Congrats being a week out!  I'm looking forward to being in your shoes soon.  Thanks for posting, it's encouraging to hear how people feel after surgery. 

I was very pleasantly surprise about how pleasant my experience has been with Dr.Mann and EVERYONE at Portsmouth Naval. My orientation was in January and I get my surgery on May 11th, so the whole proces has been less than four months for me. That isn't very long when you consider it can take some people over a year with other civilian surgery centers. I don't have one single complaint about Portsmouth Naval and I have complete confidence in the whole WLS team. From the very beginning I knew I was in good hands!
Shuniro, how was your hospital stay? How many people did you share a room with? Twenty pounds down?!?! You are doing great so far!!! Congrats...I can't wait to be post op, like you!!!

Crystal, you are correct.  Portsmouth will pick up the referral but if you want to go to a civilian provider you have to pay a certain amount out of pocket.  I wish I could find my letter so that I could give you teh exact wording they used.   I had my RNY 9gastric bypass)done by Dr. Barker at Portsmouth Naval on the 13th of April and even though I am sore since it has only been a week I believe that he did a great job.  The Nurses and the Corpsman were also extremely helpful.  It is a more lengthly process than in the civilian world but I think with all of teh testing and pysch evals it was worth it.  The made sure that I was mentally and physically prepared to have surgery.  I forgot to mention going to see the Nutrition department, they were also quite informative.   I was a little skeptical about going to Naval Hospital too but everything worked out for me and all my questions were answered and all my concerns addressed.  I wish you luck and hope that you find the doctor that is right for you!

HI Lisa, I miss ya too.   I do a Protein drink twice a day and still to this day have a check list for how many glasses of water I take in each day.  Start back to the basics and write everything you eat down and read those labels. You can get back on track. You just did writing here. :)
I will talk with ya later.
So good to hear from you.
Gwen

Oh my!!! I am so sorry.  I wasn't aware that the hospital had such a bad reputation.  I was under the impression that they have their own surgical facility.  I"ll have to check into this.