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Oh and I should say, I've had zero complications with my RYN! It's way better than the band ever was. It has a more natural 'full' feeling. It's literally the best thing I did for myself!! Ask me anything, I'm an open book Erinn [emoji2] P.s. Great name BTW!

Hi Erin! I had a lap band in 2011, lost 70ish pound, clinic went bankrupt in 2013, got pregnant 2014, then came the complications!! Constant vomiting and discomfort, gained all the weight back as could only eat sliders, and no clinic to turn too [emoji30] Had baby Dec 2014, in june 2015 found out band slipped up esophagus. Referral to provincial Bariatric services Dec 2015. Gained another 20. Had to go through months of waiting to have OHIP (I'm in Ontario) convert lap band to RYN - surgery was Oct 2016 I was 292. With lap band I got to about 204 and it was a struggle even with daily exercise. Today I was 186 [emoji2] My goal weight is 180-185, so basically there and so comfortable and easy to maintain and lose. 3 weeks ago I had plastics and I'm still in shock at the changes. They took off 15lbs! Day of surgery I was 197. Here are some pictures: Aug 2015 July 2017 Before and after plastics - Aug 2017 Sept 2016/now Now Good luck on your journey!

I had my surgery December 27th 2016 I have lost a total of 80 pounds the pictures are from 3 years ago in the updated picture is September 1st 2017 this is the best decision I have ever made no complications at all

Oops, pressed send by accident! Don't be afraid. I feel so much better and The surgery wasn't bad. I was off pain meds the day I got home. Getting rid of that Lapband that did so many complications was the best thing ever to do and I no longer live in pain or suffer with GERD. Best of luck to you!

So I had surgery on August 2nd and I have had a very hard recovery. I have no appetite because everytime i just take a sip of something or a bite I want to vomit. I went back to work 3 weeks after surgery and was ok for a little bit but this week Ive had to call out because the last couple of days I would go to work and then as soon as I got to work I almost had an asthma atack. I have lost a lot of weight but Im getting really depressed. My nutritionist told me to force my self to eat but I cant find the strength to do it. My surgeons nurse told me to go to the ER for the breathing, but when I went 1 week post op when I was having problems they did every test and just told me to go home. I feel really alone. I used to be very active, im a waitress. Can anyone give me any advice? Sent from my SM-J327T using BariatricPal mobile app

First timer here on this... I just had my appointment with my doctor and I have decided on the gastric bypass since I want to lose 200lbs+. Today I had my first nutritionist appointment and now I have to do my 90 days for insurance approval! Patience is not my virtue! Haha I want it now! My story: I had lap band done in 2010 and was doing great had lost about 70lbs (from 352 to 278) and then I started having complications. I started throwing up everything I ate or drank. I would have fluid removed from the band and then we would add more. It was a constant battle, so in 2014 I had it removed. And now... I've gained all my weight back plus some. I was shocked to find out that they no longer do the band where I go. They are taking more bands out. [emoji52] So I am super excited that I have decided to take this step in having the bypass done! I really want this to work out for me! I need all the support I can get! Friends and family are great but they don't know how it feels. They never will. What have you all been doing to keep yourself busy while you wait?!

Had my surgery 2 days ago, so far so good. No problem or complication so far. The only problem I have is the ounces every 15 min... My breakfast tray was brought to me yesterday with 3.5 oz of jello, Popsicle 1.5 oz, coffee, and 2 10.1oz bottle of water with crystal light. I ate it all at once... then was told, I was to measure it off 4oz per hour. This is going to be a long week. But, I am happy and healthy came off of 5 medications before coming home. Happy to be on this journey. Sent from my Z983 using BariatricPal mobile app

According to the internet: Nausea and vomiting are the most common complaints after bariatric surgery, and they are typically associated with inappropriate diet and noncompliance with a gastroplasty diet (ie, eat undisturbed, chew meticulously, never drink with meals, and wait 2 hours before drinking after solid food is consumed). If these symptoms are associated with epigastric pain, significant dehydration, or not explained by dietary indiscretions, an alternative diagnosis must be explored. One of the most common complications causing nausea and vomiting in gastric bypass patients is anastomotic ulcers, with and without stomal stenosis. Ulceration or stenosis at the gastrojejunostomy of the gastric bypass has a reported incidence of 3% to 20%. Although no unifying explanation for the etiology of anastomotic ulcers exists, most experts agree that the pathogenesis is likely multifactorial. These ulcers are thought to be due to a combination of preserved acid secretion in the pouch, tension from the Roux limb, ischemia from the operation, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) use, and perhaps Helicobacter pylori infection. Evidence suggests that little acid is secreted in the gastric bypass pouch; however, staple line dehiscence may lead to excessive acid bathing of the anastomosis. Treatment for both marginal ulcers and stomal ulcers should include avoidance of NSAIDs, antisecretory therapy with proton-pump inhibitors, and/or sucralfate. In addition, H pylori infection should be identified and treated, if present. So the general advice from above if I am interpreting it properly is to eat undisturbed, chew meticulously, never drink with meals, and wait 2 hours before drinking after solid food is consumed. Also avoid NSAIDs (such as Aspirin, Ibuprofen, Diclofenac, Naproxen, Meloxicam, Celecoxib, Indomethacin, Ketorolac, Ketoprofen, Nimesulide, Piroxicam, Etoricoxib, Mefenamic acid, Carprofen, Aspirin/paracetamol/caffeine, Etodolac, Loxoprofen, Nabumetone, Flurbiprofen, Salicylic acid, Aceclofenac, Sulindac, Phenylbutazone, Dexketoprofen, Lornoxicam, Tenoxicam, Diflunisal, Diclofenac/Misoprostol, Flunixin, Benzydamine, Valdecoxib, Oxaprozin, Nepafenac, Etofenamate, Ethenzamide, Naproxen sodium, Dexibuprofen, Diclofenac sodium, Bromfenac, Diclofenac potassium, Fenoprofen, Tolfenamic acid, Tolmetin, Tiaprofenic acid, Lumiracoxib, Phenazone, Salsalate, Felbinac, Hydrocodone/ibuprofen, Fenbufen]. Most forms of Excedrin contains aspirin. Use proton pump inhibitors [Omeprazole, Pantoprazole, Esomeprazole, Lansoprazole, Rabeprazole, Dexlansoprazole, Rabeprazole sodium, Pantoprazole sodium, Esomeprazole magnesium, Omeprazole magnesium, Naproxen/Esomeprazole, Esomeprazole sodium, Omeprazole/Bicarbonate ion] and/or sucralfate [Carafate] antacid. And have yourself tested for Helicobacter pylori infection.

I appreciate you taking the time to respond. I do feel a bit of comfort hearing that while always feasible, these complications can be uncommon and possibly worked around (open instead of lap). Thanks, guys!

I can relate to where you are at right now because I was there right after I had my surgery to. Add to it all the complications I was having from dumping and the memory loss due to the anesthesia from surgery and vitamin deficiency and you had someone who totally at the time regret it having their stomach altered. And I stayed that way for damn near 7 if not 8 months. But then after I drop my first 120 lb, man you could not believe how happy I was. When I was able to get rid of my Casual Male big and tall card, and start buying clothes out of Walmart, you couldn't believe how happy I was. When I was able to run for over a mile and not feel like my lungs were going to collapse you cannot believe how happy I was. When I no longer required insulin to function normally or no longer having back pains due to the damn near 400lbs of excessive weight I was carrying on my frame, you couldn't believe how happy I was. The point I'm making is that its gonna take time. Time is what you need to heal, seriously for most that takes a good soild year out. Time for you to see how important this surgery is going to be for you and your life going forward. Important in that its going to be the pathway to a healthier and more happier you in the long run if you allow it to be. The only way this surgery is going to be a mistake for you, is if you allow it to be. If you want this surgery and the outcome from it to be successful then you'll allow it to be so. You jave have to condition your mind. That's the one thing that surgery can't do for you out of this process. Condition your mind to tell you that you don't need those old eating habits, or crappy food all the time to feel and be happy. Sorry for my preachy preach there. Its just that I get what you are going though. And the simple yet complex answer to all of this is focused time. Sent from my SM-N920P using BariatricPal mobile app

I had a gall bladder surgery 3 years prior to my VSG. My gallbladder surgery was started laparoscopically and they ended up opening me up due to a rare but serious complication (Mirazzi's syndrome which is when a stone is impacted in one of the hepatic ducts) I had surgery in Mexico but I did all of my lab work in the US with my PCP and advised my surgeon in advance of my prior surgery. The surgeon actually removed some of the scar tissue which was great because certain movements caused me abdominal pain due to adhesions. Truthfully there's not much they can predict until they get in there.

I completely understand you. I had the hardest time. But a part of me even a few years out misses being able to eat like my friends/family. The other part didn't want to be big anymore. I feel I made a good decision but I love food and have to find something else to make me happy now. It saved me any alot of ways. But anyone could have complications with any surgery. I'm getting over living on a TPN bag for the last couple months from a surgery complications, even years out. I just was the unlucky one. I was really feeling like I regret doing this to me. But I have to stay focused on the real deep reason why I got the surgery in the first place. You will have some break downs with sadness threw out this process. The weight is coming off and everything else will drop too. I agree to go day by day and stay focused. And if you have to cry and punch a pillow..that's ok too. Sent from my Z987 using BariatricPal mobile app

Hey! Lurker here, mostly, in the pre-op phases. Just had consultation today with a surgeon who's operated on me previously. Lap cholecystectomy, to be exact. He recalled my gall bladder was quite inflamed. As such, it wasn't all that easy to remove. No complications, but the sucker was just all giant and gross in there, I presume. He's said scar tissue may be an issue, and that got me to wondering if any of you had issues during your procedures due to scar tissue. Thanks for your time! Cheers 🥂

I understand completely. After doing a band to sleeve I wish I had never done either. In fact, after a few complications- I weigh more now than I have in 8 years. Keep your head up and believe me when I say the break up with food is a process. It's actually like grieving. It will pass- your health will improve and you will feel better. Best of luck to you.

I had my original sleeve back in may 2015.. just had revision from sleeve to bypass on august 1.. have dropped 22 pounds so far. I also had the revision to bypass for GERD and also due to sleeve pouch stretching causing weight gain. I finally start solids in 2 days and looking towards seeing how my body reacts. Soo far i have tolerated everything i have consumed but everyone warns me of the first dumping symdrome attack i will experience eventually. Is been just over a month and i don't feel like i have a bypass. Puree and liquids go thru like nothing and do not know if this is normal or is the way is just supposed to be. I hear many stories of people who also say the same until they get to solids. My weight loss has sorta stalled right now but i have confidence once solids stage kicks in thing will pick up.. the sleeve is sorta like hit or miss and it all depends on each individual. Some people are a success and do not suffer from any symptoms or issues like GERD and have been able to maintain the weight loss very well. On the other hand now i am seeing that the sleeve is becoming sorta like when many people were getting their lap-band removed because of complications. The number of patients getting sleeve revisions is climbing. But goodluck to you on this journey and hope that you can finally have relief from your GERD

I'm so sorry to hear this. The complications are very rare but can and do happen. Sent from my LGMS550 using BariatricPal mobile app

Let me firstly start by saying this operation and the complications that come thereafter arw not only confusing but just never seem to stop. My sister had this operation 2.5yrs ago with a success story. She lost weight and was looking great. 2.5 years later she started putting on weight again and went back to the same doctor to perform the surgery again. Whilst i have no idea what the criteria is for this operation her weight was 100kg at 1,74 in height. This operation took place 4 months ago and its been a nightmare from the word go. A week after having the operatiin she was rushed back into hospital in icu on life supporting machines. She had septacemina from a gastric leak. (Please excuse me if i dont know all the correct terminology, this whole experience has been horrific). A touch and go situation, she survived however has not stopped having complications. She has been in (mostly in) and out of hospital for the past 4 months. She still has a leak, she cant eat and has a feeding tube inserted to go directly to her bowel. She is weak and frail and doesnt even have energy to brush her teeth. The doctor after what seems very many attempts to close the leak is not getting it right. Is there a happy ending to this story? Has anybody else suffered similar sort experiences. Please i would value your feedback as i would just like to know how else i could possibly be helping my sister. She seems to be at the point of giving up on EVERYTHING.

Honestly I am never physically hungry unless I have gone over 16 hours without eating. I eat at the times I am supposed to. I especially had no appetite at all the first 6 months, mainly because food was still a scary thought. Sometimes eating would cause discomfort and I was still afraid of complications. How you are feeling is normal.

In one week, I'm having surgery. I have a sleeve, currently, and need to treat a rare condition called achalasia. So, to reduce complications from a myotomy, I am revising my sleeve to a modified gastric bypass. I'm getting a second chance at losing all the weight that I needed to lose from my sleeve. I was originally over 460 lbs (not by much, but that's as high as my doctors scale went at the time). I had my sleeve, lost about 150lbs and then got pregnant. I gained back, in total, about 70lbs in a year and a half of being pregnant and post partum. Then I got back on track. I was heading in the right direction until this achalasia started about a year ago. The condition has made it very difficult for me to eat, so in the past year since being sick, I've lost another 40ish lbs... so little because about the only thing I CAN consume comfortably are carbs. (Which I really don't appreciate at all post op WLS!) Currently, I'm about 320. I'm really trying to be optimistic about losing weight and fixing my issues with eating due to the medical condition - but being a previous WLS patient and knowing the realities of post op life, I'm having a hard time NOT focusing on how loose my skin will be, what I'll look like, how I'll afford clothes - something that didn't consume me so much before because I was single and childless and made decent money... but now I'm a mom, I have an SO (and he assures me that he loves me no matter what my body looks like), money is tight... it's all just so stressful. I have body issues to work on and don't know how to change my mindset of being so critical of myself. That's definitely part of it. But there is a part of me that was okay with not "being skinny". I lost enough weight to feel better about myself, look better, but still look like ME. I need to appreciate the change, I suppose. I just feel like I can't talk about all these things to anyone in my real life. They just don't understand. They can't relate! Can anyone here relate? How do you deal with your unshare-able thoughts?

so yes i have been debating on posting this topic but i need answers i am an weed smoker prolly about 2-3 times a day i am geting the gastric bypass on sept 21 im not sure if i should quit smoking bc of the possibility of complications during surgery from smoking..i have looked it up online and nothing says weed can cause issues during surgery but nothing definite was wondering if there was anyone else who has quit prior to surgery for that reason

I was grateful because I anticipated the pain and discomfort to be far more intense than it actually was. My TOM started during surgery, a few days earlier than it was supposed to, and it was harder to distinguish between brutal cramps and pain caused by the procedure. I'd brought two heating pads with me, and they were a help. I also brought a couple of boxes of Gas-X strips (the kind that dissolve on your tongue rather than in pill form) and they worked very well. I gave one of the boxes to a woman who was experiencing miserable pain from gas, and she said they helped her a lot. I definitely recommend bringing a box or two. I was given ample pain medication and spent most of the time in the hospital sleeping because it knocked me out. I dry heaved a bit the first day, but then that stopped. I was able to do the laps through the hall within a couple of hours post-op. I was worried about being in pain on the drive home (I had surgery in Mexico and live a couple of hours away in LA) but felt totally fine. We shopped at the outlet mall near the border, and again at another shopping center. By that point (two days post-op) the biggest issue was due to an allergic reaction I had to the tape used over the bandages. They caused raised welts. Once I removed them my skin healed. I had the VSG in August of 2015 and am perpetually happy I had it. I've had no complications. I did need to progress through the post-op eating stages at a slower pace than normal because my stomach would react negatively at first and needed more time to adapt. By the two month mark forward I've had few problems. The entire process has been less emotionally painful than I expected, too. I didn't lose as much hair as I feared I would, and have no loose skin even though I've exceeded my weight goal.

How many diets have you tried and failed before? If your answer is none or just a couple, then maybe you don't really know whether you need surgery or not. Surgery should always be a last resort when you KNOW that you can't keep it off. Complications can and do happen, and so surgery MUST be risk-benefit assessed.

Stretching is a myth unless you had a bad surgeon, which from a lot of the posts I read here is seems very possible for a lot of people. RNY pouches can definitely stretch though. and they can make extended stomachs at the top of the intestine. A properly formed sleeve does not stretch. Healing is not stretching. My capacity at over 2 years is exactly the same as it was at 6 months. 4 ounces of dense protein, is the max I can eat comfortably. That is if I follow my post-op eating instructions which are to eat protein FIRST. If I eat protein alone/first. I can eat 4 ounces maybe 5 if it has more fat, but honestly 5 is uncomfortable. If I eat it alternating bites with veggies I can eat 6 maybe even 8 ounces of protein. Which is why post-op instructions are to eat protein first. If I eat meat with veggies and take sips of water, I can eat as much as anyone else (because I am turning dense protein into a slider). If I eat something that is not dense protein, like a burger, I can easily eat a 6 ounce burger with cheese. If I eat something that breaks down easy like a crispy thin crust pizza, its a slider. I could eat a whole large thin crust pizza in an hour. That is grazing though, so that doesn't count. Eating sliders and grazing are breaking the rules but I could. What people call stretching is really just bad food choices and poor eating habits. I have never seen anyone say they pounded down a 16 ounce ribeye, except that one dude that claimed he ate like a 20 ounce steak at 6 weeks or something. Dr Wiener tries to educate people on proper eating habits for life. If you are not eating correctly all the sleeve tightening, and revisions will not save you. People can eat around any surgery. The best thing is to eat properly, in the correct order. Prior to surgery I would go to Steak N Shake and eat a double, a triple and 2 orders of fries. I used to be able to consume massive amounts of food. I really just can't eat like that all, IF I FOLLOW THE RULES. If I don't follow the rules I can totally eat a ton of food. I could easily eat 1/2 a double layer cake if I wanted to, in 30 minutes to an hour, nothing will stop me, it is just mush. This is why following your post-op eating instructions for the first 6 months are really important. Not only are they a prescription diet to prevent complications but those instructions also re-train you on eating like you are a baby so you can learn new habits. With your surgery restriction, metabolic reset and rapid weight loss as tools and motivators to help you learn and stick to them. When people are a week or two out, sneaking food and talking about their body knows it needs and all that other drama, they are just cheating themselves out of their chance for an easy reset. And yes it is easy, losing weight immediately after weight loss surgery is the fastest and easy weight loss you are ever going to have in your life and you only get one real chance at it, revisions don't lost as fast as first timers. So don't blow it.

(I accidentally posted this question to the wrong board--it should have been here, not in the complications board! Derp!) Hi guys. Can you help me brainstorm a medication "hack" please? I need to try to maximize the amount of time in my potential new "tummy." I know when we have RNY our "tummys" are MUCH smaller and we also have shorter duodenums. I'm taking an anti-cancer drug that is highly dissolvable/highly permeable (BCS Class 1) and is very quickly absorbed in the tummy and intestines, but it is a fat soluble drug rather than a Water absorbable drug. I know it isn't dependent on the pH environment for absorption. So my goal would be to get my drug to "hang out" in my stomach as long as possible. So to me, that would mean, I should probably take it with dense Protein, once I've healed to the point of being able to eat dense protein. But in the short term when I'm able to eat things like yogurt, ricotta, and cottage cheese, what do you think is the one food that I could "take a bite of" to get the pill swallowed that will stay in my pouch the longest amount of time (anti-slider food)--which is why I don't want to swallow the pill with water or other liquids? The drug I'm trying to max out on tummy time is letrozole (Femara) and is a tiny orange pill that is not enteric coated nor extended release.

What your Mom is experiencing isn't common. However, other complications happen fairly regularly that require revisions. So she's not alone in having to have a second procedure. I think virtually every revision I've heard of has gone wonderfully, and the patient is much happier with the result. We'll keep our fingers crossed that the same will be the case for your Mom. Try not to freak out. Surgeons handle these types of things all the time, and that's the important thing, right? [Hugs]