anonemouse

In my opinion, I think you should try to find a surgeon with more experience. He's only done lap-bands for 6 months. To me, that just isn't long enough. I had the option of choosing a surgeon that was 2 1/2 hours away from me or one that was 8 hours away. I chose the one that was 8 hours away, just because she was much more experienced with lap-band surgery. I think even the manufacturer of the lap-band requires that surgeons perform more than 100 lap-band surgeries before they consider them to be "experts". After all, a surgeon only has to perform 3 lap-band surgeries to be certified. It's like with any surgery. You want the surgeon to be as experienced as possible when you are putting your life in his hands.

I did one before I even heard about the lap-band. A NP from my gynecologist's office runs a Phentermine program, so I signed up for it. I was on it for an entire year. Even though I didn't lose much weight with it, I am glad I did it, just because I was able to use it as my documented weight loss effort when I decided to have surgery. I would think that the insurance would accept anything, as long as it was documented by your doctor. That's the kicker, in most cases. I have heard of people being denied because they weren't weighed at their doctor's offices every month (and the weight being the reason for the appointment). Make sure that you know whether your insurance just requires documentation of your effort or whether they want documentation of a medically-supervised weight loss attempt.

Neither do I. Sharing opinions is what a message board is for, after all. No one is going to agree with everyone else 100% of the time. You were polite and you didn't bash anyone else's opinion, which is all that can be asked for.

Not a clue.

No, I wouldn't, because someone eating does not actually make someone sick. If someone has anorexia or bulimia, it is not the actions of fat people making them sick. They are already sick. A smoker, on the other hand, is putting the health of everyone they are around at risk. No one (and no law) is saying that a smoker can't go anywhere they wish. They can go anywhere, as long as they don't smoke. I really do think that smoking is akin to drunk driving, at least in terms of smoking bans. No one prevents you from drinking as much as you want to. The moment you sit behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, though, your actions have repercussions on the people around you. It's the same with smoking. You can smoke as much as you want to, but the moment you light up in public, your actions have repercussions on the people around you.

Go to your control panel (the link is at the top of the page, "UserCP"). There is a link called "Edit Signature" on the left side of your control panel. When you created your ticker, the site should have given you several different codes that you could use on different sites. Just enter one of those in the signature box. I think you may also be able to copy and paste your ticker, also, but I'm not sure.

Hey, we'll have to get together sometime! I am originally from Crossville, which is about two hours east of Nashville. I am living in Kentucky right now, but I do go back to the Nashville area every so often.

And you are still wrong, IMO. There isn't any comparison between obesity and smoking. You can't just choose not to eat. Like Kat said, you can't choose to smoke healthily.

Um, Bubble.... This is the first time I've posted in this thread.

I would never preach about what smoking will do to a smoker's health. I really don't care. I figure that smokers know full well what they are doing. If they want to kill themselves, they can feel free to do so without any preaching from me. Their effect on MY health, on the other hand, is fair game. My university enacted a smoking ban that started at the beginning of this past fall semester. Well, sort of. It banned smoking in front of buildings and on walkways. They built little glass huts all over campus for the smokers. I was SO happy. I could actually walk into a building without walking through clouds of smoke. (For the most part. There were still some asses that stood right next to the "No Smoking Within 25 Feet of Entrance" signs and lit up. My county recently passed a county-wide smoke ban for all public places. That, IMO, was incredible. I can't wait until the 2-month preparation period is over. I can finally go to a club or bar without spending the next few days hacking and coughing (I have asthma)!

Smoking is not like obesity. You eating Whoppers or Big Macs around other people every day will not make the people around you fat or give them heart disease. You smoking aroung them, on the other hand, can give them lung cancer. I am a firm supporter of smoking bans. If people want to go around and kill themselves, they can feel free. But their smoking in public doesn't just harm themselves. It harms the other patrons around them, it harms the servers or other workers, it harms everyone. People's rights (even though smoking isn't a right) end when they start to impact other people. That's why you can't drink and drive. It's perfectly legal to go out and get drunk, but once you make the decision to put others in danger, you are crossing the line. IMO, smoking bans are a matter of public safety.

I got an A on it! That means that I don't have to take the final exam for that class! This semester, I got a 4.0, which I hadn't been able to get in grad school so far!

Good luck!

They live in Memphis, which is about 7 hours away from me, so I won't be able to see them very often. (Which is actually a blessing, since I am not super-fond of kids. I get sick of them easily.)

I am originally from Crossville, which is about 2 hours east of Nashville. I am currently in grad school in Kentucky, though. I am having my surgery done by Dr. Weaver in Memphis.

I just found out this weekend that my brother's girlfriend is pregnant. It was a huge surprise. He'd just broken up with his girlfriend of a few years (they had even bought a house together) in December and started dating a new girl in January. So, I got to meet my future sister-in-law (they had talked about getting married before they found out, so decided to go ahead and do it) for the first time the night before I found out that she was pregnant. Apparently, she's due around the first of the year. Just call me Auntie Lauren!

I had the same problem. Even LB's petites are too long for me. I ordered some lounge pants (supposedly petites) online from them, but they were still about 5 inches too long. I also have shorter arms, so most of their long-sleeve and 3/4 sleeve shirts were too long for me. Even their underwear doesn't fit me right.

That's great. I have to teach a fungi kingdom lab for my students each semester, and I always have to remind them to be careful if they go out to hunt for mushrooms (some of them aren't the brightest folks in the world). I just wanted to make sure that you knew the difference between the two.

Some people can taste barium and some people can't. It's just a genetic trait. Unfortunately, I seem to be one who can. I would guess that you just can't taste it.

I try to respect everyone's opinion, even when I don't agree with them. That's why I never even considered using the rep-power thing to get back at people until they had already used it against me. I had just never occured to me to punish someone for their political beliefs. It makes me sick to think that I sank to that level. I learned a valuable lesson from it, that even though I may respect other people's opinions (or at least think that they have the right to express them without being punished), it doesn't mean that they respect mine. What bothers me the most was that I let that realization affect me to the extent it did.

My insurance required that I have a drug test before I could get approved.

Exactly. I'm a listener. I firmly believe that you can tell exactly what kind of person someone is by listening to them and observing them for a while. Oh, yeah. If my first impression of someone (there's that listening again!) is bad, I generally don't ever come around to really "liking" them. I may pretend that I like them or act friendly around them, but really, I probably won't think much of them. And what you said about dropping friends really rings a bell. I lived with my roommate for four years, and was really quite close to her. She got married, I moved away to go to grad school, and it's now been about a year and a half since I've even emailed her. I tend to look at people more as "aquaintances" than "friends". I'll be friendly with people but I've never met someone that it would break my heart to never see again.

Ouch. You know, I hadn't thought of it like that, but that's exactly what it is, letting the pressure build. I'm really not trying to brag, but I can definitely tell you that even though I only really worked on my paper today (other than the statistics), it will still be better than some that my classmates have worked on for a month. I hate saying that, because I'm really not an egotistical person, but that's how it's always been. Even in high school, I never studied. If I could get an A or a B in a course with doing only a few minutes of studying before the exams, what's the incentive to actually put effort into it? Of course, that's also gotten me in trouble sometimes, because in some courses (like math), you can't do that. I'm pretty horrible at math, just because I don't put the effort into practicing. But seriously, I know that I could do better than I do if I didn't put things off to the last minute. I always ask myself, though, why put a lot of effort into raising my grade only a little bit?

Congrats, MsDad!

That's usually why I end up procrastinating. I do work better under pressure. If I try to start a project early, I can't think of anything to write. I wind up getting stressed out for a few days, but it works for me, usually.