-op instructions carefully. Patient non-compliance is by FAR the biggest cause of post-surgical complications, BTW. That should tell you something right there...

It's orthostatic hypotension (fancy words for "position-based low blood pressure.") I deal with it all the time and I've learned to just cope with it. It only lasts a few seconds, and if I stand up slowly, I almost never have problems with it. It's also seemed to improve over time since my surgery. It's extremely common among WLS patients, and not really a concern if you just make sure to stand up slowly (and make sure there's something around you to hold onto in case you forget and it gets bad). Drinking more Water may help, but to some extent it's just something you have to deal with; in the list of pro's and con's of WLS, it is one of the (small) con's. Edit: I should mention that it makes no difference what your BP is when sitting or standing still. Orthostatic hypotension is a BP drop when you change positions (specifically, when standing quickly). Unless you happened to be wearing a BP cuff and measuring your BP just at that moment, you'd never be able to detect it.

I told anyone who would ask, and have had nothing but supportive responses. I must say that I'm somewhat baffled to hear about people who judge or attack those who've had WLS. Why on earth should anyone who really cares about our well-being object to us doing something that will make us healthier and happier? And why on earth should we care about the opinion of anyone that judgmental and ignorant?

So last night was a (hopefully successful) experiment. I focused on limiting caffeine during the day and eating properly, plus I got in some decent aerobic exercise (~2 mile fast walk). When I came home from work, I had a very protein-heavy supper, and no food after ~8:30 pm. Then, at bed time I drugged myself to sleep; although this isn't healthy or sustainable, I had suspected that I might be a little hypoglycemic at night, but not enough to be really dangerous (just judging from the symptoms), and that what was really hurting me was the lost sleep. In fact, all day yesterday I had odd shooting pains that (in retrospect) I recognize as the effects of sleep deprivation. And the result was the first good night of sleep in a week or so -- I slept straight through from about 10:00pm to 6:00am, without getting up once. I'm going to repeat the process today, going from the theory that as long as I'm doing all the things (eat right, exercise, limit caffeine) that I know are good for me, and as long as none of my symptoms are truly dangerous, it's more important for me to get a good night's sleep than it is to wake up and fret about mild nocturnal hypoglycemia. It's strange how much like a scientist you have to be, if you want to lead a healthy life -- you have to perform all these little experiments, and monitor the results, then adjust your behavior based upon the outcome!

Tiffykins touched on an important point; if you really want to learn to be happy with your body, at some point you're going to have to stop focusing on your body, and start focusing on your thinking. My mom was in AA, and although I'm not super fond of that organization (long story), some of their little slogans and sayings sort of sunk in for me, and as I've gotten older I've really started to understand them. Now, I'm not a religious man, but one phrase that sticks is to cultivate an "attitude of gratitude." This means, changing your thinking to finding things to be grateful for, instead of looking for flaws. If you're atheist or agnostic, like me, you may not have any "being" or person that you're grateful TO, but the important thing is to change your thinking from "this sucks, why aren't I good enough, what's wrong with me?" to "I'm SO happy that I've lost so much weight! I'm so glad that I can fit into 'normal' sized clothes! I'm so much healthier; the odds are that I'll live a much longer, healthier life than I was likely to lead when I was obese." I know that that probably will feel fake, and forced, and artificial at first, but thinking like this is a habit you have to build. Over time, it DOES get easier, and more automatic to "look on the sunny side." If you're like me, you may have a fear that being like this will turn you into some chirpy, brainless person who's always cheerful and never sees the bad things that life DOES hold coming, but this just isn't true. Learning to see the glass as half full doesn't mean ignoring the bad stuff in life; it means making a conscious choice to focus your attention on the good things. Remember that the bad stuff and the good stuff are both going to exist whether or not you pay attention to them, so which would you rather do -- pay attention to all the flaws in your body, all the problems in your life, and make yourself and maybe those around you miserable? Or focus on the good things, how much better you feel, how much better you look, how much healthier you are? I say all this from experience; by nature, I tend to be a very negative, cynical person. It's not something I'm happy about or proud of, but it is true. I have to focus on the positives in my life or I can very quickly spiral into Bad Places, and often take everyone else with me! But I notice that when I make a conscious effort to focus on the positive, interesting things happen. First, it very quickly stops feeling "fake" and instead it's like... hard to say, like a cloud passing from in front of the sun, do you know how that is? All of a sudden everything just suddenly gets brighter -- the whole world. And people react to me better; people want to spend more time around me and talk to me more. And things that seemed impossible... doors that seemed shut... suddenly these things don't feel quite so out of reach. And the things that truly ARE out of reach -- I'll never be a 20-year old man again, no matter how positively I think -- don't seem so horrific when I can say "yes, well, what I've lost in youthful beauty and vigor, I've made up in the self-confidence and [hopefully] the wisdom of a grown man." I know, if you're like me, I know that this sounds like foolish, wishful thinking, polyanna claptrap. But it is really true. It really works, but you have to do the work. You have to cultivate the habit of looking for things to be happy about; you have to cultivate the "attitude of gratitude." It is worth the effort! Sorry for the long-winded reply, but this topic is near and dear to my heart!

I think I have a blood sugar meter somewhere, and I'll try to dig it up. I guess I've been avoiding directly measuring my blood sugar because FWIK non-insulemic hypoglycemia is usually caused by problems with your pancreas, which I do NOT want to contemplate... For now, since the problem seems to be related to/worsened by my caffeine intake, I'm weaning myself (further) off caffeine, and trying to stick with the "many small, protein-heavy meals," and I'm going to try to have a protein-heavy "snack" before bedtime (probably just a Protein shake). Oh, and cardio exercise, since that seems to help people with hypo-g.

So, again with the bedtime hypoglycemia, although not as bad. It's 2:00am and first I was up with the shaky/wobbly feeling, which I dealt with with a small glass of skim milk. Now I have all kinds of aches and pains and bad gas. Almost feels like flu, but it's not. So instead of reactive hypoglycemia, maybe this is just nocturnal hypoglycemia? I don't have diabetes, so this is all really confusing. I can't wait till I can see a doc again...

Thanks for all the followups, folks! I've discovered (I think) that most of my problems with RHG are due to caffeine; when my caffeine intake is too high, any deviation from the "perfect" sleeve diet (you know, mostly Protein with some complex carbs thrown in, in small portions regularly) can send me into hypoglycemia. Today I cut my caffeine intake about in half, and so far I'm having NO problems. Of course, it's now bedtime, which is traditionally when I have issues, so... we'll see. I have some blueberry juice and Protein shakes in the fridge in case I need a late night blood sugar/protein boost. Hopefully, I won't need it.

You simply CAN'T focus on day-by-day weight loss, as there are too many things that happen on a daily basis -- eating/drinking, elimination, Water weight gain/loss, hormonal changes, exercise-related changes, sleep-related changes -- for a daily weigh-in to be useful at all. Frankly, even a weekly weigh-in is almost too much, but it is the most frequent you should weigh yourself. Day-to-day changes in weight are nothing to really pay attention to.