MacMadame

Welcome back, WasA. I'm glad everything went well for you!

I hate this woman at work. She's a useless waste of space.

I started with hairs like that and now I can grow a little chin beard if I want to. I have thought about getting them waxed but I can't wait for them to grow out long enough. It means I'd have to have chin hairs for a few days that everyone can see. I'm thinking about laser treatments but I've heard horror stories about going to a place that doesn't know what they are doing and I have no idea how to figure out if a place knows what it's doing.

My reaction to this post was: she's grossed out by the cannibalism but not by having sex with dead bodies?! But then you came through for me. :behindsofa:

I've heard anything over 30 is wasting money because the benefits are dubious. According to About.com, sunblock is different from sunscreen. With sunblock, you have to leave it opaque and not spread it around. Did you have sunblock or sunscreen?

This is a big fear of mine. I had to have my gallbladder out with a really large incision because of how my rib cage is placed. I'm worried my ribs will also be in the way of the incisions for lap band. Now I had my gallbladder surgery open as laparoscopic wasn't readily available back then so maybe it's all irrelevant. But I still worry about it. :behindsofa:

That's actually pretty normal. Some doctors will tell you that you should only eat 1/2 cup of food but not all do and it's not really realistic. Some times you'll need more. Other times you won't. Also, earlier on you said you get hungry after 3 hours and the nutritionist I saw for my nut. eval. said that normal hunger is every 3-4 hours. (I get hungry every 1-2 hours right now without a band--not normal.) It may be that you need a bit more fill to get to the sweet spot. If you feel like you are still a prisoner of your hunger, then you probably need more restriction. Or maybe if you are eating 1.5 cups a lot instead of just occasionally. OTOH, maybe you are just being hard on yourself. :thumbup: You are losing at the rate that is promised -- slightly over a pound a week -- and not getting hungry 1 hour later. You've also spent most of this time healing and with little restriction and still managed to lose. That's pretty terrific, really. I'm very impressed! There are plenty of people on here with bands who got to goal eating .5 to 1.5 cups of food at a time, and not having a lot of foods they couldn't eat. I would rather be like that and lose slower than be one of the people so restricted that I'm burping up food and sliming all the time and can't eat a bite of bread if I'm in the mood. But this is what is so great about the lap band .... we get to control how it works! If you think a little more restriction would make your life easier, you can try it out and see how it works. If you want to be able to eat most things, you can keep your restriction to the minimum. There are also some who choose to be very restricted so they get the maximum weight loss. This isn't for me, but maybe it's for you. But I really don't think you are dong anything wrong and a 10 lb. weight loss in 8 weeks definitely doesn't suck.

No, I'm a software engineer. My pink highlights are more fushia so they are kind of purple. But after a while they tend to go red which is why I'm growing them out. The blue I have my eye on is Punk Rock Blue, not Old Lady Brigade Blue. :party: My hairdresser says it will fade fast but that's okay. As soon as if fades, I'll go back to pink. :party: I bet cannibals don't have any trouble getting enough protein. I think most of them just went to bed.

Don't listen to me. I think my mind is going. I was posting late at night and must have gotten mixed up with some other surgery. It is not even physically possible to pull it up through the mouth because the stomach they cut away is outside the new stomach! :biggrin: I realized that this morning after a good night's sleep.

Well, I'm growing out my pink because I'm bored. I think I'll do blue next.

I don't think the dye my hairdresser uses stinks. I only get highlights though. I decided my gray hair needed company. So I gave it some pink because pink and silver go well together. :tongue2:

Okay, now you are making me doubt myself. I guess I'll have to go watch that video again! Hey, I had the same thought the first time I watched one of these videos. The other thing is, I'm not that grossed out by how fat my body is. I guess I'm good at ignoring it. But when I saw all that fat inside, I thought it was disgusting and it made me even more determined to do something about my weight. Sometimes I crack myself up.

Do people go into breast enhancement surgery being told their breasts will only last 15 years though? I haven't heard that but I haven't looked into it either. The modern generation of lap bands only started being implanted in the mid-1990s. Lap bands have changed a bit since then, though not in their basic materials. Plus a lot of changes in surgery technique have been made since then. So I don't really think that anyone knows how long they will last on average. I think when people say they last 15 years, it's because we don't know if they last longer (since there just haven't been that many implanted longer than that). But not knowing if they last more than 15 years is not the same as "they only last 15 years". I really don't think doctors should be saying the later when we really don't know.

I live in jeans. I'd buy other pants but I can't get them that fit most of the time. I do try to wear nice tops and not t-shirts. I used to live in t-shirts and jeans. I own 3 dresses. Two I bought for funerals and now wear to job interviews. One is floor length and I wear it to weddings and fancy parties. But I keep stepping on the hem and it's in kind of bad shape. So I need to get another one. I don't own any skirts. Again, I can't find any that are in my size that fit comfortably. I own about 5 pairs of shoes. I wear sneakers most of the time. If I want to look dressed up, I have a pair of Danskos that look sort of like Mary Janes in style. Flat heel of course. I do have one pair of shoes I use for ballroom dancing with a 2" heel. One pair of hiking boots I never wear. One pair of sandals I wear about 3x a year. That's it. I own one purse at a time. Right now it's a black messenger bag. I had to go school to learn how to dress myself and put on makeup. Since then I pick better colors for myself and get the right styles and when I do wear makeup, I get compliments on it. But I hate to shop so I have hardly any clothes and only stuff that is easy to find and is comfortable to wear. I could use a real personal shopper. Too bad I'm not loaded because I'd totally do it if I could afford it. So that's how I rank on the girly scale.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

I went through a period where I went nuts watching lap band surgery videos online. I found them fascinating and not scary. I did watch one vertical sleeve one and that one was a bit but only because they really do cut out a big piece of the stomach and pull it up through the throat and mouth. It really depends on whether you can handle seeing guts and a slight amount of blood. Some people can't.

Sorry to burst your amateur analysis, but I'm not the least bit afraid of dying from getting a lap band. As for "shooting down" another opinion, if people post on a public forum, they are going to get their opinions and posts challenged if people don't agree with them. Please show me where I was hateful or rude? This is why I suggested going to the Complications forum. I want to know all the risks involved too. But "my cousin's mother's roommate in the hospital..." is just not helpful. The "information" has passed through too many filters and there isn't enough of it. IMO, the OP's cousin has an agenda and will continue to save up stories of Lap band horrors until she has the surgery or gives up on the idea. I could be wrong about that, but that's how the original post came across to me. Personally, I think it would be a shame to give up on a surgery that has done so much good for so many people bases on these sorts of stories.

P.S. My parents created me. Who created your God?

Lots of girlie stuff looks too fussy on me. I look like a little kid dressed up their mom's clothing or I look like a wedding cake. I do spend more time on my appearance though. I actually put product in my hair and sometimes I even blow dry it. I still think of makeup as being a stage thing though. I wear it when I am in a skating competition (i.e., on stage) and a really fancy dress-up party which I tend to approach mentally as if they are a costume drama and not real life.

You can't be angry at something that doesn't exist.

This is why I'm not telling anyone at work. I was on Nutri/system back in the 80s. I was trying to lose weight for my wedding. I told everyone -- they could see me eating the N/s food and see the weight coming off and people were very supportive. But they also started to DRIVE ME CRAZY. They'd say "are you sure you should be eating that" and ask me how much weight I'd lost all the time and say things like "you're going to look so great in a bikini" which would bug because I knew it wasn't true and was an unrealistic goal. It's not that they were mean. They definitely thought they were being supportive. But their support drove me up the walls at times. At other times, the support was nice though. So it's a double-edged sword. I think the ones who ask how much you've lost can be made to shut up if you never tell them. Say something like, I don't weigh myself that much any more or I'm not concentrating on the pounds but on my health/what size clothes I wear/getting small enough to [insert NSV here]. Another good answer is "a lot!". If you don't give a specific answer, they get tired of answering. For the food police, it's going to be harder. Some people won't stop that crap even if you ask them. But some will if you ask them. Just tell them that you are an adult and that having a lap band doesn't mean being on a diet for the rest of your life, but making healthy choices overall. Also tell them that you are following your doctor's recommendations as to what you can and can't eat. If you have to, lie about it! "My doctor says I should eat cake once in a while so I don't binge." The other thing that will help is time. Someone else will do something to feed the gossip mill or you will get to goal and they'll get used to you at your new size and won't remember to police you.

This reminds me of another point I was going to make but decided it was tangental to my main point... When you get pg, you will get every Tom, Dick and Harry coming up to you and telling you some horror story about their own pregnancy or someone they know or just someone they heard about. They aren't trying to talk you out of being pregnant, obviously. It just seems to be human nature to want to tell these kinds of stories and for them to be as gruesome and as scary as possible. That's why you have to take them with a grain of salt. Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say that heart bypass surgery is routine. I know I was pretty worried when my FIL went through his. It's a BIG surgery - major surgery. I don't think of lap band as major surgery. It's done laparoscopically and it's over in about an hour, with hardly any blood loss. This is why everyone has to do a risk-benefit analysis. Everyone's answer will be different because everyone has different values and is in a different place in their lives. Therefore, if someone says they don't think the risks of lap band surgery are worth it to them, that's okay with me. But I've done my homework and I'm smart enough to have made the right decision for me and I think the benefits outweigh the risks -- for me.

Not every surgeon requires a liquid pre-op diet. I am looking at 3 surgeon's offices in my area. Every one of them has a requirement to lose 10% of your body weight before surgery and none of them care how you do it. Of course, it takes longer than 2 weeks if you are going to do it through healthy eating. I think that's why some surgeons put their patients on the 10 day liquid diet instead. If they can stick to it, it's fast and reliable. But of course a lot of patients can't stick to it. I think this is why there is no one right answer and they all do it differently.

If you had the right thing and were pre-approved for it, then you just have to get the hospital to rebill your insurance company with the correct code. They have incentive to do this because they want their money. Before I decided to have lap band surgery, insurance was no biggie. Almost everything I did was covered except for a co-pay and once in a while I'd get a bill for $50 or $100 saying not everything was covered, but that was rare. But with lap band I have had to jump through so many hoops, it's not funny. I haven't even gotten my pre-approval yet either. I am sort of dreading the rest of the process at this point. Good luck!

Well I intentionally put some snark in with my logic because not understanding the real risks of things is a pet peeve of mine. I blame the schools for not teaching people to understand statistics and how to evaluate information. But that's another rant for another time. Bottom line: I have done my research and I know the chances of various bad things happening if I get a lap bad. In addition to knowing the theoretical risks, I've lurked around the complications forum on purpose to get a feel for the range of problems people have and how they impact them in real life. I recommend you do that and form your own opinion about whether you can handle the risks. As for hearing about people who had problems, we all need to watch out for people whom come and tell us about every single rumor they hear about bad things happening to people who got WLS. Some people do this because they don't approve of WLS and they are on the lookout for these stories, which tend to get exaggerated and distorted. Sometimes, when you probe, the WLS isn't even lap band or an important detail is left out -- like the person went to a known quack for a cheap banding or wasn't following the rules. This is not to say that no one dies or has slippage or erosion or other problems from lap band. We know they do because we see people here who have these problems. But you'll get much better info from LBT or a local support group about complications than you'll get from someone who hasn't even had the surgery and is getting many of their stories of bad things second-hand. I am comfortable with the chance of death from lap band because it's very, very small. I was planning to have my tubes tied and the chance of death from that is similar to lap band, but I've never heard anyone caution someone not to get their tubes tied because they might die, even though they might. It's an elective surgery, too.