Dame J

Just take it easy Mandi and be good to yourself. I know how concerned you must be. I hope this clears up for you soon. I hate being sick. Get better. :hug:

:confused: Well whatever you do Susannaha do not make that joke to medical professionals. I said the same thing about not doing needle drugs because of my small veins and the Dr. doing my blood work-up and he just frowned at me. Tough Room I tell ya! :heh:

Hey I know what you mean Andrew. The only people that I know I am doing this are my mom and dad and they are not allowed to tell anyone. I have been lying to everyone left right and centre. Never thought I had it in me but hey sometimes you just have to protect your right to privacy.

By the way Gerry your loss is fantastic. Keep it up. Can't wait to hear more about your experience

Priscilla sounds like you and me both had the same experience in the operating room. The Dr. kept trying to stick me in the back of my hand but that wouldn't work (and yes I have a bruise there) and then finally he was able to get me in the crook of my arm as well. None of my incisions are bruised or red or swollen however my lower incision on my stomach which looks the biggest is the most painful one and I am secretly worried that it is infected. I am planning on calling the clinc tomorrow to see if my fears are justified or not.

Hey Priscilla I think I know what you mean about the power of the future. Today I took a walk through our town mall and I started to look at the stores I would shop in this spring and the outfits I wanted to wear. It was pretty fun and picked up my spirits for awhile. I didn't start throwing anything out just yet but I am sure the day will come soon enough. Oh hey on another matter for Feb bandsters are you bruised where your incisions are? If so how long did it take for the bruises to form. Don't know if I am just lucky or not but so far no bruises except for where the IV was.

Oh Cloe I know how you feel just so well. My moment came from pictures as well. I am not stupid I knew I was overweight and I knew that I was a larger girl but for some reason I never quite saw myself as what the pictures showed. After looking at pictures of mine from a vaccation (OMG pictures in a bathing suit :omg: ) it just hit me "wow do I really look like that?" and I knew I had to make some serious changes. Congrats Cloe cause you took the situation in stride and did what was best for you. You are doing so well at not just the weight loss but keeping motivated and keeping others motivated. I enjoy reading your posts along with others keep up the amazing work. You're doing great! :clap2:

Thanks guys. Feeling a bit better tonight I think the gas to going away and taking deep breaths isn't such a problem anymore. I try not to stay in one place long cause it does feel better to move around. I am keeping track of my one incision and although it is paining me it is not looking red or swollen. I think I will for sure call the clinic early tomorrow though if it has not let up. I guess I just feel weird cause I don't know what is normal and what I should be worried about. Never had surgery before and although I read about peoples experiences you never quite get it until you live it. Guess I am just learning the hard way.

Don't want to sounds like a worry wart or anything but I don't think I am feeeling too hot right now. I still get tightness in my stomach and up into my chest that hurt like the devil when it catches me unawares. Also makes me a little sick feeling. Not sure if that is normall or not. I have been taking my gas x and trying to walk about and although it helps the min I stop walking around all that gas comes right back. At least I think it is gas. :sick Also I don't know if I should worry but one of my incisions hurts. Not the port but one of the others. Yesterday when I has my shower I wraped the area in clear wrap so it wouldn't get too wet but that one incision bled just a tiny bit. now it hurts a little. Don't know if it's nothing or if I should call the clinic. I just keep thinking this better be worth it, then I question myself why I did this to myself. I just want to feel better and these bad thoughts really don't help. :cry

I thought the Dr. Coubourn experience was okay. Lots of great staff so I never felt like I was being neglected or anything. He was a very busy guy on Friday. I think he did 5 or 6 lapbands When I was there. Lot's of people from out of province that day. I was surprised he hasn't moved yet, however I was told that by the time I go for my check-up in two weeks he will have moved into the new building. I just got off the phone with him just now and he talked to me about how yesterday went and I got to tell him how today was going. I do like the fact that he takes the time to call, and it's not just one of the nurses. All in all I was please with Dr. Cobourn's office:)

Astrotoes you are so right. The nurses told me the same thing yesterday. I need to still drink the optifast for the liquid diet. i don't have to have 3 a day but I should maybe aim for one a day. Damn right when you thought you were done with them. :-) Well I guess I can use this time to finish the ones I have left up in my 2nd box.

Hey everyone thanks for the well wishes. the surgery went just fine. The only problem I had was when the Dr was trying to find a vein for the IV. I have very small deep veins so it took a couple princkings. Got home last night and napped in bed while watching TV. A little discomfort here and there yesterday but not so bad. Today I am pretty uncomfortable. I find it hard to take deep breaths. I think it's all the gas where the incissions are. Walking helps. I just walk around the house from room to room. Anyway other than that no biggie. I am now an official Bandster. Woo hoo. :clap2:

Yasmina that sounds awful! At least you were smart enough to get your self to the hospital as soon as you did. I am sure you will be fine in a couple weeks for you trip to Egypt. Just hang in there!

The whole Sliming thing seems a little freaky. I am a little worried about it, I would hate to do it at the office or something. Yuck! Even worse on a date. From what I have been reading though the question reallly isn't will I but more like When Will I? Maybe we should place bets on when us Newbies will have our first attack of the Slime or PB.

Interesting article in the Toronto Star today. BATTLING OBESITY TheStar.com - Health - `Only way' to freedom `Only way' to freedom After desperate bids to lose weight, at nearly 400 pounds Barrie mom took life-saving step Feb 02, 2007 04:30 AM Karen Bridson-Boyczuk Special to The Star Rating her pain level at an eight out of 10 between morphine shots, Barrie resident Rachel Buttery sits in her Michigan hospital bed and says she doesn't miss food yet. A day after undergoing gastric bypass surgery, the 33-year-old, 393-pound mother of two says she's just thrilled that she will, no doubt, finally be able to keep her New Year's weight-loss resolution this year. Ontario's provincial health insurance paid the $24,000 (U.S.) cost of her surgery because of long waiting lists here and the deteriorating state of her health. Buttery's surgery, on Jan. 3, involved creating a tiny pouch out of the top of her stomach and attaching it to her large intestine, completely bypassing the rest of her stomach and her small intestine. "They keep bringing me different kinds of broth and Jell-O, but I'm partial to the ice chips," says Buttery, who admits it was her addiction to food that led her down the road to morbid obesity. "I'm sure I will miss food eventually. But there's nothing I can eat that would be better than doing what I'll be able to do when I lose weight." At five-feet nine-inches tall, Buttery's Body Mass Index is off the charts at 61. A normal body mass index is between 18.5 and 24.9. A person who has a BMI of 30 or more is considered obese. Buttery has a degenerating left hip and must undertake more than an hour of walking in the morning to become fully mobile. Her blood sugar levels are at the high normal range – not diabetic, yet, her doctors say, but getting toward Type II diabetes. She has an enlarged spleen and an enlarged and fatty liver and she suffers from sleep apnea, a condition where her airway becomes obstructed when she sleeps, cutting off air flow and periodically choking her. Surprisingly, her blood pressure and cholesterol levels remain fine. But as her husband Paul Buttery says, that's for now. "She's fairly healthy, but how long will that last?" he says. Her surgeon, Dr. Tallal Zeni, says Buttery's excessive weight is life-threatening. "If she doesn't lose weight, there's a high risk of other medical problems all coming together to shorten her lifespan." A person with a BMI of 40, where morbid obesity starts, is more than two and a half times more likely to die than someone with a healthy BMI. Obesity has been linked to various cancers, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and depression. Buttery's fight with weight began in childhood and, after the birth of her first daughter 11 years ago, it slowly climbed, hitting its peak of 399 pounds this September. Since then, her life has increasingly been affected by her weight. "If you go to a friend's house, you think, `Okay, what can I sit on that won't break?' You worry about fitting through the turnstiles in stores. At restaurants, you can't sit in a booth. When you get into somebody's car, you pray to God the seatbelt is going to fit." No longer able to fit into airline seatbelts, even with the belt extension, Buttery turned to bus travel with her family a few years ago. But even that proved uncomfortable. Buttery spent hours unable to urinate on a 13-hour trip to Cincinnati in 2003 because she couldn't fit into the bathroom at the back of the bus. One option was surgery to reduce her stomach to a pouch that holds just under an ounce of food. But the decision wasn't made easily. First, she says, she worked very hard to lose the weight on her own. In the past five years alone, Buttery has joined the Weight Watchers program on four occasions and lost varying amounts each time. With the help of a personal trainer, with whom she worked for a year, Buttery managed to lose 32 pounds. Lifting weights, walking on the treadmill, counting her points, Buttery was moving in the right direction, says GoodLife Fitness trainer Shelly McNamee. "But her emotional attachment to food and the extreme stress that she was under in her life kept sending things out of whack," McNamee says. She was upset to hear Buttery had gained back the weight she'd lost, plus another 30-odd pounds since they stopped working together a year ago. Gaining back the lost weight, and then some, is typical for most dieters and often a key factor in how people manage to sink further into obesity, says Zeni, who performed Buttery's three-hour surgery at St. Mary Mercy Hospital. "With traditional medical weight loss, we see successful, long-term weight loss in just 1 to 2 per cent of patients," he says. "But with this surgery, we have an 80 per cent success rate five to 10 years out." But there are risks. The laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass – the kind of stomach-reducing surgery recommended for Buttery – has a fatality rate of one in 200, the risk of bowel leakage and potentially fatal blood clots, and a six-week recovery time. "It's not a surgery one should go into lightly," Zeni says. "But for people who are trying to lose weight and have other medical problems, it's the only way to get the weight off and keep it off." Zeni stresses it is not a magic bullet. "You've got to be committed to it for the long-term," he says. "Everybody is going to lose weight for the first year and a half (on average, 70 per cent of the excess weight is lost by this point), but you want it to be successful over a lifetime." For many, Zeni says, dieting and exercise alone just can't get people to where they want to be. "Once you get to a level of morbid obesity, for whatever reasons – genetics, metabolic rate, appetite – maintaining the weight loss is just unsustainable." That was Buttery's story. Now recovering at home from her operation, she says she saw surgery as her only way out. After having no trouble sticking to her diet and exercise plans for weeks and sometimes months on end, Buttery would find something in her life would go wrong and her fitness regimen would begin to unwind. "Any time I get stressed, that's what I do. I eat," she says. "And nine times out of 10, I don't even realize I'm doing it. I'd just go to the fridge and I'd just start grazing." It also hasn't helped having a husband who is a professional chef and loved to "love her with food," and thinks she looks no different than the day he met her when she was 17, Buttery says. Food produces a euphoric haze for her, like a drug, she says. "But food is the one thing you can't take away. You don't need alcohol to live, or drugs or cigarettes. But you can't not eat." Meanwhile, some people in Buttery's life feel she's taking the "easy way out." They point to such high-profile gastric bypass patients, like singer Carnie Wilson, who have gained back a surprising amount of weight given the medically reduced size of their stomachs. Zeni says this can be a result of the stomach being stretched out again by food, by the connection between the stomach pouch and intestines stretching out to accommodate more food or because of other unknown factors. "Some people are eating 1,000 calories a day after the surgery and they are still not losing, even when the pouch has not stretched," he says. "So there's more to it than we know at this time." Ten per cent of patients will gain back about one-third of the weight they initially lost, while another 10 per cent will gain back more than that, Zeni says. "It's not 100 per cent. But compared to traditional medical weight loss, it's really excellent. Ultimately, those who are successful still maintain less than 1,400 calories a day and (continue to) exercise." According to a 2004 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, gastric bypass surgery cures diabetes in 77 per cent of cases, cures or improves high blood pressure in 78 per cent of patients and ends sleep apnea for 86 per cent of patients, Zeni says. Buttery approached the Ontario health ministry last fall to get it to pay for her to have the surgery in the United States. Waiting lists to have the surgery in Canada are, for certain surgeries, several years long. Ultimately, Buttery's stomach will be able to hold about two to three ounces of food at time. But she says she's not worried about how she will cope when life gets difficult and she simply can't eat a whole box of chocolates, as she had in the past. "I've been reading a book on food addiction and I've got a support group I can go to in Barrie," she says. Between that, the four hours of nutritional counselling she received through Zeni's office and the help of her husband, who has vowed to cook up healthy foods from now on, Buttery says she's got the support she needs. She removed some serious stressors in her life, she says. Worry that she's set a bad example for her daughters has also fuelled her drive to make this work, Buttery says. "I've got to stop the cycle." For now, she's focused on how much fun she'll have with her family. "I'll be able to go horseback riding and swimming," she says. "I've got pages of stuff I've not been able to do in years. I haven't been able to go on a roller-coaster ride in years. I used to be a real roller-coaster junkie."

Congrats BlueGem on making the choice. I was lurking here for quite some time before I decided to do the surgery. I have found this site to be extremly helpful. Welcome and good luck with the future banding.

Thanks Maria! Yes I am excited about not doing the Optifast anymore, however I might have some durring the liquid only because I worry about not getting enough nutrients with other products. Very excited about Surgery. I just keep thinking this time tomorrow my life will be forever changed. Little nervous but who wouldn't be. Can't wait to come on here after and tell you guys how it all went. Hopefully I will be telling you how easy and pain free it was. :biggrin1:

I LOVE LOVE LOVE that Latte. I always find it very light and mild. Lot's of flavour though. I go on the starbucks website all the time and they have a calorie counter on there that will tell you exactly how much your drink or food item is. Very helpful!

I will have 2 full boxes of optifast left over and then a couple pouches by the time I have surgery on Friday. Now to be fair I have only been having 1 or 2 a day but yes I would still have many left over. I think the reason for that is because we are allowed to have optifast for a liquid in our liquid stage. I have no intentions of drinking that stuff when I have other options so I wonder if the clinic will buy two boxes back. By the way Andrew sounds like you are doing great! not every week is going to be as good as your first but hey it's worth it anyway. I tell ya the best thing about keeping busy these past couple weeks has been getting my mind off food but I swear even that is a challenge. I was driving to work the other day and smelled sulfer or something from the car in front of me and all I could think was I would kill for an egg salad sandwich. You know you're hungry when. :biggrin1:

Kaybear the surgery in mississauga is not an easy amount to let go of, it will cost you $16,000. That is pretty much the standard price in Ontario. People have found that Mexico is cheaper but it is all depending on how comfortable you are with that option and I know some people have a hard time getting assistance from Dr.'s to do fills or they charge for fills. There is an option of Medicard to help you pay for the cost of the operation. I am using their assistance. Just like a loan they do charge interest. I know that on their website it does say that they do look over certain marks on your credit history but I know that when they do your interest payments will be higher. If this is something that you really want it is worth it to give them a call. You can check out their website at http://www.medicard.com/ Hope this helps you. I know how frustrating it is. Some provinces have this operation for covered (however there are huge wait times). Ontario is dragging their feet and probably will not cover this surgery for quite some time. Good Luck on whatever choice you make. Everyone here has been very supportive and helpful and can help with many of your questions.

Andrew 2 weeks on the Optifast how are you doing? Look at your Hulla-Girl Go!!! Good Job! Becca still hanging in there? You guys only have 1 more week to go and then forget about it. Smooth Sailing through liquids.

Congrats Tres! What an exciting time you are having right now. Talk about a whole new life in a matter of moments. Great News! :)

Yoda thanks for letting me in on your routine. I am trying to get ideas for exercise and I am trying to map it out and time it with all my goings on. I don't want to make excuses for myself so I figure if I plan now I will be better off. Anyway I think you are going to like Aquafit. I used to do that for a couple years and I always like it. Very easy on the body but still a great workout.

Yasmina you sound like you are doing so well. Man that is so weird I can just imagine how that would feel to be full on a cup of soup. :biggrin1: I can't wait. 3 more sleeps. Yasmina don't worry about being sick for your travels. Mind over matter my friend. Tell yourself that you are fine and you will see. The Bruises must be shocking. I am a little worried about that. I am fishbelly white and I bruise easily so I can just imagine what I am going to look like. It scares me a bit actually. I know they are just bruises but I just worry a little about the pain to come. I keep telling myself my surgery is going to be just like yours and Tres Chic and I am going to be just fine and walking around like nothing happened in no time. At least I am crossing my fingers for that.

That is an amazing loss Yoda. You should be so proud. :clap2: I have measured all the same places as you. Except I also added my neck. I hate my neck. :phanvan What sort of exercises do you do to help out with the inches loss? You mentioned gaining muscle so do you do weights?