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I only had very slight bruising, it was a bit yellow, but I'm 2 and a half weeks out and still have a good amount of pain at my large incision. I'm just now starting to be able to sit up to get out of bed instead of rolling out!

I am 3 months post op and I have lost 53 Lbs. last week I had emergency gallbladder surgery! Since the removal of my gallbladder, I cannot tolerate any food. Without too much Information, it doesn't stay in my system long at all. Carbohydrates are the safest thing at the moment. High protein/high fats are very destructive to my system at the moment. Any advice/suggestions to make it through this period? I'm hoping my body will adjust- but I struggling to make my protein goal at the moment!

This happened to me, as well. I received two units of blood and then had to go back to surgery to look for bleeding. They didn't find anything. I ended up staying 3 nights in the hospital. I came home on Friday, November 13th. I am 12 days out now and feel completely healed. On another note, my taste and smell have changed dramatically. My breath is very bad. It is hard for me to get in my Protein and liquids. We are going out to lunch after church today and I am already wondering what I will eat. I'm so ready to get beyond this 'recovery' stage and get to place where I feel 'normal' again. On a positive note, I am down 24 pounds since my surgery. 46 to go!

Hello all. I was sleeved on October 22 2012, on my second week of purée and almost finished... Only problems I have right now is horrible chest pain in the area where my hiatal hernia was removed. Along with the chest pain I am starting to not be able to tolerate liquids, even just plain water keeps coming back up as a slimy mess... has eanyone ever has these problems? my biggest fear is that my hernia is coming back. ???? Any advice would be great.water.

I am 6 months post and I still have burning sometimes in my port area. It dont last but about 1 minute and then gone so I dont worry about it! It dont happen everyday but maybe 3 days aweek! i think everything is ok!

Since I can only eat like 4-5 bites of anything, I'm hungry again 90 minutes later. I counted the calories I'd be getting if I stuck to my dr reccomendation of 3 meals a day and I'd get in about 350. So I eat numerous times. Probably 7-8 times a day.

So I'm at 7 weeks out and the weight loss has been very slow. I've only had one fill so far and have little to no restriction. I know that what I've done so far has been through sheer hard work and determination. But while the scale doesn't want to move, I've had three people at work approach me in the past week and ask if I've lost weight. So at least it's starting to show a bit - gives me motivation to keep it up!

I eat throughout the day, meals and/or snacks. I just started tracking (I'm 3 months out) and I go more by calories. I agree with ms.k that I eat when I'm hungry. It's best for me to eat several times per day than wait until meal time and be starving because that is when I eat too fast/too much and I'm miseralbe. If I eat every 3 hours, that seems to work for me. I have that "emply stomach" feeling by then but I'm not starving. One thing I've noticed is that I'm not focussed on meal time now. What I mean: before the surgery, if it was meal time, I would eat (hungry or not) because I just wanted to eat. It was never a question of hungry or not, I always wanted to eat (so I guess I always felt hungry, lol). I didn't really know what hungry felt like anymore, if that makes sense because I never really listened to my body. The sleeve has changed that. Now I eat when I need to eat, meal time or not. I'm not constantly looking at the clock counting down the minutes till the next meal so I have a reason to eat. If my family is hungry at dinner time, I make them dinner, but I may not be hungry then. I may eat later. That has been the biggest revelation to me - eating when I'm truly hungry and actually being able to identify that feeling!

Surgery date December 17, 2014. Welcome to the club. Bored with what food I can eat but very happy with the weight loss thus far. Hit a stall at week 3 but it appears to be the norm. Will weigh myself tomorrow to see if my stall is over. BEST NEWS....had to give up my size 18&20 jeans because they are too big. My belt is now on the third hole---yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhh me!

I first had my band done in november of 2000 to start with i had a few problems my body rejected the port and then took 3 more ops to fix but since then i have no trouble what so ever lost weight quite easily over time and have kept if of. I have just moved and had to find a new dr regarding the band who has been very supportive. I have no regrets doing the banding and only have to look a old photos to go wow was that me. I will go and see a gp but since moving havent found one who im comfortable with just my banding dr who is 2hrs away and very busy. thankyou for your imput and will go to a gp and rule out anything else

I am having some trouble with diet. First I have no idea what my band fill is as I have had it only filled once. That time he put in 1cc. I did here talk about him asperating 6 first? Does that mean there are already six cc in their? I have not lost my apetitite at all and want to eat. I lost 35 pounds in the first 3 weeks of lap band as I was not able to eat anything then that just stopped I became ravenous. The first fill was two weeks ago. Just what is a restriction? Exactly how does it feel? I think maybe I am not chewing food well enough and I have to throw everything back up which leaves me with ice cream for food. Now this I know is not good. What is the proper amount of food to be consuming at one time or do you count calories? If anyone please can tell me any of this information Thanks Teckla

5 weeks post op. Starting weight was185 lbs. I'm 5'3", 65, and had problems w asthma attacks, sleep apnea, acid reflux, etc. Thats why i went thru the procedure. Expensive for just 50 lbs. Already lost 16 lbs. My surgery went very well, surgeon also found a hernia & removed it. For 3 weeks just liquids, then puree, then softfoods. I was very weak last week incl Saturday; almost fainted at the Nail Salon. This week i seem to b a lot better. Increased food intake. Now im trying to let Protein in my system. I love carbs, miss them tremendously, specially rice. (Latino upbringing, rice n Beans being the main course, animal products just a side dish). I drink a lot of liquid yogurt, liquid Coco Protein, etc. My only concern is that my upper abdomen is bulged. Contents take a long time to go down. Also miss Water w my meals. I need suggestions on nonbulging foods that taste good. Tired of Soups, liquid yogurt. I need food. Any help would b appreciated. Thank you. L Sent from my SM-N900T using the BariatricPal App

I've been spotting the last week and a half, and I just had my surgery June 13th. I haven't had much of a period the last five years due to PCOS. It's truly all about the hormones! When you're losing the weight, you're getting an overload of hormones, thus your body reacts.

hey sprint, i had surgery with dr.ortiz on april 2nd we missed eachother by two days. The entire experience was great basically how you mentioned. I remember the nutritionist saying if you can't drink it don't eat it for the first few weeks b/c if your stomach has to break something down it moves and affects the band healing in place. But if you feel ready i guess then do what works, i know i wouldn't dare at this point. I don't want to risk something not healing well and it costing me unecessary $$. Why dont you call her on monday and tell her about the cottage chesse and egg salad? Good Luck!

Sorry for how long this is- I know that I always appreciate reading detailed posts about the process, so I’m hoping other will find it helpful. I’m just starting the process of getting a VSG. I’ve thought about WLS for a long time, but have always been scared off because of the possible complications. I’m not sure what exactly changed, but, about three weeks ago, I was driving to work and the thought of getting the surgery popped into my head and suddenly I knew it was what I needed to do. Looking at the hard road ahead, I wish I had started this journey earlier in life (I’m 37), but I know I wasn’t ready for it until now. I’m in the DC area, and there are lots of hospitals and surgeons to choose from. I finally settled on Inova Fair Oaks, which is a Bariatric Center of Excellence, has great stats, and has an up-to-date website which let me register for the seminar online. (GWU never contacted me after I filled out their form. Other hospitals had outdated calendars on their websites, or no way to register online, or the websites themselves were unfinished, which I felt didn’t bode well for their programs.) I went to a seminar about two weeks ago, which was mostly basic stuff that I already knew. I had my first visit with the surgeon a few days after the seminar. The surgeon, Rajev Nain, was the same surgeon who did the seminar. He seemed a bit stiff at first, but after a while he seemed to get more comfortable and I felt like we had a good connection. He definitely didn’t come across as the a**hole surgeon stereotype you hear so much about. We first talked about my basic health history, medications, that sort of thing. I don’t have many co-morbidities yet- just hypertension and edema in my left leg. We talked about the various surgeries, and he was fine with me getting the VSG, he didn’t push for the RNY. I’m 5’1” and 355lbs. He said that he could get me to around 205 lbs with the sleeve. He was clearly just basing that on the average amount of excess weight lost with the sleeve, not anything specific to me. I would be overjoyed with 205, even though that would still leave me 100 lbs over my ideal weight. However, I also know that each individual is different, and I feel like I have it in me to go lower. I may not make it to 105, but I think I am determined enough to get myself in the mid-100s. I asked him about his experience- he’s done several hundred VSGs, and even more RNYs. He also has lots of experience with other GI surgeries. While I would have liked him to have done thousands instead of hundreds of VSGs, it is still enough that I feel safe with him. I asked about major complications, and he said that <1% of his VSG patients had had major complications. He has had no mortalities with the VSG, and one mortality with the RNY (the patient died of a pulmonary embolism the day after surgery, even though she was on blood thinners and had had her legs compressed during surgery.) Having lurked on this board for a while, the variance in different surgeons’ pre-op and post-op diet instructions has been a bit puzzling to me, and the materials from the presentation I attended were very authoritative. I will happily follow rules if I understand the reasoning behind them, but I tend to do my own research and come up with my own rules for myself if I feel like the rules I am given aren’t well supported. I was nervous to do it (because of that whole surgeon stereotype), but I told this to my surgeon, noted that his post-op diet (2 weeks Clear liquids, 2 weeks full liquids, 2 weeks purees, 2 weeks mushed-up real food, then finally real food 8 weeks after surgery) was one of the more conservative ones that I had seen, and I asked him what research had gone into making it. He laughed at that, and said that the priority for him and the other surgeons in the group was to have consistent instructions that everyone involved in the practice could refer to, so they just flipped a coin when making them. He said that the part he cared about was that he didn’t want patients going to full liquids until after he examined them at the first post-op appointment. Other than that, I could work with the NUT to come up with a post-op diet plan that worked for me. I then asked him about the 2-week pre-op liquid diet. The pre-op diet that he requires is 900 calories of Protein shakes a day. I told him that I totally understood the reason for the diet (to shrink the liver to make surgery safer), but that I didn’t understand why it had to be all liquid. Why not just 900 calories of low-carb food per day? Again, he laughed and said that there was nothing magical about the liquid part of it, it was just easier for people to stick to the diet when they didn’t have a choice about what to eat. He said that he was fine with me subbing low-carb, high-protein food into the pre-op diet, as long as the NUT approved my substitutions. He seemed to get a kick out of me and my questions. He said he could tell that I took this very seriously and had done my research. I thanked him for not treating me like an idiot, and not having a “do what I say because I am the surgeon” attitude. I have to do 6 months of “nutrition classes” to satisfy my insurance requirements, so surgery won’t be until next spring some time. I’m disappointed to have to wait so long, but I am trying to make the best of the time by really making sure I am ready for this change, and by trying to lose as much weight as I can before the surgery. I started myself on a low-carb diet of my own design, and am doing great on it so far. I’ve done low-carb diets before, and it has always been a struggle with craving carbs while on them, but I haven’t had a carb-craving yet on this one. I’ve cut out all grazing and it has helped immensely. I’m eating 1300-1500 calories a day and not feeling hungry. I know it will get harder, but right now, I’m feeling pretty good about myself.

I have had 3 fills now and each time I get really bad gas. Is this normal? Anyone else get this?

And why don't you go out? Today am almost 4 week out, and I went to a BBQ at my chair's. I had my pureed lunch b4 going, and sipped water all mt time there. I felt good, and many friends talked to me about my weight loss. It was quite good time. next week am going to a brown bag lunch with friends in a park. you can always find something fun to do with your friends. Think positively

I had pain in the upper left shoulder... and a bit in the port area.... lasted 3 days... can last up to a week. I found a heating pad really helped. Tom, Toronto Banded July 6 06 Wt. Loss; 156 lbs

I recently got over a violent stomach virus which required me to get an unfill. I'm going this AM for an upper Gi to make sure I didn't slip the band. My doctor didn't specify a diet and I didnt think to ask because I was just feeling so lousy. I didn't eat the first day and did mostly clears the second day after. My appetite came back for dinnertime and I tolerated some broth Soup. I'm definitely taking it easy and modifying. Anyone who has had this happen before, what were your instruction post unfil? Do you follow the traditional adjustment diet? Or is it slightly different? I go next week for a refill. Thank you.

There is more to this journey than just not being as hungry. There is a very mental side to re- understanding your body's signs for real hunger learning to chose healthy foods and breaking away from the things that got you here to start with. There are a few books that I've found or were suggested to my by my Bariatric psychologist. 1. Eat, Move,Sleep by Tom Rath 2. Lose Weight Easily by Loving Who You Are. Conquering the mental emotional side of losing weight. By S Wharton 3. The Body Book by Cameron Diaz

Katie, I had surgery the week before you. I have lost 25.5 lbs, but I haven't lost anything in over a week. I had my first fill on May 19 and I have an appointment on June 24 at which time I hope to get my second fill. I have 5 cc's in a 10 cc band. It is a struggle at this point because I don't feel the restriction at all at this point. I think I felt it a little after my fill but it did not last long. My band started out with 4 cc's on my surgery date. My fill was for 1 more cc on May 19. I don't think being hungry 3 - 4 hours later is that bad. I think you can allow yourself a small snack in between meals. I don't snack after Breakfast and I sometimes will have a late afternoon snack (sugar free pudding or yogurt). I always have a little snack in the evening before bed. Good Luck Alice Banded April 8, 2008 271/245.5/150

I had surgery on April 16th. So far, I've lost about 17lbs. I'm eating much smaller portions, but hungry again after about 3-4 hours. I have a 10cc or 12cc (cannot remember which) band with 4cc in it; have had one post op fill. How soon after your first fill did you get your second?? I'm

Hey Donna, Oh babe I know everything you said to me I know already!!!! My cousin had her op two weeks before me and she has lost a whopping 27kgs I spent christma day with her and that when I thought ok wake up call you need to sort this. The beach idea is a good one I do live by the bay but time is my enemy working full time with four little ones and a sometimes 2hr commute both ways to work. I am a nurse and should know better but I have been cycling 10 mins each morning including this morning new years day before I headed to work!!!! how good am I and a half hour swim/frolic in the pool with my boys when I get home......the amazing thing is even in less than a week I feel like I have more energy. And my boys love mum in the pool with them. Thank you for replying to my thread hunny I appreciate it.....glad I found this group. All the best for a lighter fitter 2009 xxxxx

I'm having my surgery on oct 23rd... I don't have a thyroid it was removed 3 years ago, has anyone else had successfully losing weight without one after surgery? I'm nervous it won't work. I'm just anxious.

after the swelling and irritation goes down from the surgery you will feel hunger before your first fill. I only lost weight the first 6 weeks by pure willpower (don't know where that came from. after my first fill lost a few more but the third fill it was game on. I just had my fourth fill yesterday. i might not have made leaps and bounds in my loss but it's been steady