Pregnant before surgery?!?!

Hiya.  The hospital will do a pregnancy test the morning of your surgery just to cover themselves.  Its a traumatic surgery all on its own, certainly DO NOT want to be pregnant when they do it.  Besides..it'd be hard to get the nutrition you'd need if you were pregnant and had the surgery.  I still remember being full off a medicine cup of food at the beginning....OH THE GOOD OLE DAYS....

Oy! Accidents happen..

I found out I was pregnant approximately a month and a half before I was due for surgery.  When I realized what was going on, I initially cried because I REALLY wanted surgery, but at the same time, I feel that babies are a gift from heaven and, if this is what G-d had in store for us then surgery could wait.

I didn't cancel surgery because I needed to "see" for myself that this was really truly taking place in my body.  On the day I went to the hospital for my first OB appointment and pre-natal testing, I was told that I was miscarrying (at 16 wks gestation).  Needless to say, I was devastated.

My surgeon has said that he unknowingly operated on one patient who was pregnant - she was very early on at time of surgery so HcG levels were not showing.  She went on to have a healthy baby.  That said, when my time for surgery came, he would not operate until the HcG levels were back to low-almost non-existant.  I was on pins and needles the whole time because I feared losing my chance for surgery which would have been a huge blow, specially after miscarrying.

In the end, everything worked out and I had surgery.  My surgeon recommends avoiding pregnancy for at least 12 to 18 months post-op.  We did nothing to prevent, mostly because I kind of figured that between the trauma of miscarriage and surgery it would likely take a while for pregnancy to happen on its own.  In fact, it took 11 months for us to conceive..

Surely your doc will ask for a serum pregnancy test and or will have you do a urine test on the day of surgery.  Good luck and keep us posted!

Thank you soooo much for your honesty and sharing your story!  That helps soooo much

I know it's scary but relax.  If you think you may be pregnant ask them to run a quant hcg (blood prego test) instead of a urine test.  The quant test will give them the actual level of hcg in your system (a negative result will be a level less than 5) as some urine tests may come back negative when in fact you could be pregnant.  With your history of irregular periods do you have PCOS?  It's quite common in obese women with irregular periods. 

If it gives you any peace of mind my surgeon inadvertantly did do a RNY surgery on a pregnant lady.  She'd ovulated a day or two before surgery and didn't know it...since she too was irregular and hadn't been able to get pregnant she didn't think about it.  Anyway her preg test was negative but a month after surgery she was craving stuff like pickles and the PA asked her if she was pregnant.  The patient denied it saying there was no way since she'd not had sex since just before surgery.  Well they did a repeat test and sure enough...she was pregnant.  They sent her to a high risk OB and followed her very closely.  She had a rough pregnancy but she did have a healthy baby. 

Good luck and if you are pregnant...then your surgeon will just post pone surgery.

Wouldn't my annual pap tell me if I have PCOS?  Now, I'm concerned that I should be looking into that...in the meantime thank you for your encouragement.  I guess it's better to take an aggressive approach in this situation to make certain I'm not pregnant before surgery.  Thanks for your advice!!!

Yep. My sister in law was. She had an RNY done with a titanium band around the stoma.
Of course, she didn't know it at the time. Didn't show up on the tests.
That baby is now 6 years old and perfectly healthy.