green

I am so glad that I had gone to the bathroom before I read this. Otherwise I would have peed my knickers! Brilliant!!!

Yoda - at the TLBC they have this fill tech who is very pleasant and very competent but who is very business-like and who gets you in, fills you up with yer 1 cc, gets you out, and moves on to her next fill job. There is no room for discussion. She is certainly not prepared to fool around with your band. I've got to say she always hits the right spot, you never have to wait, and I never feel any pain when she is giving me a fill. And I have an extremely low pain tolerance!!! Worse than a man!:bolt: Maybe she is new at TLBC since when you last had a fill? At our graduating class's final group fill - the 3rd fill - the paper said that we were also supposed to have a group meeting with Kathy. We didn't see Kathy. She never made an appearance.:omg: Our fill tech is, by the way, our chief/only contact person at TLBC now that we have been banded. Though she is terrific she will not engage in any hand-holding or drag one of the staff who might be better at hand-holding out of hiding. Maybe that's not within her jurisdiction. Maybe it's up to me to make a phone call. I dunno.

We get off lightly at Christmas. Both my husband's family and mine are small, and are mostly comprised of adults who have long ago decided that gift giving no longer made any sense. We are all too old and have everything we want and need. My husband and I never formally exchange Christmas or birthday presents, either. Surprising each other has sometimes ended up in disasters in the past. Still, we do buy stuff for each other, just not for special occasions, but only when we see the right thing. Buying gifts for people who are close to me is difficult. I find it almost impossible to keep them secret. I want to give them right away. This is why I have to buy my presents at the last minute. There are a few friends with whom I exchange presents and kids get presents of course. As for Christmas cooking, well, I get off lightly here as well. Christmas Eve we go to my mother-in-law's house. She is German and the Eve is more important to her than Christmas Day. Christmas Eve is also more important than Christmas Day in France. The day itself is kinda like Boxing Day is here - a day of recovery. Christmas Day we will spend at a friend's house now that both my mother and my brother are dead (they were the family that lived in Toronto). This friend loves to cook and Christmas Day is important to him. He's a bachelor, his sibs and their families live far away, and so his friends are his family. As it happens he and I exchanged Christmas gifts in October! Christmas is kind of a melancholy season for me. My kid brother and my mum both died in 2005 and this wasn't good but even before this, Christmas was kinda sad. You see, not only are there are very few children in either my husband's family or mine but many of my generation have moved away from Toronto to live outside Canada. The Christmas gatherings are thinly populated these days. The death of my mother and my brother (who, like me, is childless) just adds to the devastation. (My poor widowed sister-in-law prefers to spend Christmas with her own family.) My Husband's parents are missing two of their children and both of their grandchildren at Christmas time because they live abroad. Their daughter and her 2 children live in France and their other son lives in Costa Rica. My surviving brother lives in the States, one niece lives in Australia and the other lives with her daughter in Windsor, Ontario. My nephew lives with his wife and her family in Halifax. I have a cousin who lives in B.C. and one who lives in Ottawa. The Green family is very small!

Actually I am scheduled for another colonoscopy in February. She promised me that it wouldn't hurt this time around. She is going to use a pediatric scope and she is going to give me better dope than she did the last time. And I have an appt to have my great big fat liver looked at in January. Fun stuff in the new year, eh!:phanvan

Today I went out for lunch again. I ordered a lunch combo plate at the local Chinese restaurant. I couldn't eat it all. In the old days I would have wolfed it all down.

I think I might have some restriction. I ate at a Japanese restaurant yesterday. I ordered the small (and cheap lunch) plate. :bolt: Towards the end of the meal the food was feeling a little golfball-y. It was hard to stop eating, though. :cry The food was pretty good.:hungry: One good thing about the band - I would have ordered much more food pre-banding - and I would have eaten it all!:clap2:

Avocado is nice eaten with a vinaigrette. You can make one by mixing together Dijon mustard, wine vinaigar and extra virgin olive oil.

bump, bump

Yep, I missed you. By the way, I've heard that kidney stones hurt like hell!!!! My ex-husband's wife has just had one removed. She almost died from the infection it caused. On a lighter note, it sounds like a sure fire way to lose weight.

I don't think she removes the saline. But I do think that I now have some restriction...finally! Just not quite enough, perhaps.

I just had it done this September with no problems. I didn't have an endoscopy, either. I am 57.

That is terrible!!!! You poor kid!! I woulda done the same!

I smoke, too. I use the patch whenever I have to fly. I take Zyban/Wellbutrin for depression and I did hope that it would help me quit but it didn't. It seems that few people smoke now except for the working class and people under 25. I've heard that the only people in California who smoke are Hollywood stars. I don't understand the smoking Nazis. Cars do much more environmental damage....

"People don't need to be filled above 2cc in a 10cc band." That's nutz!! I have 6cc in mine and the other women I know who have been banded in the same centre have 7 or 7.5cc in theirs. Not all of us have yet hit our sweet spots. I will probably have to have another fill in a couple of weeks. My suggestion to you, Gummie, is to see if you can find someone who does a cheaper fill. Maybe you could also try to talk to the doctor about his nurse and her underfill. Perhaps he will give you a fill on the house.

Cool!:clap2: :clap2: :clap2:

I did join a gym last February which was long before I got banded and I found that I actually enjoyed going there. Then two things happened: our very hot humid summer happened and I wasn't going to leave my air-conditioned house except to go to the cottage, and I wrecked my rotator cuff. I got banded in early September and figured that as I wanted to go back to the gym it was time to get my shoulder fixed. Well, I am still going to physiotherapy and am still in pain! I do a lot of walking. I walk home from all my physio appointments. I am losing weight but much, much slower than I would like. Since my operation I have lost 16 lbs, most of it in the early weeks. Part of my problem is that I don't have much restriction yet even though I have had a few fills.:cry

:clap2: :clap2: :clap2: :clap2:

I was reading through this thread and I, too, was going to mention acupuncture, then I came to BJean's post. She had beaten me to it. I knew a woman who was going through the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. Toronto is my home city and the University of Toronto is one of Canada's largest and oldest universities. As it happens we now have a large minority of Chinese students. This friend of mine who was lucky enough to be able to be studying medicine had many Chinese colleagues. She said that although they were studying western medicine they still respected oriental medical techniques, enough so that when they got sick they resorted to the medicine of their roots. Acupuncture is part of oriental medicine. Some western (white) doctors have taken the trouble to learn acupuncture. You might want to investigate acupuncture. It could help you and it would be a drug and surgery free solution.

I think that I am going to make another appointment for a fill. The fill tech gave me her card. I don't think that I am in the sweet spot zone. *sob* Today I had my morning meds and a small tin of tuna with no problems. I hope the damn thing isn't leaking.... I am about to make myself a small dinner snack: an avocado with salsa and extra tomato. Later on I will have my second small dinner snack. I don't know what this will be. Maybe tzatziki or maybe poached eggs with salsa and cheddar cheese? The poached egg thingy I do in the microwave.

Aunty Green, pharmaceutical queen, may have advice for you, Argon. You should be aware that Zyban is a stimulant and should be taken in the morning. You should also be aware that over the counter sleeping pills tend to raise the blood pressure. If you have elevated blood pressure you should talk to your doc and have him/her prescribe something instead. (I take imovane/zopiclone when I can't sleep. My doc prescribes this for me.) I only run into problems with sleeping when my depression gets out of control but some people have problem with sleeping due to stress issues. This is why it is not a bad idea to talk about your sleep problems with your doc. You might also try reading a boring book before going to sleep! Sometimes this works for me. lol

I don't know what to think about this particular surgery. From looking at the pre-surgery photos of the child I would say that the poor kid was obese and was suffering from the social nightmare that follows from this condition. Moreover, I would venture that the kid had gone through an early puberty and had likely reached her full height. Add to all of this the fact that her father was slated to die.... This child had a lot on her plate, psychologically speaking, and the kid was likely fairly mature, developmentally speaking. It has been reported that her surgeon has excellent "street cred" and that he did not enter into this project carelessly. It has also been reported that this child had voluntarily submitted herself to a lot of really stressful lipo surgery. It seems it took a year to sculpt this girl into her present state. (Lipo work is not as patient friendly as lapband surgery. It is much more painful and the patient's recovery time is much longer. I also suspect that the overall mortality rate is higher though I have no statistics to back this up.) I have also seen the post-op photo and read the article covering the girl's new life. The kid looks great and it seems that she is happy! Because she is in normoland she now feels sufficiently optimistic that she is prepared to take care of herself. She is working out and she is laying off those foods which are bad for her. Certainly this child's journey has been exceedingly unconventional because the kid has undertaken it at an unusually early age. This is controversial. And the raft of "beautifying" surgeries that this kid went through are only available to those who can afford them. But so far this story seems to be a success story. I am happy for this girl and I would like to be updated on her life from time to time for she has undergone a complex transformation on many, many levels. Shas gone from being the ugly duckling to being the swan and she has done this after a period of much pain.

Congratulations from Green who is green with envy!!!! :eek:

I would never go back there. All that sweat doesn't sound sanitary. And if the dude had punctured your band.........

This morning I went in to the TLBC for my third fill. I have been feeling no restriction at all, as you all know, and one night I even ate a banquet burger that my husband brought home. I had totally forgotten about this stunt until today. And I have never, ever PB-ed although I had a weird experience with water after my first fill which resulted in me asking to have a cc taken out. Since then I have been lagging behind the other women in my graduating class with respect to the amount of fill. They are all up to 7 to 7.5 cc and I am only now at 6 cc. Nevertheless, the fill tech won't give me more than 1 cc at a shot. At my weigh-in today I learned that I had not lost a single pound since my last fill and that was 3 weeks ago. The good thing is that I haven't gained. So, I am in onederland and my hair isn't falling out, and that is good. I would have liked to have lost a couple of lousy lbs, however.... One of the members of my graduating class is not doing so well. She has lost no weight at all since being banded although she has had incidents of PB-ing and she is now losing her hair. It is because I heard her story that I am able to deal with my own lack of weight loss over the past 3 weeks.

So,...no head jokes, eh?:heh: Aww.... You do look great. Congratulations!:clap2: