Alexandra

I've been unbanded for two weeks now, and have definitely put on a couple of pounds. But I think it's totally understandable that after denying our bodies certain types of foods (bulky, fibrous, etc.) for so long we crave them. I know I've been almost gorging on salads with raw vegetables and have scarfed down a cheeseburger or bagel occasionally in the last couple of weeks. But today I'm determined to get my mind back in the game. I know I'm not really hungry so much as just desirous of certain things. But these things are what got me where I was four years ago, and mindlessness is my particular demon. So I'm taking another go at being mindful, since I know I'm capable of it.

396, as I recall I just asked you to be mindful of the wide-ranging audience here. I didn't call YOU anything. I said that rabid pro-lifers hold a thought that I consider to be a fallacy. That's not attacking the pro-lifers, it's attacking the thought. And the definition of "rabid pro-lifer" is, in fact, someone who wants to outlaw abortion in every case, no exception. I fail to see how that's offensive. Maybe if I change the word "rabid" to "extreme"? That'd be fine with me. Whether you consider yourself a rabid or extreme pro-choicer or pro-lifer, my entire point is that these people are on the edges and MOST people are somewhere in the middle.

Funny, you've mentioned several times that you've asked for forgiveness for your abortion. Have you forgiven yourself? :hug: Honestly. When we asked you to tone down your rhetoric when you first got here, it wasn't anything personal. You did, and we thank you, and you're a welcome part of this site. Why so defensive? My comment about "rabid pro-lifers" is not a personal attack on anyone, and correctly describes the subset of right-to-lifers about whom I was talking. It's not an insult to say they exist, is it? Anyway, what you're describing is essentially anarchy. You believe people have the right to kill? For no reason? Assuming that the consequences you mention are not that our victims' families will come after us but that the law will means that in fact you do believe the law should get involved. Were you being sarcastic?

I most certainly do respect your views and your acts. And though I only know you slightly, I am confident that you provide counseling with more compassion and openness than what you received. As you know so well, women who are seeking answers when they are unexpectedly pregnant deserve respect too. Right?

Your first question is exactly what we are all asking. Since there is no way to determine whose line we should follow, we have to trust ourselves to come up with the right answer for ourselves. Why can't you do that for me? Is that what happened to you? The fetus is a FUTURE baby, we all agree on that. But I fail to see how anyone could change the fact of a fetus being a future baby into it being an actual, here-and-now baby. They are different stages on a developmental timeline that can't be simply compressed into nothing. The only way I could have been shocked and changed by the statement you describe above is if I didn't understand I was terminating my pregnancy by having an abortion. Which, of course, I did.

What do you mean by "a real life"? What possible new information could there be that could change the point of view that a fetus in its early stages is not a "baby"? Once again, MOST people see a difference between a developing fetus and a separate, breathing, fully-formed human. The line is in different places, indeed, but for most of us there is a line before which the adult woman's rights outweigh those of a clump of cells whose full humanity is, as yet, only potential.

I said it was hard to make the decision, not to live with it. Life-altering decisions are big and emotional, and this was no different. Hell, it just as hard to decide to GET pregnant when I was ready many years later.

That's a bizarre question. What do you mean, what will we do? You're implying that there is some third party that will be passing judgment. How is that not a Christian point of view? It sounds like you're imagining a sea of angry dead babies somewhere. And what about women being "inconvenienced" because they were raped? Is that acceptable to you?

I'll chime in here, too. For me the hardest thing was the way my future shifted in and out of focus for the few days it took us to decide what to do. For a short time I seriously considered getting married and having a baby, imagining what my life would be like with this man and a child. Thinking about one life versus another life is very heady stuff, and it was an emotional roller coaster. No matter how sure one is about the decision, it's a BIG one to choose not to explore that path and all its potentials. Making the decision was the hard part. Once it was made, though, the procedure wasn't hard.

Yet people who have had vasectomies and tubal ligations get pregnant. How sure do you want us to be? To have the baby? Or the abortion? Lower rates than what? No one knows how many underground abortions were performed before legalization, precisely because they were underground. They are impossible to count. And once again we come around to the fact that MOST people see a fundamental difference between an early-stage fetus inside an adult woman and a living, breathing separate human being. It's those people I believe will prevent the more extreme view--yours--from becoming the law of the land.

Yet I feel the choice you made is one of the responsible ways to deal with consequences. You did not bring an unwanted child into the world and did not become a mother before you were ready. Even though you feel that these decisions were coerced, others may see them both as very responsible decisions. I'm truly sorry that you don't see it that way and live with regrets. I'm confused. Did you feel at the time that abortion was the wrong decision, and still went through with it? Or did you come to feel that way later? What do you think your decision would have been had you just been given information and told to go home and think about it? Without the lectures and scare tactics, would you have continued the pregnancy or gone through with the abortion? The rest of your statements about consequences and punishments seem to be not borne of your experience, but rather your convictions about the rights of fetuses. As has been said repeatedly, we don't all share those convictions. I knew what a mother feels, too, and I came quite independently to the decision to terminate that pregnancy. Should I have had that choice removed because YOU feel differently about the "rights" of a potential baby? Rabid pro-lifers seem to think that they can reduce the occurrence of what they see as murder by passing some laws, but this is the utmost fallacy. Abortion has been around as long as sex has, and a law or two will NEVER change that. What we as a civilized society should be doing is supporting and protecting women from unscrupulous monsters on either side who take advantage of them. Abortion is a reality, and to drive it underground would be the worst thing we could possibly do to our daughters.

So you weren't having "irresponsible" sex--rather, your birth control failed. I mean that if abortion were illegal, you'd have been punished for your birth control having failed. Punished in the sense that the only option you saw as open to you--abortion--would have been off-limits. Punished in the sense that you would have had fewer choices open to you to salvage a situation that you found yourself in due to circumstances beyond your control. Punished in the sense of being told you are not adult enough, not a PERSON enough, to do what you think is right. Of course, it's entirely possible that the 'nurse" who behaved so unethically toward you would not have been daunted by a law. And there will be many more of them to cater to ever more desperate women if abortion ceases to be a legal option. When I found myself unexpectedly pregnant (my birth control failed, too), the first person I told was my boyfriend. We talked and agreed that we weren't ready to become a family (though we did marry five years later), and my own doctor referred me to an abortion clinic. I had to wait a couple of weeks because I'd caught it too early for a procedure to be performed. There was no drama, no manipulation, no pro or con persuasion. It wasn't very painful and I had no physical after-effects. I was 22 years old and everyone treated me like the adult I was. I'm just sorry you couldn't have had the same respect shown to you. But I guarantee you that making abortion illegal will guarantee LESS respect and LESS decent treatment for the hordes of women who want nothing more than to be treated like people. What should be outlawed is the kind of treatment you received, not the procedure itself. Funny, I have to ask: If you felt then as you do now that life begins at conception and abortion is killing a person, why were you so easily swayed to end your pregnancy? Did you consider keeping it or giving it up for adoption? You were the victim of a wholly unethical group of people. You, however, were not forced to have an abortion and I just want my daughters to not be forced to go through with unintended or unwanted pregnancies.

Were you having irresponsible sex? Do you believe you should have been punished for that? Why didn't you want to keep the baby in the first place? And why didn't you tell the father of the child? Would a law have changed your mind? Your answers to those questions are personal, and of course you don't have to share them. But my point is that your answers to those questions are YOUR answers, not mine, not my daughters', and not those of all the other women who may choose abortion.

Funny, my heart goes out to you and especially to the confused 19-year-old girl you were. No one would defend the actions of that nurse, who indeed did not treat you the way you should have been treated. However, saying that women should have the choice does not equate to believing that the sort of treatment you got is fine and dandy. The nurse's actions were unethical. But unethical behavior can be found everywhere, and there are lots of stories from scared young women who wanted abortions but were manipulated out of having them as well. There is always room for regret if decisions are not made freely. That doesn't change a thing about the inappropriateness of laws being made to take those decisions out of women's hands.

Oh, please. No one has said that "everyone feels relief and no regrets after abortion." Certainly everyone who finds themselves unexpectedly pregnant is in a stressful situation, indeed, but that is no reason for the government to get involved. We may all react to this sort of personal trauma differently, but taking decisions out of the hands of women--even 19 year-old women--because they might "regret" it just infantilizes and demeans all of us. Yes, counseling is important, but the responsibility is on THE WOMAN to assess her own state of mind, her circumstances, and carefully decide what to do. No one else has that control. It sounds as though the only options the woman you're describing had were to a) keep the baby and force the guy into marrying her, and be forever worried he didn't love her, or have an abortion against her will. Forgive me, but last I heard there were several other options available. No one has an abortion against her will. But if we continue to allow the government to intrude into our personal medical decisions, we may not be able to say that forever. If the government can tell us which medical procedures we CAN'T have, what's to prevent them from telling us what we MUST have?

Anaesthesia affects us all differently. Among the bad stories are people getting very nauseated upon waking, an effect that I understand can last a while. Others have absolutely no ill effects, reviving almost immediately. I'm somewhere in the middle. While I don't get sick, I do feel a lingering fogginess for a day or so. When I had my original banding surgery it was a full three days before I felt 100% alert. But when I had my band removed, I was totally over it the next day. Maybe they used less that time, or something.

This is a common restriction to preserve space and make posts easier to read. Can you edit your sigs to make them smaller?

Yep. I even burst a blood vessel in my eye once, when I had a coughing fit so severe it made me vomit. Yuck.

Oh, absolutely I sweat less. In fact, you'll hear lots of people complaining about being cold once they start to lose weight.

I was able to take any pill I needed to until after my third fill (if I recall correctly). It's really a personalized thing; you may never have a problem, or you may have trouble right from the start. It varies depending on the restriction level you have, as well as your native ability to swallow pills in general. As a rule, if a pill is larger than a pencil eraser, you should break it in two. That's roughly the size of the stoma (after a fill or two) and pills smaller than that will proceed easily down into the larger stomach. Pills smaller than that will just stay in the pouch, will take longer to dissolve, and that can compromise their effectiveness as well as being potentially irritating to the stomach.

Hi Mbz, Wow, what a story! I'm glad you were able to have surgery before things got too serious. I hope your healing proceeds well from here on in. I'm definitely staying with Abkin/Bertha, they've been absolutely wonderful for me. You're right about the "factory" atmosphere; they are a little overstretched since the third surgeon left. But I feel so very lucky to live near the most experienced lap surgeons in NJ and I'll be with them as long as I can. My next appointment is on May 3 and at that time we'll be talking about the next move. My preference is to have another band installed, but I want the larger VG band. When I saw Dr. A at the hospital he told me my stomach was fine, but I'll know much more after I see him next week. The idea of having a different procedure done now makes no sense to me, since I'm so much lighter than I was four years ago. But the prospect of being bandless scares me too--I don't want to gain again. Good luck with everything!!

Hi Paula! Now that a few days have gone by, I can report more accurately on the "already hungry" thing. I definitely have more hunger than with my band, and it's probably the same as before I was banded. That is to say, it's probably normal, human hunger. But then, my problem was never really being too hungry; it was eating more than I needed to resolve the hunger (mostly because I ate too fast). I'm much more aware of the speed at which I eat now, but at the moment find myself unmotivated to regulate it the way I should. I'm thoroughly enjoying eating things that were out of bounds while banded--I just finished the first bagel I've had in 3+ years. It was amazing. I didn't need to eat the whole thing, of course; I was hungry and one half of it would have done beautifully. But because I can, and it was so delicious, I did. I am not 100% sure I can have another band, but my fingers and toes are totally crossed. Tomorrow I will make a concerted effort to slow the heck down when I'm eating. But today is Sunday, it's a beautiful day, and I'm going to a barbeque later. So... :rolleyes

Carlene, I <3 you. :biggrin1:

Hi Banded Barb, Were you banded in the US eight years ago? I'd love to hear your story--were you part of a trial? If you haven't been back to your doctor in six years, you might want to try again. It may not be possible to give you any more fill, but you won't know until and unless you try. Things may have changed internally and you may have other options to explore. Good luck!!

As long as your hypothyroidism is under control it isn't a contraindication for surgery. And your insurance carrier won't care either. It's just one of those things that must be under control by medication before they will approve you for surgery.