May 28th, 2013 will always be remembered in my mind as the day that my new life technically started. It was the day of the Seminar. I was so excited about this meeting, because I had been to one before with another doctor, but had never meet this doctor before and was very interested in seeing what he had to say.
Before going, or better yet before even looking up a doctor I had done a ton of research on this type of operations, so I had already decided on the Gastric Bypass operation. I still had to go to the seminar as a requirement by the doctor and insurance.
At the seminar I was very shocked to see how many people were actually there. We were in a conference room on the the first floor of the Matthews Hospital and there had to be at least 40 people in there. I was very excited about this mainly because I knew of the large support this showed, if there were lots of people that means there would be a lot of support. Another thing that I noticed on this first entry into the seminar is another thing that I am going to go off on a tangent about for a few minutes and talk about.
All my life as a big person I've had fears and anxieties whenever I would go somewhere, I always was worrying about what kind of seating is going to be offered. The questions that always went through my mind were; will the seats be big enough? Will they hold me? Am I going to have to squeeze in? Will I fit into the booth? Will I break the chair? And many upon many other questions..... but when I walked into this seminar I was greeted with large seats. I was very relieved, it is like the hospital understood what I was going through and what kind of hardships I and the others there faced and they were prepared for that; and to me when I saw that when I walked into the seminar I felt very relieved, and very welcomed by the hospital because they went out of their way to take care of me!!!
During the seminar I was introduced to an operation that I had heard of but had not really done much research on it before. It was called the Gastric Sleeve. Dr. Pirrello was really pushing this operation as an operation that would allow you to loose weight, as much so as the gastric bypass and was able to be conducted with the lower risk of complications and problems after the operation; the one downfall to this operation is the operation did not statistically cure diabetes.
The seminar lasted about two hours and was very informative. Dr Pirrello was very personable and gave a lot of examples of success stories and a story of personal connection as to why he got into the field of weight loss surgery
After this meeting I was still convinced I was going to get the gastric bypass; I wasn't very sure as to why I was going to stick with it, mainly I think it is because I am hard headed and did not like others telling me what to do, so this was a way for me to "stick it to the man", although I wasn't very sure who I was "Sticking" it too.
Look out for the next post for my stories of the pre-op meetings and appointments and my further research!!!
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