Gail T.
Had My First Appointment
Nov 21, 2009
After I received the call to schedule my first appointment, they had sent me MORE forms to fill out including a psychological test. I read over everything when it came in the mail, but I forgot to fill them out until the day before my appointment. This was probably a good thing in the long run as I'll explain later. However, it took me a couple of hours to fill them out. One thing I did on my own was to start a food & sleep diary three weeks before the appointment. I just made up my own form on an Excel spreadsheet. Because I have an erratic sleeping schedule, I thought I should mark the hours I was sleeping so the odd hours that I ate would be put in context. This was very helpful both for answering some of the questions on the forms and for the meetings with the surgeon, psychologist & nutritionist.On November 9th I had my first appointment with Dr. Sudan (surgeon), Dr. Applegate (psychologist) and Liz (nutritionist). Everything went very well. There were some delays so I was there about 4 hours instead of two. They were very nice and apologetic about it. Dr. Applegate came to the waiting room to explain it herself and to make sure I could wait. Since my first appointment was supposed to be at 1pm I had not made any other plans for the rest of the day, so I just sat in the waiting room and read. (Tip: Take a good book to read while you wait.) Dr. Sudan was very personable and helpful. He was not rushed and wanted to answer all my questions. Liz told me all about the after-surgery diet and gave me a very good hand-out. We discussed my personal challenges (like eating too fast and not chewing enough). Dr. Applegate asked me many of the questions that were on the "test" I filled out the day before. Since I'd only done the test one day earlier, it was easy to answer consistently. ;-). After the obligatory questions we just chatted about my history. She asked me to explain the surgery I wanted to have, in my case the RNY. They want to know that you are fully-informed and understand what's involved. They drew blood while I was there and ran a lot of blood tests. They asked me to get a chest x-ray and an EKG on my own. (My family doctor did those.) I was told when I made the appointment that they would probably do this so I scheduled an appointment with my family doctor for the day after the Duke appointment. All of my test results are in now and all were normal. Dr. Applegate contacted my regular therapist. Again trying to insure that I'm prepared for the surgery and understand what I'm getting into. Now I’m waiting to hear from them about a surgery date. Believe it or not, I never asked about surgery dates until I saw Dr. Applegate, my last appointment. She said that surgery dates can run two to six months after this first appointment, but they are currently running at about two months. So I’m hoping for a January surgery date. She also told me that submitting to the insurance company is the last thing they do after they have evaluated everything.
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About Me
Louisburg, NC
Location
26.6
BMI
Surgery
03/19/2010
Surgery Date
Jun 03, 2009
Member Since
