EagerPenguin

That is great! It shows dedication to a healthier lifestyle. It'll be good to have a tool (the sleeve) to help keep that off. Your appetite may or may not decrease after sleeve surgery. Mine is still there, but I've read of other who aren't hungry at all for up to a year. I've read that you can expect to lose about 60% of your excess weight with the sleeve, but some have lost more and actually achieved a normal BMI. I've been having some trouble with the diet; I didn't expect it to be this difficult to tolerate. I'm so sick of liquids, of protein shakes, and now of pureed textures. I want something crunchy, a cucumber with greek yogurt ranch dip perhaps. I'll get to regular foods eventually, but the wait is a lot longer in my mind than I was expecting. My weight loss has also been slow so far. I was sleeved on 12/7/17 and have lost about 12 pounds since then, which seems low. I suspect it's due to my medications, because there's no way it's due to excessive caloric intake. And it turns out that the timing is harder than I anticipated. Having the surgery before the holidays has been really hard. I was having a little bit of regret at first, when I was more bummed out about these issues, but I don't regret the surgery at all. I think it's one of the best decisions I've ever made. I totally feel a difference from the band. I had a more difficult recovery with the sleeve than the band (a week of mild nausea, stomach cramps), and as I wrote about above, the inital diet is typically long and in my opinion sucks, but it'll be worth it. So far, instead of my food getting stuck at the top of my stomach, it slowly makes its way to the bottom until I feel satisfied. You still have to eat slowly, and take small bites and chew chew chew, but I've not had any regurgitation, "stuck" foods, or "slime-ing", even now that I've started puree. Also, NOT HAVING A PORT. That's glorious. I hated the thing. It flipped on me shortly after placement, so I had to have another surgery to fix it, the fills were painful, and it was plain uncomfortable under my skin. The sleeve is like night and day from the band. It's becoming very common to revise from the band to sleeve. Best wishes as you make your decision.

The surgeon who took out your band sounds not only like a rude jerk but dangerous! It's too bad you didn't get answers to your questions back then. It hasn't been years, but my surgeon was saying that I'd have more scar tissue too due to that stomach sewing technique. When she took my band out last August, she tried to take down some of the scarring because she knew I'd be revising to the sleeve (I did so 12/7). I think it's just a matter of taking out that scar tissue in the same surgery as your revision. It'll probably just take a while longer. My surgeon used an endoscope to check the staple line during surgery, then had me do a water barium swallow the morning after my surgery and before I had anything else to drink to make sure there was no leak.