3.5 Years Out - Not Wanting to Take Vitamins

This surgery can be harsh on you quickly....when I dont take my vitamin Ks I quickly bruise easily, when I do not take enough Calcium my teeth start to die or look bad. Not a enough vitamin A, my eyes start to blur....multi, I do not feel as much energy....and etc. I DEFINITELY have to take my stuff.....you got to be careful what you ask for...

My labs are great except I have always been anemic....so slowly but surely. I,miss Vitalady tender Iron, they did not constipate me. So now I take a softer and I finally,found the right probiotics.

Update from original post!

I won't claim to be perfect, but I've been MUCH better about taking my vitamins regularly. I think I've found a regiment that works for me, made specifically for the DS. It tastes a bit like dirt going down, but it's just one managably sized pill (2x daily).

Since my first post I tried the powdered version where you mix with water and drink, and this worked for a couple weeks but then I started to not want to take them again cuz it was three doses a day that tasted like flavored vitamin. Yuk! But I kept searching and found the pills I'm on now, which are from a reputable bariatric vitamin company that my doctor gave the okay for.

Hopefully my numbers will start to rise again (again, just assuming they are low from lack of vitamin intake) with continued use and the scary "you're going to die" threats to my body will remain ideas and not become actual reality. Thank you to all who posted.

:)

It's great that you're making the effort to improve your vitamin intake, but I would caution that these all-in-one products, even if marketed for bariatric patients, and even when ok'ed by the surgeon, tend not to work well for us. Our vitamin needs are different from,and greater than, those for people with the more common gastric bypass, for whom these vitamins are marketed (and they don't always work so well for them either). Also, you can't adjust for too much of one component and not enough of another. That's why most of us take lots of separate vitamins -we get enough of each, not too much and not too little. Yes, it's more effort, but that's what we need to do to maintain our health.

So, check your levels again soon, and be ready to take the separate A, D, K, multi, calcium, zinc, etc. And you don't need yucky tasting powders, just pills. It's well worth the effort, which is to say, YOU are worth the effort.

Larra

My first year I was taking all in one pills and they worked out fine for me then. My levels were always good, however I had to take 8 of them since they weren't specifically made for DS patients - just bariatric in general. The "normal" dose was three a day, but like I said I was told to take 8.

These new ones are specifically made for DS patients, and are high in ADEK. I think I'm safe with them for now, but my anniversary appointment with the doctor will be some time in July, so that lab result will be able to tell me if these are working or not.

I was taking the separate pills as you've been saying - prior to me not taking them - and I made it through an entire pregnancy with no complications and a healthy baby. If these don't work out, then I will go back to that. I will say, when I told my doctor that I wanted to start taking individual pills for things, they obviously let me, but looked sort of surprised. Most of the patients at my doctor apparently use an all in one multi as their main vitamin source. That is what was recommended to me when I started, and most of the patients, myself included, do fine with them.

I have also tried the patches in the past and they do NOT work. So if anyone reading this is thinking about trying those, PLEASE DON'T. I was on them for a week and got sick with all kinds of side effects.

Sounds like a good plan! If you need help with reading your labs, bring them here. Your Doctor will know a lot about reading your lab, the VETS here will know more.

As larra also posted, the all in one bariatric vitamins aren't very good. My surgeon had me on them the first year after my DS and my numbers were so bad I was supplementing with more vitamins than in the original packet (Vita-4-Life). Ultimately gave up the V4L and started individual supplements.

If you stay on what you're taking, have your labs checked in 3-6 months to make sure they're going up and not down.

You'll find something that works!