Gloria S.
After 5 months of reading countless journal entries and looking at hundreds of before and after pictures...I'm finally starting MY journal. I'm 31 years old....I am single, never been married...(only been in 1 long-term dating relationship) don't have any children...sounds quite uneventful, doesn't it. The best is yet to come!
I'm the baby of the family...youngest of 6 kids...the 5 older ones were between the ages of 19 and 13 when I was born. (Me...spoiled? No way :) My mother and both of my sisters had WLS in the 80's...completely different than the RNY's of today I might add. Each one of them had different outcomes. After years of watching my mom and sister "get stuck" and vomit countless times....I decided long ago that I never wanted to do that to myself. Never.
Well, I've come about full circle...and have finally gotten to the point that they were at so many years ago...this surgery is the only option I have to finally get the weight off and keep it off. I worked a night shift my first year out of college...after a year of eating junk all night long and being sedentary, I found myself wearing a size 26. Completely out of control. I have taken the weight off and put it back on many times....in 2001 I got down to 200 pounds. Man that was a wonderful time of my life! After I started dating my ex-boyfriend...I just let things go back to normal and started eating more and not getting my excersising in...and here we are today. I started weight-watchers in the fall of 2003...did that for a year and a half. In January of 2005, last year, I joined the Y and took off 40 pounds in 4 months. I gave up, again...and it was at that point that I completely gave up on myself...gave up on even trying to lose any weight. And here I am today. I've put on a lot of weight this year alone...and now here I am...weighing more than I ever have...and starting to feel the effects of my actions...
I went to an informational meeting at a local hospital on WLS in the fall of 2004, but I really didn't have enough time to make up my mind, and didn't get my insurance switched during open enrollment.....(the insurance plan I have now has a total exclusion for the surgery). So, last year went by...I took off some weight like I mentioned before...and I sort of put the surgery out of my mind again. I went to the same informational meeting again in the fall of last year...I started to consider the surgery more...but STILL hadn't made up my mind completely on having surgery. I didn't want to switch insurance companies if I really wasn't going to go through with it, as i would have to pay a lot more out of pocket in comparision to my $10 per visit that I have now...so yet another year passed and I didn't switch.
My oldest sister, Sherri, had her initial surgery reversed in the 90's...and last fall she was working on getting approval to have another surgery...(Biliopancreatic Diversion). After talking to her...getting sick and tired of being sick and tired...I decided before the end of the year last year that I am going to have surgery...after open enrollment was closed. So, I tried to be optimistic about the whole thing...and told myself that another year will be ok to wait...I'll have time to do alot more research...begin changing my eating habits...do whatever I need to do to mentally prepare myself for the life altering changes.To be honest with ya, there was a point around March or April that I did not know HOW I was going to make it through the rest of this year. But, here we are at the end of August already....and now it's starting to be a lot closer than I can really even comprehend at this point!
There are 2 major local hospitals that offer the surgery...Mercy and Methodist. Methodist had their bariatric program closed for a long time, after they had several deaths occur. Needless to say, I started gathering information at Mercy. I had reservations about Mercy's program..there are 3 physicians that do the surgeries....two of them work together on each of the operations. They had only had 1 death, but still.... the last time I checked, they had only done about 200 surgeries all together. So, they really didn't have as much experience as I would want.
Within the last year, Methodist hired a physician to come in and head up the bariatric program at their hospital. He has done over 350 surgeries alone! I went to a community informational meeting they had the first part of May...and went to a 2 hour seminar they had in their office the end of May. I really like the total package...he seems so personable...but more importantly his statistics speak for themselves! This group seems dedicated to after care...have staff on board to meet every aspect of needs that you will have...diatician..mental health...exercise...so, I decided to go thru Methodist to have my surgery...and feel like I've made a really good decision! Everyone just raves about Dr. Eibes...so, I'll let ya know what I discover along the way!
