January 31st, 2011

Every time I drive around to Los Angeles, especially around the holidays, I’m inundated with billboards advertising lap band surgery. I guess the home of the Hollywood culture of thin chic is the perfect market for that sort of thing. But whenever I see the billboards, I think of my friend Sony, who had the band put in nine years ago and has regretted it as long as I’ve known her. Finally, once she started having certain complications, the insurance company agreed to pay for its removal. She’s written about her experience with the lap band here.

The first year was pretty good. I lost about 50 pounds. I had a few issues, but nothing major and overall I felt great. I was losing weight slowly, with minimal frustration, and basking in the compliments and goodwill of people who were trying to be supportive.

The second year was not great. I plateaued for several months, then went in to get my band tightened, but it tightened so much that I couldn’t swallow my own spit and I had to go get it untightened in the ER in the middle of the night. It was downhill from there. I never found the sweet spot between feeling satiated on smaller amounts of food but not throwing up constantly. Some people with the band do, but long term statistics indicate that the number of people who do is closer to 10 percent of all the people who have the surgery.

“Success” is something everyone should be aware when it comes to weight loss, and weight loss surgeries. For the marketing collateral they claim 60-80% “success” – but depending on what you’re reading they will define it as some small percent of body mass lost and/or limit the time to a couple of years. There aren’t a lot of ten year follow ups, and they never do the math to include the people who died from the surgeries in their failures either.

So. No happy middle ground with the band for me. In years two and three the weight started coming back, even though I was following all the rules, getting my band adjusted, and exercising as regularly as I could. For the past six years or so I have weighed exactly what I did when I had the surgery.

The day to day reality of living with this is that I eat in a completely disordered way, I eat much less healthy, fresh food than I would like (or ever did pre-op), I’m tired all the time, I’m cold all the time, I vomit several times a day most days, and I get horrible reflux if I try to sleep on my back or my stomach or my left side. In the last few months there has been blood present a few times when I was vomiting, which finally vaulted the need to have this thing out from elective to emergency as far as the insurance company is concerned.

Obviously, this is only one person’s experience. But as long as there are all those billboards touting the surgery as an easy way to get thin quickly, I think it’s worth sharing the stuff that they’ll never put on a billboard.

Posted by mo pie

Filed under: Health, WLS | 40 Comments »

January 27th, 2011

Hi everyone out there in BFD land! I certainly have missed you. And how has everyone been? Do we have stuff to catch up on or what? I guess I should first explain why I went away so abruptly and without explanation. Well, it’s Wigburg’s fault. Wigburg, who is currently, even as I type this, kicking me in the bladder. Yes, I’m pregnant! 25 weeks tomorrow.

And here’s the thing: I got really really really really really really sick. I wish I could convey to you how incapacitated I was. I was so sick that I could barely function. Just to get to work and home again was all I could do, for many weeks. Looking at a computer screen made me nauseous, so I didn’t reply to emails (my inbox is still stuffed) or moderate comments or post to the blog. Other things that made me throw up included eating, not eating, thinking about eating, moving around, looking at things, and talking (which made lecturing fun, let me tell you). At one point I was driving to campus and in the middle of the faculty parking lot I had to slam on the brakes, open the door, and puke on the concrete. Then I had to go brush my teeth and give a lecture. That was a fun day.

I got so sick, in fact, that I’m actually still a little sick. (It’s supposed to go away at 16 weeks. This in my case was a terrible lie.) It’s just that when I got to the point where I couldn’t leave my bed and was in fact doing nothing but curling up in the fetal position while occasionally projectile vomiting, I finally got some Zofran, an anti-emetic that I probably should have asked for weeks before I did. But in the meantime I was busy trying every remedy under the sun, from Vitamin B6 and Unisom to special Sri Lankan ginger cookies procured by a friend. And I was busy puking! Let’s not forget the puking.

In the meantime, and in addition, we bought a house! (I know. Lots of news from these here parts.) It’s a fixer-upper, and we’ve been working on fixing it up. That’s also been taking a lot of time. Add in teaching and traveling for the holidays, and there you have it. Where I’ve been.

The thing is, I have a lot of stuff I want to post about. We never talked about important things like Huge being cancelled (nooooooo!!!) (still sad) or the Harry Potter Theme Park adding fat-people seats to their ride just in time for me not to be able to ride roller coasters. Plus, now there’s all this fat and pregnant stuff to talk about, such as the fact that I still don’t really look pregnant and what that means (in fact, so far I’ve lost 15 pounds, even though none of my pants fit), or the fact that Wigburg is a girl, and that I need advice from all of you about how to help her grow up feminist and confident and awesome. And also, the fact that none of my bras fit, because apparently no matter how big your boobs are, they can still get bigger. Scientific fact.

I’m not going to commit to posting every day quite yet, but I will commit to at least one post per week, and see how that goes. I will also try not to turn into a mommyblog. But you know. There might be more mommyblog-esque content here and there. Once again: it’s Wigburg’s fault.

Posted by mo pie

Filed under: Huge, Kids, Meta, Mommyblog, Personal, TV | 47 Comments »