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lellow's Blog

A blog by lellow in General

  • Entries

    19

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About this blog

Band Replacement - Starting Over

Entries in this blog

Lucky? Yes, but I also made my own 'luck'

This band has been a godsend. I won't lie. It helps me maintain my weight easily. I know how hard it was for me to not gain when my old band was leaking, and how super hard it was to lose, so I'm loving that my new band has me back on track. Yes I've had complications, but generally speaking, yes I've been 'lucky' with the band. My band has been SO easy to live with. Or maybe it was that I had realistic expectations, I don't know . But either way, I love that it's there helping me every day.  
  • lellow

"You're lying, that's not you!"

Today I was fiddling with my collage maker on my phone and made a collage of one of my 'before' pics from 2003 and one of me that I took today, in 2013. I wanted to use it as my profile pic on here, so this is it:     I sent it to myself at work, had it up on my screen and someone I didn't know very well walked up behind me and said 'who is the person on the left?'   So I said, 'oh that's me 10 years ago'.   Believe it or not, she puffed herself up in indignation and looked me in the ey

1st Aug was my 5 year bandiversary

And I missed it!   I may have a brand new band in but I still consider the 1st August 2008 to be the first day I became a bandster.   And despite the ups and downs, it has been a game changer for me. It transformed my life in so many ways that I can't even begin to articulate. Not just in my weight, my health and my prognosis for my future health, but in my confidence, my view on life, my career and my value in myself.   Happy bandiversary to me! It's been an amazing 5 years and here's to

Meh

This is the vent post I never usually make just before I leave LBT for a while. It's the one I think in my head but never say out loud. But here goes:   I get tired, as do a lot of the band veterans here I'm sure, of saying the same thing over and over. I get tired of people fighting wanting only their opinion to be heard, or people asking for advice then when you give it, refusing to even consider it. I'm tired of the same story, but different faces where people talk about how the band isn't

Got to love the confusion about 'ideal weight'

So my surgeon, who replaced my band, and his wife, who does my fills, can't agree. When I went in to see him for the first time, I'd been successfully maintaining for 3 years and then lost restriction with a leak. My BMI was just under 23. And that's what he's recorded it as.   My BMI just a smidge over 24. He thinks I need to be a bit tighter so I can get back down to my pre-leak weight. His wife, however, thinks I am perfect the way I am now.   What IS someone's ideal weight? Because even

My body image

It's taken me a long time to get my head screwed on right. I went from being heavy to being too thin, and after a lot of analysing, I decided that I'm finally happy with my weight. Because I'm not all about my weight.   This was a difficult mindset to come to. I sometimes wonder, when I was losing, whether or not I'd traded one obsession for another: food for weight loss. My whole goal was to lose, and it didn't matter what the scale said, I kept wanting to lose.   My best friend eventually

How many interesting people have you missed out on meeting?

I saw a video of an interview with Dustin Hoffman today and it really rang true for me. I think I am so lucky because I was a big girl most of my life and lost the weight, and in the process I went from being invisible to being visible to society.   The thing is, I didn't even know I was invisible when I was heavy. How would I when I'd been heavy all my adult life? But when I lost the weight, and the level of attentiveness, regard and interaction people wanted with me increased out of sight, I

Boobs, butt and a waist!

Before After   So I'm 2 days post lipo. I'm feeling really good! I called work because I was supposed to go back tomorrow but they said to take another day, so I am. Haven't needed pain meds but have got some swelling that is pretty uncomfy so I appreciate having a little more time off.   I'm so pleased with the result. I had a panicked moment just before I went into surgery asking myself why the hell I was doing this, but now, seeing that I actually have a waist for the first time

Commitment

I am committed to me being my best. This means I will not:   - Reward myself with food. I love food, and I love beautiful tasting food, but it's not a reward, I am not a dog. I have to maintain a healthy relationship with food, which means I can enjoy it without it being the centre of my life.   - Forgot that that for most people, achieving 'fullness' at every meal is not their goal. This is something I realised just recently. My partner is not a big guy, and he stops eating when he's no lo

Being satisfied with myself

I was asked recently, if I ever would be satisfied with myself. I'm having lipo in a week, where I'm getting a little bit of contouring on the lovehandles and backfat left over from the body lift, and some fat taken from my inner thighs. It won't be drastic by any means, it's just a little bit of shaping, really, but despite telling very few people (non-banders) about it, the resounding feedback seems to be that there's something wrong with me, because I don't seem to be happy with myself.   A

Too good to be true?

My last band took a lot of fills to get me into the green zone. 8.5cc in a 10 cc band, and when I was leaking, it got up as high as 10cc.   With my first band, at 6cc, I couldn't even feel my band. And yet here I am now, at 6cc again with a new band, placed by a different dr, and I feel like I'm in the green zone.   Maybe because of my history I keep expecting it to disappear but it's been 4 days since my fill and I still feel like I can't eat more than a couple of poached eggs tops. I actua

Hanging out for my next fill, I miss the green zone!

See, unlike a new bander, I know how good the green zone is to me. It's like those first few weeks after surgery when you don't feel hungry, have no desire to eat, can't imagine eating. That's what my green zone is like.   But I also know it took ages to get there the first time. I got to 8.5cc in a 10cc band to get to that point. At 4cc, which is what I have in my band now, I felt nothing. I feel nothing now.   I know my surgeon doesn't want to go too fast with the fills. He put in 2cc the

almost 4 weeks post op and I'm already thinking of more surgery

I must be nuts. My boyfriend keeps reminding me how miserable I was in the week after my band replacement 4 weeks ago. But honestly I don't care. Or I don't remember!   I came into a little bit of money and I want to get lipo done. Even at my lowest weight (BMI of 21) I had pockets of fat that wouldn't go away - my inner thighs, my love handles (above my body lift scar) and upper back fat (near my bra line). I remember trying to lose more and more trying to get rid of those spots and while I d

Yeah, my regrets are gone, along with the nausea.

In fact I'm pretty much feeling 100% now. My port incision still hurts a little but that's the extent of my discomfort of late. I'm even back to wearing the jeans that I couldn't quite get into earlier this year. This pic is of me in those very jeans TODAY.   I did my post op appt early too, by one week, because I can't make it next week. So I saw my surgeon yesterday, two weeks post band replacement. He was SO pleased with how I was healing, weighed me (I've officially lost 4kgs since he las

Hallelujah the culprit may have been found!!

So it turns out I might have been having a reaction to my painkillers this entire time, and that's what was causing the overwhelming nausea.   Tramadol. Not quite an opiate which is why it was prescribed to me, because this little duck is allergic to opiates. Except it made me nauseous because the number one adverse effect of Tramadol is, low and behold, nausea.   I took that little pill every freaking night. And woke up the next day feeling like death. Not last night though, and today I fe

Embarrassment for the overachiever

I'm 10 days post band replacement and today I returned to work, to start with a new client for my company.   Maybe it was because it was a new client and I'm very much in the 'must impress' mode that I ignored the lingering nausea and pain and took myself off there this morning.   I brought my hot water bottle with me as a concession though and it provided me with a good segway to explain to my client that I had recently had abdominal surgery. He was lovely and said he wasn't in a rush to st

Regret for the first time

I've had a lot of surgeries. Initial lapband surgery, a torsoplasty, breast augmentation, 2 port revisions and now, finally, a band replacement. So pain and feeling horrible is something I can put up with, because I know it's for a greater good.   But this nausea might have me beat. It's day 3 of it with last night being the worst. I spent a lot of the night dry retching and feeling like absolute crud. I alternated between goosebumps and convulsing and then shivering and burping then dry retch

6 days post band replacement surgery

I woke up this morning and I feel OH so much better than I have the last few days. I was starting to worry that I'd never feel ok again.   This surgery was harder than the initial surgery. It hurt more. It took more out of me. Mind you, I *am* almost 5 years older than I was then. Maybe that's it, maybe it's just coz I'm an old chook now lol.   I'm still on a liquid diet - full liquids, with the thickest thing I am having being yoghurt, and I'm doing it easily. I'm rarely hungry and this rem

4 days post band replacement surgery

So here I am, 4 days after full band replacement surgery. Feeling weird because I've done this before so I don't really relate to those who have just gotten their bands for the first time, but at the same time, knowing that what I'm going through isn't much different.   S why did I get a band replacement?   Well my band has been leaking for 15 months now, maybe longer. I was first banded in 2008 and had great success with the band, losing all my excess weight and more. In fact the band was s

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