green

Pink, I had my work done in Toronto, Canada at the Toronto Lap Band Centre. This is the same clinic who performed Woodys' operation. Their fee is $16,000 but these are Canadian dollars. Canadian dollars are much cheaper than U.S. bucks; this usually means a third off but at times there is as much as a 40% discount on the exchange rate and that will bring an operation in Canada closer to the costs of a visit to a clinic in Mexico. The Toronto Lap Band Centre not only performs the operation for that price but also includes, as I understand it, a lifetime's worth of aftercare. This means that all your fills are included in the fee. There is also another excellent doctor in the Toronto area. His name is Dr. Coburn. If you are curious about finding a surgeon in Canada as an option I suggest that you visit the part of this site that is dedicated to Canadian chat. I must mention to you that the best deals in town are those offered by the Mexican clinics and some of us Canadians have chosen to have our operations done in Mexico. From all that I have heard these surgeons have superb qualifications and reputations. Where you choose to go is an issue of price and comfort level. Good luck, kiddo.

Tell 'em it was a dueling wound and that you are lucky to be alive.

I've been hearing that Australia is having severe drought problems and that your government is very concerned about global warming and pollution issues as a result. I find this very, very interesting and I should probably do some more reading on your situation in Oz. I have also read that you are prone to terrible forest fires during the summer months. Canada, which is where I live, is a very watery country. I pay a flat rate for my water and because of this I tend to be careless in my water use. It's hot baths for me and my baby. My tenant prefers the shower. I will mention that our summers are getting hotter and drier. During the summer of 2005 certain townships in the region where I live were issuing water advisories. People were asked to restrain themselves from watering their lawns more often than every second day. There was no rain in my city during that entire summer and there were over 40 days when the air was so toxic from smog that air advisories were issued. Sorry for hijacking the discussion, folks.

I think I had "air lock" for awhile after my op but it eventually went away and doesn't bother me anymore. It happens shortly after you eat, right?

Mookie, I am 57 years old and a smoker and I sailed through the operation and I have only had one PB so far. I also didn't need BBQ tongs for my bum! lol By using this site and by choosing a very well-known, experienced surgeon you are well prepared to get through any struggles that you might have. I have learned much more from being a member of this site than I ever could from an hour long pre-op seminar. The emotional support is a big bonus!!! As for the operation, it is a straight forward business, especially to an experienced surgical team. Remember, those dudes don't want anything bad to happen to you; it's bad for business. If they are concerned about any risk they will refuse to operate. I even found the fills to be a walk in the park and I am terrified of needles. You are going to do just fine, grrl.

What a great NSV, Bandiva!:clap2: :clap2: :clap2: :clap2: :clap2:

May all your wishes come true....and they will!

You will actually find yourself eating much less than before. I find myself leaving food on plates in restaurants now. Before I used to hoover everything up.:hungry:

Yep, it is happy days for Iran, ain't it? And if it is a real right royal mess in the Middle East, well, at least the Rapturists will be in a state of rapture. Someome is going to go home happy, eh.............

Ooh, tres cool. I can't do fitted. Bravo for you, girl.

You have no idea how much hearing your thoughts touches me. I went through the whole nine yards. We had a bunch of frozen beef filets in our freezer. I would defrost two every day. I would make egg noodles with garlic and cheese and cook a couple of those filets until they were just the way I like them - which is kind of cow-car crash raw - and then I would quietly sit in front of the TV and eat. It was so wonderful that my husband works second shift. Oh man, it was how Green spent much of her Farewell Foodcourt Tour. LOL, I mean, LOL. This is such a coooool thread.

I think I get what Gadget Lady is talking about. There have been individuals, I will put myself in that category, who have expressed concern on this site over the fundamentalists' drift towards the emotional and, along side with this, the agressively anti-intellectual form that their faith has taken. I like to call this rabble-rousing rhetoric 'sloganeering' and I believe that one must always be wary of this, whether it be a manifestation of pop culture mania, political spin, or certain big box televangelists' spin. This is emotion without substance. This is like a drug-induced high. There is nothing of substance behind it. This kind of spin is what carried Hitler into power.... Benny Hinn is shilling for bucks for his personal aircraft. He's gonna call it the Dove. Indeed, I must admit that one of the reasons that I am an atheist is because I am deeply mistrustful of the purely emotional experience, whether this be individual or mass; I am suspicious of religions that are not backed up by any sort of historicity for these carry the stink of cult. (This is why I, if I were to shift from disbelief to belief, would likely land up in the lap of Catholicism, either Anglo or Roman.) Truth be told, there are other things that concern me about the most recent version of the Christian God. Protestant folks are fond of talking about a personal God. This seems to be a relatively new development, God wise. This new God rewards those folks whom He has deemed to be acceptable by giving 'em lots o cash, temporal power, and glory. God used to be much more of a communal kinda guy. His concern may not have been in awarding you a healthy investment portfolio and children who are a) straight and not troubled by unwanted pregnancies until they are married. You might not have the right to judge those to whom shit has happened. (Your turn may be next.) But this God was played fair and square.

Thanks for sharing. I have to tell you that there were certain bits of information about the band that I withheld from my mate. I never told him about sliming and the PBs. I figured that the $16Gs and the operation would be shock enough. :speechles And if any of you remember my earliest posts, the dude did spend the time while I was being operated on drinking big beers at a nearby restaurant. Such was dh's stress! :tired Anyhow, I only came clean about the PB problem on the drive home from his parents' house after my first ever PB. He was kinda fascinated and has been talking about them ever since. Seems that they are up there with farts, eh. Men are so gross. And Green is so amused! (Sometimes she suspects that she is part woman, part frat boy............:faint: )

Teens are weird and they watch movies like Jackass. It may not occur to them that you are not a stuntwoman and that your falls do end up in serious bodily damage. Though your body is hurting try to forget the damage done to your emotions. And too, they undoubtedly have deeply conflicted emotions about the high drama going on in their homelife. Because you are the one who has decided that life with your husband is no longer tenable, any negative emotions that they might have are likely to attach themselves to you and all of this is being encouraged by your husband who is playing the wounded one. Once the business of separation and divorce becomes regularized and life calms down, your relationship with them will inevitably begin to mend. You must remember that your kids are teenagers and teenagers do rebel against and resent their parents even when their parents are happy families. This is the nature of the teenage beast. I was sent off to boarding school because I was a 'difficult' kid and stayed there until my terminal year of high school. Then I pulled a stunt that was so heinous that the nuns tossed me out and I finished off my year at the local school. And I was not a bad child by today's standards! I still don't have a rap sheet! LOL As for your pratfalls, it sounds as though you are a grrl who probably shouldn't be wearing Sex In The City shoes, eh. LOL I think that the fact that you are choosing to spend time with friends is an excellent move. You need the break both physically and psychologically. And it is a good thing that you are defining yourself as an individual to your family and to yourself; this is the step that you are taking by spending these important holidays with friends instead of opting to remain home alone. Maro's advice to seek some talk therapy is excellent advice. This is what I have done during every stressful period of my own life. If you have EAP as a resource then you should definitely exploit this because it is available and it is free! Free is always good. You likely have some sort of medical coverage plan. You should investigate what this covers: psychologists, psychiatrists, or both? In my opinion, a psychologist is more useful for talk therapy and a psychiatrist is valuable because he or she can prescribe medication that you may need on the short term in order to help you get through this. When I speak of medication I am referring to anti-depressants, anti-anxietants and sleeping aids. Of course some psychiatrists wish to engage in talk therapy with their clients and this can be a good thing. The important thing is to snoop about, make new contacts, have fun, and get control over your own life. This takes some amount of time, ya know........

Hahahahaha :faint: Bravo, Carlene!

Yep, maybe you can change your tickets in order to arrive a few days earlier. There is a lot to see and do in this part of Canada. The Falls are amazing and the city core is fun. The Museum is very interesting and the area around it has interesting stores for window shopping and there are restaurants.

Omigawd, Wheezy! That is one of those stories that seems kinda funny in retrospect but awful at the time. Thanks for sharing.

Interesting, in the land of Oz you call it Dim Sims and up here in the Great White North we call it Dim Sum.... You are so lucky that you can get them in any take away. (Speaking of the Great White North (which is what we sometimes call Canada), thanks to global warming or whatever it is still very green where I live. No snow, eh.) And yep, pot stickers are dim sum, Argon. As for the chow mein biz, I have had both dishes passed off to me as chow mein but I think that one is actually lo mein. Cloe: your chopsticks idea is brilliant! I went to the Chinese buffet restaurant last night with my husband and the Chinese family. I ate slowly and I did not PB! This was a relief. My hostess was concerned that I was not eating enough and thus didn't like the food. I had to reassure her that I did and I went back for seconds. It was a good thing that the plates were normal size and not the huge platters that are now the fashion in many Toronto restaurants. The dessert thing was made easier because they served a lot of different fruits along with the usual cakes, etc.

Good ole shoot 'em Dick Cheney.... LOL

That's a fine bunch o NSVs ya got there, grrl! Congratulations from Green.

I dug deep into the archives to resurrect this thread. I did this because I noticed today that the jeans that I had managed to get into a couple of months ago are now loosey-goosey in the waist! This is the place where I take the longest to lose weight because I have always been thick-waisted even when I was thin. I think that it may finally be time for me to go shopping, eh. It's funny but I am feeling kind of nervous about this.

Ugh! The editor of another site that I frequent will ban members who send abusive PMs to other members once the member who has been harrassed complains. I don't know what the policy is on this site. I am pleased that you provided the content of this idiot's PM and his name. All boneheads deserve to be outed, eh. Darrell, huh? Mistah Incoherency! Hahahaha

The Fords were a class act.

Oh, I know about those kitties. They are the ones with the sharp claws. I've worked with them from time to time....

I believe that there are many wise, tolerant, and thoughtful Christians, ones who have made a point of learning about their faith and who have studied the Bible. Some of them post here and certainly Carlene, TOM, and Jack, to name a few, fall into this category. It is impossible to do other than to respect and admire such Christians as these. No one can deny that there are responsible Christians just as there are responsible Jews, Muslims, and atheists. And then there are the fanatics: these are those individuals who do not respect the rights and beliefs of others but who only seek to judge and to impose their own beliefs. These folk are merely moral bullies and they are either ill-educated in the study of the very Book that they seek to use in order to attain control over the lives of others or they are cherrypicking their material. As I have mentioned before in these threads the Bible is a complicated, often violent, and often contradictory set of documents. It is my opinion that the quotes expressed in the site which I have listed above are disgraceful and as hate-filled as anything issued by members of the intifada. That these individuals are, with the exception of Phelps, prominent, mainstream members of America is dismaying. It is this type of Christian and this manifestation of Christianity that I believe that we are attacking here. And why shouldn't we attack these folk?