What Are Some Things That Surprised You After Surgery?

[Beks18 4]

I’ve done a lot of bypass research and found out so much that I didn’t have a clue about prior to research. Things like the foamies, the Constipation, medication absorption, etc. I’m curious to hear about things that surprised you after surgery that your clinical team didn’t tell you and that you might not have come across in your own research beforehand. I want to be as prepared as possible for what’s to come. Give me the good, bad, ugly… all of it.

[SpartanMaker 915]

I think the first thing that comes to mind is just how varied dumping syndrome can be. When the bariatric teams talk about it, they tend to tell you all the symptoms and that it tends to happen pretty quickly after eating.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple or straightforward. Some people may only have one or two symptoms. Others multiple symptoms. For some people it happens really quickly, and for others it can take hours before it begins. Time to recover is also really varied. For some it's over with in 30 minutes or less. Others can be in agony for many, many hours.

As an example, I'm over 2 years out and for the longest time I just assumed I was one of the lucky (or cursed depending of your perspective), people that didn't really have to worry about dumping. I can eat almost anything and not have "typical" dumping syndrome. What I do have is what I was calling reactive hypoglycemia, meaning I was having low blood glucose issues ~3 hours of so after eating.

After talking to my bariatric surgeon in my last checkup, she pointed out that what I was calling reactive hypoglycemia, is likely just a different form of dumping. Once I started being more careful about not eating a bunch of added sugar without sufficient Protein as a buffer, the symptoms mostly went away.