If any of these are you, then come on in and have a seat.  New friends are always welcome!  Southern hospitality demands it, right?  Around here we’ll be having conversations for every phase of the weight loss surgery process covering a large variety of things you’ll need and things to try. 

***  Disclaimer:  I am NOT a medical professional.  I am simply a weight loss surgery veteran who would like to share what I’ve learned over time to make your journey a little easier to travel.  Your surgeon’s advice should always trump anything you read here. ***

My name is Erica and I had Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypass Surgery on June 29, 2009.  I was one very excited and scared single mother heading into it.  Unfortunately, every single mother’s nightmare came true:  my surgery backfired.  I was vomiting all day and never made it off soft foods.  For six months I ate out of a medicine cup because I was mostly eating liquids.

By December 2009, my original surgeon had told me to get my “affairs in order.”  Thanks to my mother going all Shirley MacLaine on the hospital staff, I was introduced to Dr. Jorge Rodriguez and Dr. John Wo who worked together to save my life.  They discovered that the surgery had paralyzed my stomach – a condition I now know is gastroparesis.  My pouch and my stomach are forever useless.

For the next 15 months, I still struggled daily with nausea and vomiting but my life was functional and I was so grateful.  Then, while teaching elementary students about technology, tragedy struck again.  I was back in surgery and spent a week in ICU.  My intestines, for a then unknown reason, had strangulated and died. 

I came home from the hospital with a g-tube (a feeding tube that goes through the abdomen and was placed into my old stomach).  I was fed through the feeding tube for nearly two months and I was wasting away to nothing.  I literally looked like a skeleton with skin.  Dr. Rodriguez told me that we needed to start looking into reversing the bypass.

When the feeding tube fell out and I had to try to reintroduce food, I began vomiting everything I tried to eat again.  After reaching the hospital and getting the results from the initial tests, Dr. Rodriguez gave me the following options:

1. Die slowly of starvation within the next few weeks by doing nothing, or
2. Die fast by reversing the surgery but there would be a small chance of surviving and thriving.

You see, reversing Gastric Bypass Surgery is not something surgeons like to do.  He said it was much more likely to kill me than not, but it was the best chance I had.  I chose option number two – and that’s why I’m here today.  Thank God for Dr. Rodriguez!!!

Since then, I have gone on to live my life.  I do have some limitations that other weight loss surgery patients don’t have to worry about, but I’m not vomiting anymore.  I have no abdominal pain to speak of.  I have been happily going through life for the past 8 years.

It is my sincere hope that the information shared on this site can help those who come after me on this weight loss surgery journey. 

My goal is for you to know that:

1. you are not alone
2. these surgeries are not always sunshine and roses, and
3. things going wrong (even horribly wrong) doesn’t mean that the journey is over. 

Today is always the beginning of the rest of our lives.  Let’s do this thing together.