ILKrista

I quit a few months before the surgery using Chantix. The doctor told me they would be checking my blood for nicotine before surgery and if there was any, the surgery would be off. I did gain over 15 pounds (partly from not smoking and partly from too many 'last suppers' thinking I would never be eating these foods again). I then had to lose that 15 before the surgery... which sucked, but wasn't as hard as giving up smoking was. I'm now 10 months smoke-free, which is the best I've ever managed with the 10 + times I've tried quitting. You can do it! Just think of how much faster you'll feel better & how much easier it will be to start an exercise regime when you can breath easier.

Okay guys, I finally got started on this... it wasn't as bad as I had thought it would be. I mostly did 1 minute of walking and then 1 minute of jogging. I did do a couple where I did 2 minutes of walking because my heart rate was still pretty high. I should stress the word JOGGING. I was going 4 miles an hour for jogging and 3.3 for walking. I figure I'll worry about speed once I can actually jog more than a mile at a time without stopping or thinking I'm going to die. How is everyone else doing?

I had to do 3 injections a day for 14 days. They wouldn't let me leave the hospital until I had done it 3 times in front of them so they knew I could really do it. I could either do my stomach or my upper thigh. I will say I was totally freaked out about doing it... I was more worried about that than the surgery itself. The first couple of days I would sit in the bathroom trying to psych myself up to do it. After that, it was really no problem. The needle itself never hurt, it was when I would inject the heprin that it would burn. I found that the stomach was much less painful than the thigh... probably because there is a lot more fat there. Good luck & you can do it!

I wasn't sure where to post this topic, so I am throwing it in here. Here is a website where they have photos of people your height at all different weights. I wanted to get some idea of what my goal weight really should be. http://www.cockeyed.com/photos/bodies/heightweight.html

My guess is that the answer to question one is that you are at the 3 week stall. If you search stalls, you will find that ALOT of people hit a stall right around the 3 week mark. Mine lasted about 8 days and then I was back to losing weight. I can't help with question 2. Good luck!

Dr. told me the blood thinner can cause some women to start when they weren't expecting it. I got mine immediately following surgery, 2 weeks before I was expecting it.

I had & still have some nasty bruises from the heprin shots. I had to inject myself 3 times a day for 2 weeks on either the thigh or stomach. I'm 10 weeks out of surgery and the bruises have faded somewhat, but not disappeared. Mine also seemed to spread out... I'm not sure why.

I gained 10 pounds from the surgery and it took over a week for that to disappear. Give your body a couple weeks to adjust to having a large part of an organ removed! It will start coming off, just give it a little time.

I voted for you. You might also consider posting this on Obesity Help, if you haven't already. Good luck!

I'm 10 weeks out and I finally decided to resume my zumba exercise class. I hadn't been there in about 3 months. In the middle of the class, the instructor catches my eye and mouths, "Wow! You look great". After the class she stopped to talk to me to tell me she couldn't believe how different I looked and it was amazing how much a person could transform in just a few months. I felt great when she said that because the scale hasn't moved in a while and I was getting frustrated. Today, I'm happy knowing the weight loss is starting to really be noticeable. YEAH!

Sunny D- I completely understand where you are coming from! I havent' met that special someone yet, but am hoping to & to have kids one day, as well. I can't imagine ever being comfortable enough to get naked with someone with tons of sagging, loose skin... so how the heck could I have kids without the plastic surgery? It seems like you need to have the plastic surgery in order to be comfortable enough to make those babies. I know people say that if he really loves you things like being fat or having loose skin won't matter. The reality is that the issue is not with how a man sees you, it is with how you see yourself. I don't know that I could let myself be open to an intimate relationship if I felt like my stomach & boobs looks disgusting. I don't really have any good advise for you. I'm waiting to see what my body will look like when I hit my goal. I probably would have the plastic surgery even without having had kids and then if I have kids later, I'll deal with the restretched skin then. I don't think I will wait to feel good about my body in the hopes that someday I really will meet Mr. Right and have babies. There's no guarantee it will ever happen. Hmmm... now I'm depressing myself.

My biggest worry would be the coughing... of course, if you smoke MJ pretty regularly, then maybe you don't get the heavy, hacking cough. I would worry that hard, heavy coughing could cause stitches to split, a hernia, or just be damn painful. But I'm not a doctor, so that's just my opinion. As for the munchies, I never had them & actually always felt far more in control of my eating that I would when completely sober. I think it is definitely something that varies by person Good luck & when you do restart smoking, maybe you could post how it went? I'm guessing others would appreciate the info without risking the criticism that goes along with posting the question themselves.

I've never heard of this... that would mean at my heaviest I would have had to eat 275 g of protein! I don't think that's possible. I try to hit 60 g every day. Good luck to you.

Well, my doctor told me that he wouldn't do the surgery if I had smoked within 1 month of the surgery. He didn't care what I was smoking out of.... a pipe, a bong, a hookah, or a just a plain old cigarette. According to him, smoking inflames the esophagus and makes it much harder to get the tubes in your throat. Maybe you should check with your doctor?

Hello all, I got through my surgery and 2 weeks of recovery just fine. I thought I would post a detailed description of how it went because I know how apprehensive I was about the whole thing, and I really wanted to know exactly what to expect. February 23 was the date of my surgery. I was having the gastric sleeve procedure, a hernia repair, and my gall bladder removed. I had these procedures done in Downers Grove, IL by Dr. Rosen. I had to arrive at the hospital at 5:00 am. They weighed me and put me in a room where I was asked to put on the hospital gown and get in the hospital bed. They then put an IV in my hand and put the compression stockings on my legs. I was given a couple of shots (I'm not entirely sure what they were for). Every time a nurse stopped in I had to repeat my name and date of birth and they had to check my wrist band. All this happened over the course of 2 hours. I was allowed to have one person in the room with me and we pretty much just chatted in the in between times of the nurses visits. At about 6:45 am the surgeon stopped by to review the procedures we were doing. I also met with the anesteologist. My surgery was scheduled for 7:00 am, and at about 7:05 am they started to wheel me to the operating room. I did make them stop at the bathroom because I was nervous and really felt the need to go one last time. Up until this point, I had been very calm and at peace with my decision. My heart rate had been right around 65 the whole time. But now I was extremely nervous. They wheeled the bed through what felt like 20 different corridors. We arrived in the operating room. It was COLD and smelled funny. They had me move to the bed they would be doing the surgery on. I lay there and looked up at these 3 huge lights (reminded me of old movies where the police were interrogating you and they had that big bright light in your face) and I started to really freak out. I kept thinking that this was going to be the last place I would ever see (I was so nervous about the idea of dying that the night before I wrote goodbye letters to all my friends and family). I started to cry and the nurses and doctors tried to comfort me, but I can't say it really worked. I would say that they knocked me out within about 2 minutes of when I started crying. The next thing I remember is waking up in a considerable amount of pain. I believe it was around 10:30 am. The nurse wanted to know my level of pain on a scale of 1-10. I told her 6-7. I also told her I had to go to the bathroom. It was horrifically painful to have them lift my hips to put the bedpan under me, and in the end, I couldn't go anyway. I stayed in the recovery area for 3 hours because they didn't have any regular rooms ready. For the most of the time I slept and the pain medication kicked in, so I didn't feel so crappy. Finally, at about 1:00 pm, I was taken to my room. I again pretty much slept and i would say that with the morphine, my pain was about a 2. I didn't feel bloated from gas. My biggest problem was a constant need to pee... major inflamation due to the catheter. In fact, the need to pee was so overwhelming that by 4:00 pm, I forced myself to get out of bed and try to go to the bathroom again. Getting out of the bed was incredibly painful. As long as I was not moving in bed, I felt fine, but getting out of bed hurt! I became incredibly nauseous when I sat up and I told them I needed a bucket in case I puked while on the toilet. I dry heaved a couple of times (that hurt like a mother!). They put something in my IV to get rid of the nausea, and I never experienced it again. I still wasn't able to go to the bathroom, but as long as I was up, they had me walk a lap. I pretty much had to get up every hour from that point on to try and use the bathroom. Most of the time, I would also walk a lap. I should add, that they put some blue dye in the ice chips so that when I was able to pee, it was bright green. The blue dye helps them make sure you have no leaks. If there is a leak, the blood in the drain would turn purple. If there is no leak, then your pee will be green. Around 5:30 pm, I went to radiology where they made me drink something that really left me feeling like I might hurl. After I got that down, I had to do the barrium drink. That wasn't as gross. The cool thing was that I could see the screen so I could watch the Fluid move down my throat and into my stomach. I was down there for about 10 minutes and then it was back up to my room. At 10 pm the nurse came in to tell me I had to give myself my first heprin shot (my dr. requires all patients to give themselves 3 shots of heprin a day for 2 weeks following surgery). The idea of injecting myself with something really freaked me out, but I knew I had to do it or they wouldn't release me from the hospital. I had to give myself the shot in either my thigh or my stomach. I did the thigh. It took me a while to work up the nerve to put the needle in my leg, but I did it. It wasn't really painful and I would say that by day 3 after surgery, it was no big deal to do anymore. They also checked by blood sugar level which was 159! This completely freaked me out because one of the big reasons I wanted this surgery was to prevent diabetes, which runs heavily in my family. Because the blood sugar level was so high, I had to get a insulin shot. They had to check the sugar level every 6 hours after that. The next time they checked it was 139 and the time after that it was 88. They told me that sometimes surgery causes your blood sugar levels to spike, but it will usually drop back down to where it should be by the next day. That night I had to sleep with some tubing below my nose because the sleep study showed I have low oxygenation in my blood when I sleep. This thing was to monitor that. A buzzer would sound if the oxygen level dropped below 90. So, every single time I would fall asleep or start to drift off, this annoying buzzer would start ringing and I would have to call the nurse to get it turned off. At 3 am I finally asked what the purpose of this was, other than making sure I didn't sleep a wink the entire night. I was even more irritated about the whole thing when she told me the buzzer didn't sound out at the nurses station. The only place it rang was in my room. I made enough of a stink about the whole thing that they changed the tubing so it was putting out oxygen and would keep the stupid alarm from ringing the second I started to sleep. I don't think I slept after that because I was awake every time a nurse came in to check a vital or give me a shot. I will say, expect to be woken up at least every 2-3 hours. The next day, they took me off the morphine and gave me a form of vicodin as a pain killer. I continued walking every hour (and going to the bathroom). The surgeon stopped by around 8:00am to check on me. He said that since I had been up moving around so much and I was doing quite well, that he was going to have them release me around 2pm (provided I could drink 4 oz of Water every hour with no problem). I had no problem with this and was ready to go, but my nurse was so ditzy that it was after 4:30 by the time I was finally released. Before I could go, they had to remove the drain, which I was really nervous about. She assured me it wouldn't hurt, but would be more uncomfortable feeling than anything. I was still braced for serious pain because friends had told me it hurt a lot. However, when she pulled it out, it really wasn't painful. It was more of a bizzare feeling because you can feel that tubing snaking around your internal organs. I think because it was only in there for a day, the skin hadn't grown around it so there was no pain. I went home. The next 4 days, I was stiff and sore. I continued taking the liquid vicodin type medicine and my pain levels were around a 2. sleeping was difficult. I slept on the couch with my back propped way up so I could be in an almost sitting position. By day 5, I stopped taking the pain medication except for at night. By day 7, I quit the pain medication all together and was able to resume driving. If I had had to, I probably could have resumed working, but I was still very easily exhausted. I took a full 2 weeks off of work because I didn't want to have to give myself injections at work. Overall, I felt like the surgery was far easier than I had expected. The only hard part was getting in & out of bed & moving position, but the more you force yourself to do it, the easier it gets. I haven't had any problems with throwing up or anything like that. Relearning how to eat has been a struggle and is my biggest focus right now. I hope this long and detailed (and in some cases TMI) story is helpful to those of you with this surgery in your future. Krista

I don't think there is a sticky thread of people's surgery/hospital stories. I know that many other people have posted them, but you will probably have to search through the lists or maybe try doing a search keyword for surgery or hospital? Sorry I can't be more help. Good luck in making your decision! I would also recommend you check out the band to sleeve revision forum. I'm sure the folks in there would have plenty of food for thought.

I've found that some people have really genuinely been supportive of my journey... and I've been surprised by who they are. I've also found that some people really are 'haters', doing everything from telling me it doesn't look like I've lost any weight, to competing with how much weight is lost because they don't want to be the fat friend. Again, I've been surprised by which people in my life these people have turned out to me. Whenever someone tells me I don't want to get too thin or I shouldn't lose more weight, I just tell them that I am going to follow the advise of my doctor who has been doing this for more than 20 years... and if I'm feeling bitchy, I'll usually ask them how long they've been practicing medicine for. Remember, you are doing this so you can be the person YOU want to be, not the person your friends want to be!

At 2 months out, I would have to say that I experience hunger... or at least something happens that makes me glance up at the clock and realize I need to eat every couple of hours. But it is never the 'I must have food or I will go crazy' type of hunger I had before the surgery. More of a tickling type feeling that tells me it's time for a snack. The only other time I feel hungry is when my coworkers (cheerfully refered to as 'the sadists') bring in cupcakes, donuts, or whatever other 'treat' they've decided to leave in the breakroom. Mentally, I still feel that compulsion to shove it in whether I'm physically hungry or not. However, I've never actually given in and eaten any of it.

Congrats on your success! Krista

I gained 12 from the surgery. I don't count it as weight I re-lost. I figure it was from the gas & IV & swelling from surgery, and not from fat. Congrats on your weightloss!

Hey Suz, We are in the same boat. Like you I have about 130 pounds to lose. I had surgery 6 weeks ago. And I've lost 'only' roughly 40 pounds. When I went to my doctor two weeks ago, I asked why I wasn't losing 30 pounds a month like EVERYONE else. I was told that the weightloss rate depends a lot on how much you have to lose (if you have 300 pounds to lose, you will lose more quickly than if you have 150 to lose), what you are eating (people who struggle with the eating and drinking in the beginning lose weight a lot quicker, but this is not doctor recommended!), and what your gender is (yes, men do lose more quickly). At this point, my doctor says I shouldn't even be worried about how much I've lost. I'm still healing and am only cleared to do certain exercises. I still get frustrated... the scale hasn't moved in days! But, just remember, if you lose 10 pounds a month, by the end of the year you will be at goal! That's freakin' amazing! If you ever need to talk, feel free to send me a message. I'm at the same stage as you and going through a lot of the same frustrations.

I use a baby spoon to take really small bites. To slow down my eating, I will knit a row or figure out one answer to a crossword before I allow myself to take the next bite. Of course, if you are eating as a family, this might be a little weird.

If you figure it out, let me know! I go from zero to bitch if someone so much as glances at me funny. Guess in the future it will be easy to spot sleevers... we'll be the ones out of jobs