Would Like to share my story. It's not good and its not the norm

doxaholic · March 23, 2018

You got me hooked really need to hear the rest of the story imagine that said in paul harvey's voice.

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GirlShrinking · March 23, 2018

OK let me start with a warning. My experience is not the norm for this surgery and it is a long story so I will do it in sections. Also some background. It actually started in the late 80's or early 90's don't really remember. Bariatric surgery was really in its infancy. I was in my late 40's early 50's.
Part 1: The first surgery I had was to have my stomach stapled. That worked to a point, I lost about 80lbs. I was getting so depressed at never being able to eat over about 2 shot glasses of food, After about 10 years of this I just wanted to be able to eat. I knew that this surgery was completely reversible so in about 98 or so I had it reversed. I was able to eat again and loved it but started gaining weight. I was around 190 then. My weight just kept going up. At about 275 I heard about a surgery at that time called a BPD-DS which very few doctors did but there was one about 150 miles from us. My wife was also quite overweight. We thought about it for around a year or so. In 99 we decided we would both get this if insurance would cover it. To our surprise they would so we joined the wait. The doctor Adrian Heap had been doing this for quite some time and felt comfortable with him.
Dr. Heap told us that all we would have to do post surgery was take a multiple Vitamin and we could eat anything we wanted that didn't bother us and we would lose weight. Sounded like a miracle. The internet was really new and there was very little info on this procedure. It just sounded too good to be true. Our turn came up in around 2000, mine was first. At the time this guy was doing about 3 of these a week. I was a little leary when it came to the night before and the only clean out we had to do was to drink 2 bottles of MOM and stay at a hotel that he had previously made arrangement with for all his patients. So early the next morning I went in and by that afternoon it had been done. I spent about a month recuperating and was able to return to work on the railroad. My wife was 6 months after mine.
Everything went along just fine the first couple of years, or at least I thought it was. I was eating everything I wanted to and take my multiple vitamin. The weight was just melting off. People at work started noticing I was looking really bad, pale getting thin and I just shrugged it off. I continued to lose weight. I started not feeling very well at around the 6 year point but not so bad that I was worried. I hadn't seen Dr.Heap in a few years, he was still doing the surgery but had come up with and unapproved version of the operation by then he called the mini BPD-DS. I read some horror stories about it. I started getting worried in early 07. I was down to about 150 and thought I was fine but by then my PCP didn't like the way I was looking and did a big battery of labs. He found I was dangerously low on albumin and several other things but the albumin was the worst, it was at 1.8. In the summer of 07 he had me admitted to the hospital for an infusion of albumin. It was supposed to be just overnite. They started the infusion and part way into the first bag of it I had a reaction, anaphylaxis. I came out of it and they continued the infusion, first mistake. The second reaction was worse, they couldn't get me to start breathing again normally. They rushed me to ICU. They put the tube in and all I remember is that first breath of air. The put me in a medically induced coma and on the respirator. I'll stop here for now. It starts getting pretty dicey after this.

What state was this surgery done in? You’re story intriguing.. would like to read the rest?

...patiently awaiting a response [emoji4][emoji848]

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2legsshort · March 23, 2018

Episode 2:

As I was saying, they put me in a medically induced coma on the respirator. The first night they told my wife not to expect me to make it throught the night. I did and a 3 weeks they decided that I was strong enough to bring me out of it. I was still in ICU at Holy Family in Spokane, WA. When they brought me out the first thing I remember is seeing my wife and her telling me I had been out for 3 weeks. I didn't believe her, but during that time I had dreams that things were happening to me, some very strange things that seemed totally real to me. I told my wife not to sell the house but if she did open up a rehab center in out new one. She looked at me like I was crazy, none of the things I had dreamed were real. I accused her of all sorts of stuff which hurt her a lot. It's really strange what all those drugs and other things that were going on affect you. I wasn't myself at all.

She would come to see me everyday and a couple days after I woke up she noticed some bruises on my feet, she asked them jokingly, have you been beating up on him or what. They hadn't noticed these and when she mentioned it to them, they took a look. Well all hell broke loose in ICU. We had no idea what was going on but they were trying all kinds of things to get the blood circulating in my legs to no avail. During this time a doctor had visited me on his rounds and he was a bariatric surgeon. He took over my care, at what point I'm not sure but he more or less brought me around after others had given up. This was Dr. Lee Trotter. He told me at about 3 days awake that they were going to have to amputate both legs below the knee. During my out time my heart had gone down to a 15% ejection fraction, which basically means it wasn't working. It was pumping blood to my legs but not back out. As the days went by my feet started getting blackish purple and developed big sores that the skin and meat just dissolved and big holes appeared. They were dead and were rotting away. He told me they were going to take the right one first then the left. That weekend a nurse got her wires crossed and thought I was supposed to be taken off all IV fluids and morphine pump, going to oral pain meds. I didn't get it and my wife got hold of the doctor and he came in on a Sunday and he was pissed. He read them up one side and down the other. The put me back on fluids and morphine and surgery was scheduled for the next morning. 7am I was on my way to the OR, they decided that it needed to be done immediately, I was able to get a hold of my wife and she barely got there before I went to surgery. I came out legless both at exactly the same point about 8 or 9" below the knee. I was stable and was in the hospital about 3 more days and the insurance company was putting the pressure on to get me out of the hospital and in a nursing facility. That happened about 4 days later. Nursing homes are not where you want to be. My wife would come in and they hadn't emptied my urine bottle, they would bring my food and if I was asleep would push it to one side of the room where I couldn't reach it. When I would push the button if you were lucky someone would come in at about 30 minutes. After a week of this my wife decided I would be better off at home and during this time had gone thru insurance and set me up with a ramp to get me up the stairs a hospital bed all the stuff needed for transfers and bathroom needs, a power chair and manual wheelchair. During this time my weight had dropped to 114 and looked like a skeleton with skin. As my grandaughter described it a holocaust survivor. As soon as I got home I started gaining weight. I was being seen by Dr.Trotter once a week and a visiting nurse 3 times a week.

My weight kept increasing and I started to feel better. After a few appointments with Hanger Prosthetics they were ready to fit me with my first prosthetics. These were very basic but did the job. To their surprise I was, after practicing for what seemed like months I was able to walk on them with my walker. This was shortly after Christmas 2007. They decide to get me into a better set of prosthetics, which were much better and low and behold I was able to walk, first with the walker then crutches, then canes. I kept getting better and better and my weight went up. At about 6 months after I started using prosthetics I was feeling pretty good, weight had increased to around 155 and I started to pursue going back to work with the railroad. They were going to try to get me back as the first bilateral amputee train engineer. I thought this was great. I took all their tests and passed, then someone in the upper echelon decided I would be too much of a risk on that job. They offered me a job teaching about the operation of air brakes but it really didn't sound to me like what I wanted to do, plus the exempt position didn't have as good of benefits after retirement as a different scheduled position. So they offered me a job called Lead Driver, which was basically a desk job with some driving involved which at this time I could do pretty well, as long as it was an automatic transmission. So in the fall of 2008 I took that job, I had retained an attorney to sue the hospital for not stopping the infusion after the first episode. He thought based on what I had told him I had a great case.

Well it took him 3 weeks to get my hospital records and by the time he did they had gone thru them all and put them in a computer format. There was no mention of the first episode and they blamed it all on my condition at the time. He said there was no way I could sue them for malpractice based on what the records now showed. The whole thing was my fault. According to them they did everything possible. He said that because this was such a big corporation Providence Medical, and they had 20 attorneys working on this and had covered things up, I didn't stand a chance.

I took the job as lead driver and did it well. People were expecting me to be a cripple and I could get around as well as any of the others that also worked the same job on different shifts. During the next almost 2 years I worked my job and when I reached 60 years old I was eligible for normal retirement, the requirments were 60 years old with at least 30 years service, I had 36. Since retirement paid about the same as the ob which was considerably less then what I was making as an engineer, I decided to do it. I still felt great my weight was stable at 175, which was the perfect weight for me. We decided we would get a motorhome and spend the winters in AZ and summers here. We got a motorhome in 2010.

I went to see my doctor for a routine physical and everything looked good. They had been doing yearly echos on me because I had a heart murmur since birth. That summer after the physical my doc told me the cardiologist wanted to see me after the echo, I figured to big deal. So I went in and he told me I needed to have my aortic valve replaced which scared the hell out of me. I himmed and hawed about it and decided I would have it done in August of 2012. It was supposed to be a surgery that many had had that was routine for them, but it was open heart surgery, I figured I would feel better after recovery and we could continue with our plans. WRONG. After the surgery the doctor told me I had the most calcified heart structure he had ever seen. The only part that was supposed to be calcified was the valve. He said that he was able to get 13 sutures in but it hadn't made a good seat and had a paravalvular leak. I did recover but didn't feel really good. I have no idea if the BPD-DS had anything to do with the calcification but he said It was not a common condition. I definately had a substantial leak and my BP hovered around 140/50. Post surgery I began to lose some weight but it wasn't bad. I was down to about 155, I didn't feel great.

That winter I had gotten back to somewhat normal and was able to get around pretty good. I went to get the mail one day and stepped on some ice and slipped and fell hard, broke my femur and shoulder both on the right side. As I was laying there in the driveway I was thinking great this is just what I need. It took me about 6 months in the chair again till I was able to start walking again. It was slow going, I was no longer allowed on the snow and ice per wife.

Well I will stop this episode here for now will continue later.

Pat

TakingABreak · March 23, 2018

I mean this with zero disrespect, but I love the suspense and the "episodes". Can't wait for the next one.

Edited March 23, 2018 by AshAsh1

melissa1227 · March 23, 2018

I mean this with zero disrespect, but I love the suspense and the "episodes". Can't wait for the next one.

Bahahahaha

frust8 · March 23, 2018

Thank you for sharing, I for one will be following your story. What you said about nursing homes is only so true. I admit this having been formerly a STNA for 25 years. 3 1/2 years ago I had my right knee replaced,.insurance insisted I go to a LTCF which is the abbreviation for long term care facility. Having worked most of the ones in my town,we have 6, I chose the one I had worked the longest for, over 11 years. Things had changed there. They met me at the front door and crammed me into small sized wheelchair. I am sorry to say even in 2014 my rump was big enough to have his own zip code. It took 3 people to transfer me out, one under each arm and one to hold the chair steady. They then took me to be weighed on the whirlpool chair because of course I couldn't stand on a regular scale. Came back to the room and my friend Becky who was working there marked the clothes I had brought in. They did bring in my supper tray and remove it that night. But by the next morning I must have had a miraculous recovery because although they might bring my food tray in They never returned to pick them up. You are supposed make notations on how well each patient is eating, part of the job. Well I could have been flushing it down the toilet for as much they cared. I never attended any activities, why? Because I was never invited and I wasn't sure whether my doctor had okayed it. I did get therapy twice a day, but with the assistance of a walker I was taking myself to the bathroom and back, bathing myself in the washbasin, carrying my own food trays etc. The nurses came in and dispensed medicine, gave me a breathing treatment now and then, finally when the house doctor came in I demanded to be released to home.I told him I'm performing all my ADL myself,that's medicalese for activities of daily living, so I saw no reason to remain. Let me tell you how I greeted my patients:" Hi my name is ***** and I will be your aide today.Welcome to our facility. We have many fun activities here. The Doo Woop Trio will be presenting music from the 50s tonight, tomorrow Mrs Jones our activity director will be teaching us how to make small floral arrangements for our rooms. If you would like to go either time,please turn on your light. We will be happy to either walk you down or take you in a wheelchair. If you have any other requests please turn you light on and myself or one of my co-workers will be happy to help you. We all hope you'll enjoy your stay with us". Was I the last person who cared like that? After staying there for 3 days I wonder? True tale: Little gentleman was in pain and/or suffering from demetia catercornered across the hall from me. Had tried time after time to climb out of his bed. Should have had a mobility alarm on if they weren't going to watch him closely. Well lo and behold he clumb out of the bed crawled to the hall and collapsed. I tried my light,no answer, I called out verbally for an aide, no answer. What did I do next? Well with a freshly repaired leg I surely could not pick him up. I yelled at the top of my lungs. "Nurse to Room 203 STAT! "That did get results. She came running then tried to bawl me out. She said "That is very unprofessional to act in THAT MANNER!" I looked her right in her beady little eyes. I said "Ah but I am not an employee, least of all Your employee ,I am now a patient and we can do whatever we ***-**** please. I have worked in Long Term Care and,know legally thats the way the mop flops in this state and I have been on both sides now!" She slunk from the room, knowing she was in the wrong, I could have reported her to management for neglect of duty as my poor neglected neighbor's room was in direct line of vision from her duty desk, and LOL I was right, she was wrong and she never darkened my door the rest of the shift. Sure I felt some vindication but I still felt so sorry for my neighbor, he deserved a better standard of care than he received. I'm sorry for going off on a rant but I cared about and for those entrusted to my care & it hurts to feel I was the last of a dying breed.

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2legsshort · March 23, 2018