It’s treatable with a prescription drug called omeprazole. It can be exacerbated by coffee, tea, alcohol, spicy food, or even water - mine kicks in when I practice forward bending in yoga. Acid refluxĪround 35pc of people experience either new or worsened acid reflux after gastric sleeve surgery, which in my experience was the only negative side effect.
This monitoring is actually a good thing, as it makes you more tuned in to your overall long-term health - it’s not something you should skip or only do intermittently. You will also need to get annual blood tests - I arranged this with my GP on return from Tallinn - to make sure you don’t become deficient in anything. You will need to take supplementary vitamins and minerals every day for the rest of your life, and have a B12 jab every three months (I get my B12 and syringes on prescription and do my own injections at home - it’s intramuscular and very easy - you just aim for your upper arm). This also demystifies the process, when you hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, rather than via a shiny advert in a bariatric clinic - if that encourages even one person to take action around their weight I just tell people I’ve had weight loss surgery, and it worked a treat. Telling people you have taken up jogging or gone paleo or whatever feels a bit disingenuous. When you drop lots of weight - I went from 92kg to 70kg - people tend to notice, and comment. I ordered dessert too when I felt like it. Instead, for the first two years post-surgery, I just ordered starters rather than mains, and if anyone asked, I said I wasn’t feeling that hungry. When I left the clinic, the surgeon gave me a card explaining I was post-WLS, and could only eat child-sized portions in restaurants - a bit like a disabled badge for my stomach. You can still eat normal foods, just in far smaller quantities.
Gastric sleeve 10 years later full#
If you continue to eat after you feel full - even a bite - you’ll experience nausea and discomfort, or just feel wiped out and need to lie down. So you need to eat slowly, eat healthy stuff rather than high-fat high-sugar foods, and stop the moment you sense fullness. Slowly, you’ll go back onto solids, where it’s all about quality over quantity - if you overdo it, you will feel awful.
This lasts a few weeks as your stomach heals, and involves lots of liquid, but - the best bit - you won’t feel hungry. Initially, you need to follow the clinic’s eating instructions to the letter. Here are some of the things I’ve learned over the past three years. Except, of course, it isn’t - it’s the start of a new way of living, initially at least. A beaming ex-fat person gambolling through a field of daisies. When it comes to WLS stories, that happily-ever-after usually concludes the narrative. Except, of course, it isn’t - it’s the start of a new way of living, initially at least’ ‘That happily-ever-after usually concludes the narrative. Statistically less risky than gall bladder surgery, the keyhole surgery took two hours and was done by Dr Ilmar Kaur, who has performed thousands of such operations and trains other bariatric surgeons in the region. Nothing worked.įinally, in 2019, aged 51 and weighing 92kg, I flew to Tallinn and had gastric sleeve surgery, and my (useless) gastric band was removed. And some of the less usual - diet pills from the doctor that were later banned across the EU due to risk of heart attack/stroke one hundred days of protein shakes that resulted in an impacted colon and a trip to A&E (it wasn’t fun) a gastric band in 2012, which in terms of efficacy was like setting fire to six grand. But the results of the sleeve were often satisfactory enough for patients not to need a second (bypass) operation a year or so later.Īlthough my BMI at the time of surgery was around 35, I’d been overweight/obese for years, the excess fluctuating between 10 and 30kg, and had tried all the usual diet and exercise stuff - personal trainers, slimming clubs, therapy, 12-step food fellowships etc. The gastric sleeve was initially devised as a precursor to the bypass, to allow very overweight patients to spend time losing weight to make bypass surgery safer. It differs from the bypass operation as it does not involve rerouting the small intestine. Three years ago I flew to Tallinn, Estonia, for a gastric sleeve - this is when stomach capacity is permanently reduced by around 80pc so it becomes a tube rather than a pouch.
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