The pre-op office visit and I'm a grandma

so as of yesterday at 6:15 a.m. Pacific Time I became a grandma. My oldest daughter had a little boy. The poor guy had to have the toilet plunger treatment to get out and today is sporting a cone head, and bruises. His cord was wrapped around his neck four times. He seems to be ok-as per phone calls from to them but next week I will get to see for myself when my youngest daughter and I fly up for a couple of weeks to do the grandma baby-sitting gig. I have never been to Alaska so it should be an adventure.

Last Monday I went into the surgeons office to do all of the pre-op check in stuff. I started the day with an appointment with my surgeon-He was very my three sons dad (If you are too young to remember this check on the web). He gave me a hard time stating that i was too thin to need this surgery (geez the only place in the world where someone has said that!). He also had it written in his records that I like to read research so he gave me the low down on the effectiveness knowledge of weight loss surgeries. Basically the news is that they are all about the same in effectiveness (but he thinks rny is a bit better). He said that 1/3 of lapband patients will have some complication that requires their removal-1/3 have great success and 1/3 have less than satisfactory success. If this is true than my assumption is that the 1/3 who have to have their bands removed were not part of the 10 year study released in Europe a few years ago that said that the weight loss was slightly better than other kinds of surgery and that an average of 60% of desired weight loss was achieved over this period. he did say most of his research came from Australia and New Zealand and that he was trained by them. Anyway-he then went on to say that right now no ones knows how to know if one method will work any better than another an that they leave it up to patients. an finally right before i was ready to leave he said-well since you have had so many abdominal surgeries (4 c sections, a gallbladder and hernia repair) he said that lapband was probably the best choice for me!! soooo lap band it is!

After that I went in for pre-op testing. I had an ekg, conversation about my allergies and medical history, and finally a blood draw-3 pokes later sporting a bruise the size of a coffee cup I was 5 minutes late for my next appt. upstairs.

I ran upstairs for a required seminar on weight loss surgery. The main speaker was not very comfortable or skilled at the job but went through instructions on how to check in for surgery, where to park (bad directions that we will not use!) and retold us all the stuff we already were presented at the pre-appt. seminar. They spent most of the time talking about rny and then gave me a folder with info about labpand (Im not sure why i couldnt have been let off and given the packet without the talk).

They tried to get me to sign up for various research projects except that by the time I showed up to hear about these projects the person was missing and never came back. I went to lunch, waited around for like 15 minutes but she never did show up so I left. I was going to let them use me as a subject because i remember how hard it was to find people when i was doing research but I wasnt going to wait around forever!

Sooo april and may are gong to be busy busy busy. I go to alaska for two weeks, i have to get my supervisory jobs done first, travel come back do some more observations, have surgery, three days later help to move my daughter back to her university town after she comes back from Spain, go to one of my work conferences 8 days after surgery, get ready for my younger daughters high school graduation (and the party i must host) 17 days after surgery. Keep your fingers crossed that I heal quick!