NEW.. consult oct 19th

 Sooo i'm from Fort Wainwright, since 08 i have been deciding on to have WLS or not. I just committed and decided to do it. After many failed attempts of weight loss diets diet pills and hoax being 5'7 and 290 sucks!!! and I just want a what to expect with Dr. Grant Searles and results fromt he weight loss, any tips on what I should go ahead and prep to do! thank you so much !

 Dr Searles is great, but he has no bedside maner what so ever, and no after-care program at all.  I just winged it and did fine without his help!  I had surgery (lapband) in 08' at 250 pounds and a size 22, these days I'm about 115 pounds and a size 0!!  He is easy to work with and will tell you just what to do, and the hoops you have to jump thru for TriCare are minimal, the hardest part is the Psych Eval and finding someone local to actually DO it!

Kari

 yeah i heard tricare was pretty easy, but anita at the office said today that there is some new loops i have to go through to deal with tricare which was very discouraging, and whats more frustrating is that she now said that she assumes that i need to do a 6 month weight loss program in order to get the approval of surgery so i shall go tomorrow to tricare at BACH and figure out what i need to do?  it seems like a long road to go down, hopefully it will be worth it..

I hope things are working out for you, if you would like, I run a support group for weight loss patients and we have many people who are military and went through the process using tricare at BACH. we meet the 2nd and 4th wednesday of the month at the Fairbanks Cancer Treatment Center. the next meeting is this wed, the 9th of Nov. at 7:00PM. we wouild be more that happy to answer any questions you have or talk about the surgery with you, or you could email me. if you would like to talk to my wife, who is 3 years out from surgery next month, email us and we will give you the phone number.

Andrew Harkness

[email protected]

My surgery was performed in Fairbanks by Dr. John Mayer....have you consulted with him?  I couldn't be happier.