Ok - I am a Wisconsin 'newbie' and am scheduled for my lap-band surgery on Monday, October 6th!

Welcome!! You will love this site!! Lots of very nice people and you can get your questions answered and concerns addressed by kind people who really know what you are going through. Not long until your surgery!! Good luck!! Becky

Welcome! I just had surgery at Aurora BayCare in Green Bay last week 9/24. Tomorrow is my one week followup appointment. I'm looking forward to see how I am doing.

Who's your Doc?

You will love this site. I learned a lot of information and it's great to come here for support to keep your mind off eating after surgery. I'm in that post-op liquid phase and I'm overly bored by the choices.

Best of Luck to you.

I will also be at Aurora Bay Care for my surgery on Monday. Getting nervous and excited - tell me one thing - people have been telling me that they are going to fill me full of air before they make the incisions and that it will be very painful afterwards - any truth to this??

My doc is Kemmerling - who was yours? You certainly had your insurance approval quickly! My journey is as follows:

Jan 08 - group meeting at doc's office

Feb 4, 08 - decided to get going - insurance informed me that I would need 6 months of supervised treatment

Sep 08 - received approval from insurance

October 6th (Oh my gosh!!) - surgery!

hi, welcome to LBT. congrats on a surgery date and best of luck to you!

hi, welcome to LBT. best of luck to you.

Good Luck on Monday...I will be thinking of you. I was lucky...my insurance (UHC) did not require any 6 month supervised diet. I had enough Jenny Craig/WW receipts.

Here are a few things for Monday that I wished I knew.

My insurance was approved as outpatient. Outpatient for this hospital means 23 hours from when you are brought up to your room. Dr. K will keep you the entire time, you will not go home same day.

I got to the hospital at 6:00 a.m. They did the prep work and all of the surgical people came in and told me what to expect. I met the anesthesia doctor, the surgical nurse, Dr. Kemmerling's assistant. Doctor Kemmerling came and talked to me before surgery.

The rooms are nice at the hospital and all are private. One thing that was the hardest is that I was not allowed anything to drink after surgery. Nothing...not even a swallow. I got to my room about 12:00 noon and was not allowed a drink until the flouroscopy session the next morning at 9:00. For me, this was awful...I had a terrible cotton mouth and literally did not get a drink from 11:00 pm the Tuesday night before surgery until 9:00 a.m. Thursday morning. I was so weak from this it literally made me cry.

You will have 2 small horizontal incisions. One is about 3" wide above the belly botton on the left side and the other is about 2" wide to the right. I also have 3 very small laprosopic incisions which are about 1/2".

You will be sore, but you will get a pain pump to be able to administer your own pain meds. If you get nauseus, just tell the nurse...they will give you some meds which really takes care of that.

I think Dr. K is very thorough. You will get a shot pre-op of bloodthinner and will be on a round of antibiotics during your stay at the hospital. You will also where compression socks the entire stay.

Dr. Kemerling was great. He came and saw me Thursday morning and was great. I saw him a week later and already dropped 11.1 lbs.

My next visit with Dr. K is 11/1/08 which I will be back on the regular diet.

I feel good. I had some gas pain after surgery, but not too bad. I took gas X thin strips for the pain and it was tolerable.

I'm now 11 days post op and really tired of the liquids. I'm ready to go on to some food but Dr. K says I need a few more days of liquids and then 2 weeks of pureed followed by 2 weeks of soft foods. I'm in sales for my job and spend a lot of time on the road entertaining customers. This is hard, especially when there is nothing that you can eat.

Best of luck! You are in good hands and will bounce back before you know it. It is so worth it once you see the numbers on the scale.