Lap-Band question

I would be very cautious using a doctor that doesn't fully support your surgery choice.  You will need a lot of support and follow-up because the band requires regular maintenence.  If the practice doesn't offer a long-term aftercare program and is more structured to support the other surgery types I would consider another practice. 

The band worked for me, but my surgeon fully embraces the band as a viable tool for permanent WL and has a practive built around supporting ALL of the surgeries.

Best wishes as you finalize your decision.

Lisa O.

Surgery Aug 2005 - so coming up on my 6 yr anniversary. Lost 167 lbs. Saw pictures of myself at my thinnest & realized that I had to come clean of having my band purposefully to tight & only drank liquids. Stopped. Had a slight unfill, therapy, read "When Food Is Love" By Geneen Roth which turned my world around & made me start being honest about my band & how to use it correctly. Gained 30-35 lbs. Had a baby. Got cancer & kicked it's ass. Had my panni removed & a pseudo tummy tuck..... living life to it's fullest.

For me personally, if I hadn't read "When Food Is Love" then I would have never came clean about my food addiction and would have ended up being a regretful bander.

I have had my band for 2 years now with zero complications thus far.  I have seen mixed stories over the years here on the boards.  Personally, I am well under my goal weight (121 lbs at 5'7) and have maintained that weight loss for 15+ months.  Good luck and please do find a surgeon that fully supports your WLS decision (band or otherwise). :)

My experience:



Part I--Getting the LapBand

So, in 2002, retired early due to disabilities and having a BMI of around 51 and SEVERAL comorbidities that could have killed me, I started looking into wls.

I found this board and old spotlighthealth.  I read here and joined at Spotlight.  The LapBand had recently been approved for weight loss surgery in the US and I thought I had found the best new thing ever.  It was a less invasive surgery, it was adjustable, two years out it provided the same results as RnY, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I started looking for the most experienced surgeons.  My insurance wasn't going to pay for it...it was too new.  So I might as well get my money's worth.  My local surgeons...I think back then Quebbeman and Cuneen were the only ones, had done a few dozen bands.  I checked Europe...Weiner in Frankfurt looked promising...so did (I'm drawing a blank right now...Jacques...I'll get there...Himpens ?) in Belgium and Favretti somewhere in Italy...and then I found Roberto Rumbaut Diaz.

Dr. Rumbaut is a resident of Mexico...he could be a citizen there, but I don't know.  He was born elsewhere and he grew up for a while in Ohio.  He is fluent in English, which I am not in Spanish...I have survival skills and not much more.  He had participated in the pre-FDA trials of the LapBand with the doctors in Washington state and he practiced at the hospital in Monterrey, Mexico where, if the President of the US needed a hospital while in the area...that would be the one.  What could be better than that?  I'll tell you what.  He was also a band patient.  And the most experienced band surgeon in the Americas.

He implanted my band in October of 2002.

It was the usual up-and-down experience...you just had surgery and there's no restriction and so on.  I don't even remember where I had my first adjustment...it may have been Kuri in Tijuana, who did a lot of adjustments on Rumbaut's local patients.  Later, I flew back down and had an exam by Rumbaut.  After that, all adjustments were done locally.


~~~~~~~


Part II--Living with the f'ing thing

After the first few months of the Where is the Restriction...I had some restriction.  But, I had barfing to go along with it.  Banded people like to call it "PBing" for "Productive Burping."  That's bull****  It is NOT "productive bull****"

You open your mouth, you put food in, you chew carefully, you swallow and shortly thereafter you move on to the next bite.  And then, when what went down, comes up and flies out of your mouth.  That's pretty much puking in my book.  If you want to call it, "Productive Yodeling with a side of Koo-Koo-Kachoo," you go for it.

So the weight came off...slowly, painfully and pukefully.  I'd go to the doctor and get an adjustment and everything would be too tight...and then I'd go and get saline taken out and there was NO restriction.  Weight loss slowed and then stopped.  But that's to be expected when you get to the point that you enter the LapBand Soup and Ice Cream Diet Phase.

Let me start that by mentioning that I've always been a little lactose intolerant...and ice cream has always been a possible problem, so it was NOT high on my list of things to eat until AFTER I had entered LapBand hell.  But eventually, you get to the point when you go out for dinner and want to eat SOMETHING!!! And you know that the cream of something soup is probably the ONLY thing that is going to go down and not cause you to barf on the table.  So that's what you order.  AND, you are still hungry, so you order the ice cream or the lemon meringue pie (because you won't eat the crust... that would get stuck...and you can eat the rest as it will melt in your mouth.)  Guess which way the scale moves when all you can eat are liquids.

This is also the phase where the "I Can Puke Up Bigger Balls of Disgusting Viscous Slime Than You Can Contest" starts.  Here's how that works:  At some point, the brain of MANY banded people decides that the reason things aren't moving on down to the stomach in normal fashion, is that there is a blockage.  Without asking your permission, it decides to "lubricate" said blockage.  It sends goo...slime...a see-through, mucousy ball of snot.  And it can't get through either.  So the brain says, "Oh!  Here's some more!"  And sends even more of that snot...a big ball of mucousy snot..on down toward the blockage.  That reaches about half-way down the esophagus and has no where else to go.  And the brain says, "Oh, ****"  And you start to feel a wave of nausea, because the brain has decided that if it won't go DOWN...yeah...you got it...it's coming up.

We eat out a lot and I knew/know where every restaurant restroom is and how many stalls there are, because when you go running for the restroom, you have to know your chances of finding a stall.  And the parking lots...yes, I've barfed up SLIME in many a parking lot.  And on strangers' lawns on our way home.   This was disgusting an embarrassing and a terrible way to live.


~~~~~~~


Part III--And it Went Downhill from There

The next thing that happened...and we're into late 2004 early 2005 at this point...is that my esophagus joined my brain in not liking or understanding or adjusting to the band.  It did that by ceasing to function.  A working esophagus massages food on down the line until it gets to the stomach.  If it stops massaging, it pretty much becomes a gravity operated deal.  Don't drink water a half hour before your workout or up it comes because it just bounced around in your esophagus and
never GOT to your stomach.   And food?  Some days, you could take one or two WHOLE tablespoons of soup and then you could feel it bouncing around in your esophagus.  Like Venus was on one end and Serena on the other, batting it all back and forth.  Sometimes it would just stop...and for the longest time, you had no idea if it was going down or coming back up.

~~~~~~~


Part IV--Enough is Enough

By late spring of 2005, I had decided that the band was coming out.  I was almost back to my pre-op weight.  Meanwhile, most of my friends who had had the RnY about the same time I had gotten the band were starting to gain weight.  But my two skinny ***** friends with the DS were still pretty skinny.  So that's where I headed.  It took a while and I spent the next several months complaining about my symptoms--some GENIUS doctor decided I needed to learn about life with the LapBand.  (Eat **** and die, doc, I could write the friggin' book.)  No one could find anything that was causing me to barf all the time and or anything that would make me feel those esophageal tennis matches.  But I knew what tests doctors wanted and I had all of them, except the endoscopy, done before my first appointment with Dr. Keshishian, in late summer, I think. 

Dr. Keshishian wanted the band completely empty of any saline and didn't own a Huber needle, so we drove to Tijuana to see Dr. Verboonen.  He was training a new radiology guy.  Verboonen, the radiology dude and my husband were watching as I drank the barium and Verboonen emptied the band while explaining to the radiology dude (this was in Spanish, but I was able to follow) that as soon as the band was empty, we would see the stoma open wider and the barium flow through at a faster rate.  But it didn't even GET that far.  It got about halfway down the esophagus and took a break.  They all just stared.  I started laughing and said, "And THAT is what I've been trying to explain for the past year or so!!!"  When I laughed the barium moved down a little and then back up farther.  Verboonen used the magic controls to make sure the table, which reclined, was in the full upright position.  When I was standing, I bounced a little and the barium finally went through.

~~~~~~

Part V--Yeah, I know

Dr. Verboonen had a very serious look on his face and started to assemble his English to try to explain to me what was going on...and to save him the trouble, I just said, "Esophageal dysmotility?"  He sad, "Oh, thank God...you read a lot, don't you?"

So my esophagus was ****** secondary to the adjustable gastric band.  It hadn't worked well in months, but most of the EXPERT doctors I saw thought I was nuts.   Maybe I am...but the band had ****** up the esophagus regardless of my mental state...and now, finally, it was documented and witnessed.

AND...I had a date to have it removed.


~~~~~~~~

Part VI--Free at last...

It took eleven weeks for the esophagus to heal...and I was very fortunate that it did.  That was a LONG and terrifying eleven weeks, during which I was pretty sure that I had permanently screwed up my entire esophagus and my life.  

The adjustable gastric band, as I experienced it, is a dangerous piece of **** that should be illegal.  As we know now, I was already high risk for band failure as my BMI was too high.   (And I was in another high risk for failure group...older patients...I was 55 at the time.)  But that wasn't why the band almost ruined my esophagus.  It made the mess that it did because it's just a bad, bad, bad idea.


~~~~~There's more...but I'm worn out even THINKING about that time.

I was first banded on June 19Th 2006. The elusive " Sweet Spot " should be called " The Wondering Sweet Spot " due to it's ever shifting location.

One day You're so tight you can't swallow your own saliva. You're so tight you have to sleep sitting up in a reclining position in hopes that the burning acid in your throat won't creep up during the night, but it really doesn't matter because that acid will creep up over and over again even if your band is unfilled.

The next day you may be loose and you are able to get certain types of food down. It's mostly impossible to eat dense protein because the band makes it extremely painful to do so. That is not to say it can't be done, but in my experience it can't be done on an everyday basis. It's easier to eat the unhealthy slider foods which in turn can cause you to regain back any weight you may have lost.

I have been white knuckling it for 5 years now by stepping on the scale everyday to make sure my weight does not go up and by the use of weight loss pills and exercise. I'm one of the luckier ones in that I have been able to keep my weight loss at my " Honey Moon Phase " level but by no means am I at my goal weight.

People are always saying to pre-ops that this is just a "tool" and they have to use it or it won't work. I believe that some pre-ops are so excited to get this tool that they are really not fully comprehending exactly how hard it is going to be, and with most of us being unable to successfully diet on our own pre WLS
. That means that there are going to be people who are not fully prepared for what it really means to
" Work their tool " Then there will be some like myself who are/were working their tool and their tool wasn't working with them.

Instead their tool worked against them and they are/were unable to eat " The Bandster Way " It's not like we wanted to jump off " The Band Wagon " it was more like we were shoved head first off the wagon.

Today I suffer from chronic left shoulder pain, and I'm willing to bet I will be diagnosed with achalasia, just as soon as I can get my new refferal approved for my band surgeon.

What is achalasia?

Achalasia is a rare disease of the muscle of the esophagus (swallowing tube). The term achalasia means "failure to relax" and refers to the inability of the lower esophageal sphincter (a ring of muscle situated between the lower esophagus and the stomach) to open and let food pass into the stomach. As a result, patients with achalasia have difficulty in swallowing food.

www.medicinenet.com/achalasia/article.htm#tocb