10+ years later...

[Lisa250 0]

Hello all! I was banded in Nov 2007 so it’s been awhile. Ups and downs, fills and unfills. I’ve kept off about 45 pounds that I lost, it’s been hard to do. I’ve found that the band worked maybe 50% of the time but that’s hard to judge due to some poor choices on my part.

For the past 3-4 months I have Been having pain/soreness at my port site. I’ve not had a fill in at least 18 months to 2 years. The pain goes into my lower abdomen and all pain is on the right side right at the port and below. Hurts to walk a lot and stretch/move in certain directions. Not enough pain to warrant a trip to the ER.

Has anyone experienced this so many years later? Slip? Corrosion?

any thoughts?

Thanks!!

[jfc193 718]

Sorry to hear that you are having port pain.

I was banded in Sept 2007 and have not had any problems with the Port.

Any issues that I have with my band have been because I either had it too tight (Currently have 1 cc in my 4 cc Band) or have eaten to fast.

I appreciate the band as a tool. i still have to make good food choices and keep a commitment So I manage to keep off over a hundred pounds for most of the 10 years.

[katie608 5]

Lisa, I just saw this message. I don't look at many Lapland posts anymore since my band was removed (after 11 years) almost 2 years ago now.

My band was removed because of a port infection.

My family doctor and I spent months trying to figure out why I was having so much pain in the area of my port when my bariatric doctor indicated nothing was wrong with it. We were looking at every other part of my body and could not resolve this. No one actually suspected the port itself for all those months since there had been no obvious source of infection in recent months.

Ultimately my port started to even loosen up and flip under my skin. Even the bariatric doctor I visited was not alarmed. Finally the pain became really strong -- definitely at my port location. The last sign was that I developed a small abcess above the port (it looked like a tiny pimple to start with). I finally gave up on my bariatric doctor and visited a major hospital in my area and saw another doctor. He very quickly diagnosed this as an infected port. The entire band and port were removed within the next 24 hours.

The infection had not reached my stomach or the band itself, fortunately. However, this entire situation went on for almost a year before someone told me my port was infected. I just want to highlight this as I figured if I had an infection it would be obvious. Even the doctor I was seeing for this and my family doctor never suspected this could be the case.

I figured since I was so far out from the original surgery that something like this really could not occur......I was wrong.

Best of luck and I hope your port is fine. If you still have pain (it's been some time since you posted this), I would really encourage you to push your doctors to find an answer.