Another bump in the road

My bandwagon hit another bump in the road in April. After my surgeon removed my band, she was unable to pass the bougie (calibration tube) through my esophagus into my stomach because of a stricture, so I woke up with 6 incisions, no band, and no sleeve. Extremely disappointing.

Since then I've had the stricture dilated from 13 to 17 mm (the bougie was 13.3 mm) by a gastro-enterologist who says my problems were caused by longterm "silent" reflux. I can remember going to an ENT doc in mid 1980's who said my chronic cough was due to reflux, not a throat problem. Since I'd never had any recognizable reflux symptoms (heartburn, acid regurgitation, etc.), I didn't believe him. Now I wish I'd sought treatment for the reflux, but I can't go backwards and somehow I'm determined to move forwards. I'm taking omeprazole every day and aside from regaining 20-25 lbs, feeling fine. I plan to take another shot at the sleeve surgery in August.

Always a bandster at heart

My journey on the bandwagon has taken an unexpected detour. Earlier this year, I learned that the reflux I'd been having was related to esophageal dilation and motility problems. A complete unfill cured the dilation, but because my surgeon will not re-fill my band and strongly recommends removing it, I'm having surgery to remove my band and revise to vertical sleeve gastrectomy on April 27, 2012. I am very sad to say goodbye to my band, but trying to make the best of the circumstances. I absolutely refuse to go back to the land of obesity, and I know myself well enough to realize that I still need a surgical tool to help me with weight management.

I have a lot to learn about the sleeve and you'll probably see me comparing life with the sleeve to life with the band. I'll always be a bandster at heart, and the Bandwagon publications and Facebook support group will go on as before. So stay tuned!

Is there a link between obesity & fibromyalgia?

In 2009 and 2010, researchers published the findings of three studies performed at the University of Utah and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology that found a link between obesity and fibromyalgia. As someone recovering from obesity and suffering from fibromyalgia, I’m glad when data comes to light that might help explain, treat, or prevent these conditions. A link that might reveal a common cause sounded promising to me.

The public in general and FM sufferers in particular heard something else in those reports, thanks to eager journalists who jumped on the studies’ findings and mined them for their shiniest nuggets. The studies included mostly female subjects, so a distorted message was broadcast: FM is a fat woman’s disease, and if those lazy gals would just exert enough willpower to diet, exercise, and lose weight, their FM symptoms would lessen or even disappear.

I recently wrote an article about the obesity-fibro link for Fibromyalgia & Chronic Pain LIFE magazine. In researching the article, I learned a lot about the possible causes of both obesity and fibromyalgia, things I’d never heard before at all. Sufferers of both obesity and/or fibromyalgia often hear that their problem is all in their minds, but it turns out there’s a whole lot more going on than the patient’s conscious behavior…that the problem is caused or at least affected by biological and other factors over which we have no conscious control. If you’d like to read more about it, go to http://fmcpaware.org/ and click on the image of the magazine cover on the left side of the page (it’s a woman wearing a red jacket, holding a globe).

The late bloomer

In early November, one of our rose bushes decided to produce one last perfect rosebud before nodding off into its long winter sleep. You couldn’t miss that rose: a bright coral spot in the otherwise dull brown and grey garden remnants. I cut the rose, brought it inside, and put it in a bud vase on the counter of the bathroom I use the most, so I could enjoy it every time I went into the room (which, with my small capacity bladder, is at least 500 times a day). I positioned the vase so that the rose would be looking at me whenever I entered the room. Later that day, I went off to work and forgot about the rose until I came home six hours later.

Of course I saw the rose as soon as I walked into the bathroom, but it wasn’t facing me as I had left it. It had turned its lovely head towards the mirror, so it could admire itself. I could swear I heard the rose talking to its reflection. This is what it said:

“Oh my! Aren’t you a lovely girl? I’ve never before seen such a pretty face, and your color! You are just stunning! And I can tell that you are beautiful through and through; I can see your soul shining in those coral petals; I can see your spirit supporting that slender stem, and just a few thorns to remind everyone that you deserve respect. It’s a delight to meet you. I hope you won’t mind if I stare at you a while and drink in your loveliness. Is that okay with you? Oh, good. You are as kind as you are beautiful.”

Clearly, self-esteem was not an issue for that girl.

And why would it be, you ask? She’s a rose…to paraphrase the Bible, she toils not, nor does she spin. In fact, she’s awfully self-centered, mooning over her reflection in Jean’s bathroom mirror. She’s not like me – she’s young and fresh and perfect, while I am old and tired and wrinkled and fat.

That’s an easy conclusion to make, but it’s not correct. You have judged both the rose and yourself wrongly, and here’s why.

Rose was a late bloomer. While she worked for weeks to grow from a glimmer in God’s eye into a tight little bud, while her bigger, showier sisters burst into bloom and, being incorrigible show-offs, made sure to taunt little Rose. They called her names: immature, ignorant, slow, stupid…well, I’m sure you can imagine how that went. But Rose persisted. She was determined to bloom before the first frost, to prove her sisters wrong. She knew it would be slow and difficult, but it was her last chance. The brevity of a rose’s life was obvious to her as her older sisters shed their limp, brown-edged petals and dried into sad, hard rose hips. It would have been wonderful to prove them wrong before they died, but Rose knew she must fulfill her fate whether or not she had an audience. She was going to be a glorious rose just for herself.

And she did become a glorious rose. She achieved her goal, brightened my life and even as her life expectancy shrank from weeks to days to hours, she gazed in the mirror and said, “Oh my! Aren’t you a lovely girl?”

Thanksgiving Dinner "Full"

The Thanksgiving theme is especially appropriate subject matter for this newsletter, not just because of the practice of giving thanks but because of the ritual overfeeding of Thanksgiving celebrants. It is an excellent allegory for the concept of satiety, in ways both physical and spiritual.
I often say that my pre-op idea of satiety was “Thanksgiving Dinner Full”. Because I loved food and the experience of eating (the physical aspects) and because I was trying to fill a bottomless hole inside me (the spiritual aspect), every meal consisted of huge portions with second and third helpings – so much food that I was over stuffed. I would have to stop eating not because I was satisfied but because I was so uncomfortable. As soon as the pressure and bloating in my abdomen eased up, I was ready for more food, not because I was physically hungry (in the way I know it now) but because eating was my default activity. My mom used to say that cats’ default behavior was bathing: “When in doubt, take a bath”. Mine was: “When in doubt, eat.”
I think a lot of WLS patients have eaten that way as pre-ops and, like me, struggle to identify and accept their post-op experience of satiety. They say things like, “I never feel full,” when actually, feeling full is not a sign of satiety. Satiety is feeling that you have eaten enough food, no more, no less. Enough is not the amount that makes you happy. It’s the amount that ends your physical hunger pangs. It takes a long time to retrain your conscious mind to recognize satiety and heed it. If you don’t recognize it or don’t heed it, and go on overeating in your attempt to reach your pre-op “fullness”, your overeating can cause a lot of damage, not just to your weight loss but by dilating your esophagus and/or stomach and possibly by putting so much pressure on your band that it slips out of place.
That’s why I keep harping on the importance of weighing and measuring your food before you eat it. I know plenty of bandsters who have never done that, have lost their excess weight, and haven’t had any complications, so I can’t say that weighing and measuring is a guarantee of weight loss success and prevention of complications. But I do know that mindfulness during food preparation and at mealtime is crucial for teaching yourself a new way of eating. Your old way of eating is one of the things that made you so obese that you needed WLS, so it’s time to bid it farewell.

I'm a Hollywood Star!

This year's Halloween theme is Hollywood. I went as a Hollywood star - as in a star on the walk of fame. Getting through doorways proved to be very tricky, so I'd have to say that this costume was more of a trick than a treat.

My 4th Bandiversary Photo!

This photo, taken 6 days after my 4th Bandiversary, is remarkable because I'm wearing a belt! I think the last time I wore a belt was in 1968, when I proudly wore a white patent-leather belt with my bell-bottom jeans. Since then, I've never wanted to accentuate that pudgy middle!