Lap Band Surgery: Putting the Deaky in Freaky

No, it is not.

The LA Times recently reported (via Gawker) that it has been previously under reported how many people have died from lap band surgery. Lap band is the latest in bariatric surgery, a.k.a. cutting the fat out by cutting up the stomach. Lap band surgery is...kinda freaky.

With a traditional gastric bypass procedure, your stomach is disconnected from your large intestine, then stapled so food goes into a tiny upper pouch, then both pouches are connected separately to the small intestine, thereby "bypassing" the large intestine, where food is usually absorbed more efficiently. When you think about it, that's kinda freaky. But wait: lap band gets freakier by a factor of three deakies!

With lap band, an inflatable silicone ring is slipped around the stomach to create a small top pouch and a bigger bottom, and no staples or rerouting of the intestines are required. While this surgery is still, like gastric bypass, major surgery, it is not considered as invasive or risky. However:

"As patients lose weight, their bands will need adjustments, or “fills", to ensure comfort and effectiveness. The gastric band is adjusted by introducing a saline solution into a small access port placed just under the skin." (full description here)

A port just under the skin. Images of people freaking out on too many drugs claiming they have bugs under their skin comes to mind. Having a medical device in my midsection that can be inflated and deflated by jiggering about with a port right by my belly button, that just adds too much deaky to the freaky.

Reading through the wiki that gives all the advantages over gastric bypass (lower mortality, adjustable, reversible, there were also a bunch of potential disadvantages, of which only one jumped out at me:

"Bulging of the port through the skin"

GAAAAAAH!

Quattoscopic Surgery

Then there is "sliming", a side effect too disgusting to go into here. Click the link to read the description, but the picture is oddly....porny. So it may be NSFW if you or someone who sits near you swings that way. And by swing, I mean an incredibly disgusting pervert.

I'm squeamish when it comes to surgery, I admit. I'm irrationally scared of needles. I have watched numerous good friends undergo successful Lazik surgery on their eyes to lose the glasses, but I could never get down with the idea of someone cutting up my eyeballs....WHILE I WATCHED. I've never had surgery of any sort, and hope to keep it that way until my cogs pop.

Despite that, over the years I've half-seriously googled up gastric bypass, then in more recent years lap band. So many promises of how THIS IS IT, this is the lazy fat person's solution to losing weight without working at it!

It'll turn you into a 23 year old blond chick!

But once you start doing the research, it's not easy. It is a hell of a lot of work, with a lot of potential side-effects, and lots of discomfort. Basically, instead of

• me powering through too few calories to make me feel hungry day after day after day, and using this blog as a crutch and support mechanism, 

it would be

• me powering through too few calories to make me feel hungry day after day after day, and using my cut-up, rearranged or silicone-enhanced innards as a crutch and support mechanism.

Despite what the medical industry is promising, despite what they are convincing the insurance industry to pay for, despite the hot chick on the billboard, surgery is not the easy option to lose a lot of weight, just another option that is probably very suitable for some, but hardly all. Maybe after a year of limited caloric intake and increased caloric output without significant change, I'd reconsider my surgical options. But it probably wouldn't make for a very humorous blog.

THE COUNT: 2345
My digital scale died on me this morning, so I could not count out the ingredients to the huge pot of tomato sauce I made -- other than some Italian peppers, roasted garlic and a little tomato paste, it was basically the same recipe as the previously measured batch, so I'll just assume it's the same calorie value. B picked up a new scale for me, so all is well!

AM SNACK: 7:15am, iced green tea, 25 cal


BREAKFAST: 10:30am, fruit smoothie, 350 cal


PM SNACK: 1pm, momma salad, +/- 100 cal


LUNCH: 2:30pm, Subway veggie burger 6" sub, Doritos, diet coke, 760 cal

DINNER: 7pm, sauteed chicken breast, steamed string beans, boiled corn, kraft mac n' cheese, 7oz diet sprite, 1110 cal
Made the box of mac n' cheese for Edie yesterday, and this meal needed some sort of carb to it -- I was hungry. However, after reading the box's nutritional info closely, the stuff as I prepared was 400 cal for a 70g serving. 70g of the stuff is only a palm-ful. The meal was good and satisfying, but snack-blocked me from eating something this evening. Should have done a baked potato or something. Even a 2oz portion of pasta would have been half the cal.