JamieLogical

@@lucille6624 It definitely will depend on your insurance company and policy. My policy explicitly states it won't cover skin removal surgery due to weight loss from WLS. But some providers will cover it if it is deemed "medically necessary", meaning the loose skin causes chronic rashes or interferes with movement.

Welcome! I was self-pay in Mexico, so I did not have a local support group either. I found this site to be invaluable throughout the whole process. I hope it serves you well too! Definitely don't hesitate to chime in on threads or post questions.

Goes to show, once again, how different everyone's plans are!

I was allowed to take small pills the day after surgery and return to normal sized pills at 7 days post-op. Since my multi-vitamin is a normal sized capsule and my calcium was a pretty big pill, I started those at 7 days. IIRC I was taking my prescribed meds, my sublingual B12, my D3 and my birth control the day after surgery.

If you've already started your pre-op diet, I would HIGHLY advise against deviating from the plan at this point. The point of the pre-op diet is to shrink your liver by depleting it of glycogen stores. They way you deplete your body's glycogen stores is by sending your body into a state of ketosis. Reaching a state of ketosis requires abstaining from carbs for 2-4 days. If you eat carbs while on the pre-op diet, you are essentially hitting the "reset" button and will have to go through the transition into ketosis all over again. If you absolutely MUST cheat (which I sincerely doubt), make sure you stick to protein-only foods and don't have carbs or sugars. Otherwise you'll be undoing your hard work of getting your body into ketosis in the first place.

Take your PPI religiously and eat on a schedule. If you wait until you are "hungry" to eat, you may eat too often or not enough. Like you said, it's tough to distinguish "hunger" from other things like reflux or heartburn or just a rumbly tummy. So if you take your PPI, you can diminish the occurrences of those other symptoms. And if you eat on a schedule, you can be sure you are eating enough and meeting your daily nutrition goals.

Yeah, hi. I had ONE m&m and when I am literally puking up almost every really healthy food I try and a fricken taco salad actually goes down, I am going to eat it rather than feel sick and nauseous all the time. Thanks for your really judgmental input though. I get that you are desperate to find foods you can keep down, but for you to learn that you can't keep down M&Ms and Oreos, you have to have at least tried them and at 4 weeks out, that seems ill advised. I actually had 3 Oreos for Breakfast this morning! But I am also over two years out. At 4 weeks, I wasn't even on solid foods yet! I was instructed not to have fibrous vegetables (ie: lettuce) or any crunchy foods (ie: taco shells) for three full months post-op. Have you spoken to your surgeon about the difficulties you are having keeping appropriate foods down? Has he/she ok-ed you to try some of these less advisable options? I'm really not trying to be judgy. I am concerned for your healing and also concerned that the message you are sending to newly sleeved people is that taco salad and M&Ms are okay at 4 weeks post-op. Most people aren't in the desperate situation you are, but may see this and take it as a "green light" to eat things they really shouldn't be eating so soon post-op.

I'm a little curious why you wouldn't go back to Dr. Ortiz for your revision. Do you think he is in some way responsible for your current GERD situation or is he just too expensive? I know he's on the pricey side.

Taco salad, M&Ms, and oreos at 4 weeks out... I am just going to slowly back away from this thread....

If you managed to watch a video of a TT being performed and not throw up, then your drains should be no problem!

Oh, I agree wholeheartedly that it's better than no protein at all! I'm not arguing that at all. I am just saying that I would be cautious when counting it as "30 grams" of protein towards my daily protein goals. I would err on the side of counting it as 15 grams and getting more than I need rather than counting it as 30 and only getting half what I need.

@@PorkChopExpress Don't be frightened. There are risks associated with any surgery, but botched plastics can mostly be avoided if you do your research, and look at photos and talk to real live past patients. Not that I am blaming the victim in this case at all! I am appalled by her results and very glad she was able to successfully sue. No one should have to go through something like that. I can't even really figure out what the surgeon in that case was TRYING to do to get results that bad! Anyway, like @@AvaFern said, the worst "disfiguring" you could expect with a reputable surgeon is scarring from infection or necrosis, which a surgeon has little control over. It's usually minor and can be surgically revised once you are healed up.

Sure feel free to private message me anytime! You can do that by clicking on my portrait to go to my profile, then clicking "send me a message".

Anyone can make any claim they want on the internet. Until there are independent studies confirming their "science" I don't know that I'd want to run the risk of only getting half the protein I think I'm getting.

lol, I remember reading that I believe... didn't it make national news? I knew my kids would beat me, so had no issue with it. I was happy to finish it strong and run for the entire duration... those were my two main goals. On the positive side, with it being my first 5k, I set a personal record! Yeah, it was in the national news. My parents called me up and asked me about it and they live in PA, so they had seen it on the national news. I remember her passing me at the very end and feeling discouraged enough about getting passed by a kid. It wasn't until the next day that I found out she was only supposed to have been running the 5K! I think you did really awesome with your 5K time. Better than I've ever done and I've run lots of 5Ks.

I had a donut lift, so just scarring around the nipple, no line down the bottom. My scars are still pretty noticeable when i actually LOOK at them, but i am so used to them that they don't bother me in the slightest. My husband was used to them too, so I was worried when we separated and I started dating new people. But honestly, no one cared. I'm now in a new steady relationship and my BF couldn't care less about them.

You mean which surgery to have done or which surgeon to use?

I didn't have my surgery with Dr. Garcia, but I have undergone surgery twice, both times in Mexico. It's normal to be nervous and afraid, but you have to remember that VSG is one of the safest surgeries you can have. The mortality rate is lower than having a knee replacement. Would you hesitate to get a knee replacement if you needed one?

@@goblue9280 That's an awesome way to celebrate your surgiversary! Don't let the kids' times discourage you. When I ran my first half marathon back in April, there was a 5k that same day that started a half hour later. Well, this 12 year old girl accidentally got into the crowd that started the half marathon and didn't realize her mistake until well into the race. She ended up finishing the entire half marathon with zero training. Not only that, but she passed me with maybe 400 yards to go at the end of the race. She beat me by 43 seconds. I had trained for that race for almost 4 months....

Like @@shedo82773 said, you will definitely want muscle repair along with the panni. If you have had children or are "apple" shaped (store most of your fat in your stomach), then it is highly likely that fat UNDERNEATH your muscle has stretched it out (just like fat under your skin stretches your skin out) and the only way to repair that is to surgically tighten it up. You will not get as good results with a panni alone if your muscle fascia is stretched out. @@WLSResources/ClothingExch Yes, that's me in the pictures I posted. Those are from one year post-sleeve and four years post-plastics. I actually am a rare case that had plastics BEFORE my sleeve. I had lost weight "on my own" and had plastics back in 2011. Unfortunately, I regained almost all the weight I'd lost by the summer of 2014, which is when I decided to have VSG. Luckily, my tummy tuck held up well through the weight regain and re-loss. My boobs, not so much. I'm going to have to have a revision for those eventually.

"Eat more to lose more" is a little hyperbolic. It's more like "eat ENOUGH to lose steadily". Clearly, in order to lose weight, you have to create a caloric deficit. I don't think anyone is suggesting otherwise. But creating too large a caloric deficit over an extended period of time has undeniable impact on your metabolism. Even the study the OP mentions concedes that much.

Here are some pics of my scars around 4 years post-TT. I had an extended TT (almost circumferential), but not the fleur de lis. The last pic shows how underwear hides the scar completely. I have much skimpier underwear than that and it's still completely hidden.

Like @@jess9395 said, I have always thought of my sleeve as "weight maintenance surgery" because weight LOSS was never my problem. Keeping off the weight I lost was always the issue. I joke that if losing weight was an Olympic sport, I'd have several gold medals. I obviously can't speak for you and what your experience will be. But I found myself in a vicious cycle of weight loss and regain over the course of many years. My largest loss in one go was 90 pounds (270 down to 180), but as I regained that weight, I would gain 30, lose 25, gain 50 lose 40, etc. all the way back up to 260 pounds when I finally decided to pursue WLS. I know I *could* lose the weight on my own yet again, but I also know that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I knew that in order to fix my weight problem for good, I needed to do something different! For me, the challenge was my mindset. I have always been goal oriented. I have always been great at setting a goal and working toward it until I achieved it. The problem is, once I achieve that goal, I'm kind of like "meh, done with that now". So I would get to my goal and then just go back to exactly my old habits that got me obese in the first place and move onto my next life goal. The real difference for me with the sleeve is that it is forever. I can never be "done" with it, the way I would be with my diets. I had to completely change the way I eat in order to live and that is a lifelong change, not just a means towards reaching a goal. PS: I reached my goal weight right at my one year mark and I have been maintaining below goal for over a year now. WAY longer than I was ever able to maintain my weight loss in the past! And now the goals I set for myself are things like running a marathon (did that on September 18), instead of just seeing numbers go down on a scale!

Proton pump inhibitor. It's a form of medicine that prevents the creation of stomach acid. You should have received a prescription for it post-op.

I had the chest pain (constricting esophagus) with every teeny tiny sip in my early weeks post-op to. You really do just need to take tiny sips. Aim for one ounce of Water every 15 minutes, so only 1/2 cup per hour. Also, try marching in place as you are sipping. Strange as it sounds, that helped me some. The good news is, that muscle spasm/constriction thing only lasted a little over two weeks for me, so hopefully you are nearing the end of it. As for the heart burn, are you taking a PPI? If so would your surgeon consider upping your dose? I was on 40mg of Omeprazole daily for the first two months post-op.