The Dreaded Follow Up

I saw Dr. WLS for my first post-op appointment yesterday. It was just about as bad as I expected. I have witnesses who will tell you it wasn’t horrible, but there were lots of questions and innuendos that I could have happily lived without.

I have many friends who live in disbelief that this guy, who already knows that I was denied WLS by my insurance once, is still pressuring me to get the surgery. As I waited for his assistant in the room, the Jaguar (my trainer/nutritionist) examined the poster with the various surgical options on it – the Roux En Y, the lap band procedure, the the gastric sleeve, and the duodendal switch – and even on the poster it listed the various deficiencies one has to deal with for life if one chooses that surgery. They all thrive on malnutrition. There are no long term studies on the effectiveness, or on how they impact other health factors. Some of the mid-term studies that are coming out now show that over 50% of WLS patients regain some or all of the weight due to restretching the pouch/sleeve. Many patients do not adapt to the lifestyle that comes with having the surgery, because they were so pressured into it that they never considered what life would be like five years down the line. It’s one thing to commit to a lifestyle change in the present, but it’s a whole different animal to learn that there’s no “giving up” if you don’t like it, if you don’t like the new you, if you don’t like how it changes your life.

Now, I know I have many friends for whom this surgery changed their life in a positive way, and I mean them no disrespect. I believe WLS is an incredibly personal decision, like any sort of body modification, and you shouldn’t be bullied, pressured, or otherwise pushed into having it, or even considering it, if that’s not what you want to do to your body. I feel like the treatment I have received from Dr. WLS is as though someone was standing there in front of a trans man telling him, “You won’t truly be a man until you lop your breasts off. You’ll never pass, no one will ever see you as a man, you won’t be able to live a full and meaningful life if you don’t have a masectomy right now.”

I can carve you up like an ice sculpture!

Do I feel that being obese (even morbidly so) is a good thing? I think it’s just a thing. We all have unhealthy things in our lives. Some of these things could be solved by surgery. Many of my friends have hernias that they’ve suffered with for years, but since they aren’t emergent, they haven’t had the operation. At any moment, my appendix could go rogue and explode on me, but I don’t feel the need to have it removed today. I don’t know anyone in perfect health, who couldn’t use some sort of medical intervention. But no one gets hassled about it the way fat people get hassled about WLS.

Anyway, so there I am in the room to talk about my hernia surgery. The nurse asks me a bunch of questions about my diet – and when I give her honest answers about being on a strict plan to help lower blood sugar, rebuild myelin, and the like, she writes nothing down.  She asks if I have been supplementing with protein shakes. I tell her not only no, but if that’s mentioned I might stab someone, because the last time I was on the protein shake diet I got seriously ill. She definitely doesn’t write that down, either.

I took a picture of her intake notes and this is what it said.

Dr. WLS’s assistant, we’ll call her PA Perky, comes in. She claims to remember me from the last time I was there. Before she even asks about the surgery, she asks if “we can get back on the ball with the weight loss.” I tell her I’m not interested, that I am seeing a trainer/nutritionist who is helping me, and that the protein shake diet made me very ill. She gets very fakey-disappointed. As the appointment progresses, she decides to take out my staples. However, she calls Dr. WLS in to look at my scar, and together they decide that maybe they should only take out every other one, since the scar site is under a lot of stress. I tell Dr. WLS that a lot of my post-surgical pain is because the scar is in a very difficult place on my body – right where my belly ends and my mons pubis begins. He claims it’s in the same site as the old scar. This is not true – it is a good three inches lower. The assistant tries to give me the same song and dance about how my scar could “unzip” and I could have organs falling out. My trainer makes a face -  she knows that my organs would have to miraculously make their way through my ab wall and the layer of fat before they’d do that, and that would take something traumatic, not just a little pressure on an external scar. But this is the exact line they used last time to scare me into WLS.

Before you say it, I’ll be clear, here. I am never having surgery with this doctor again. Next time, I *will* go to one of the other hospitals in hopes that they will see how serious I am about not wanting to discuss WLS. I just have to put up with him through the aftercare of this surgery, and then I am never going to see him again. Unfortunately, it’s going to take some time, because my drain is still putting out a fair amount of drainage, which means I will likely have to have it in for a few weeks.

And this time around, Dr. WLS has even more invested; he now sells a line of protein shakes and vitamin supplements in house, where I’m sure he makes a nice percentage. He also has a sleep study doc in house, so maybe this isn’t the first time he’s gone tete-a-tete with my neuro (whom I met when I needed to have a sleep study as part of my pre-WLS examinations). But a friend reminded me of something I’m going to use from here on out when WLS is brought up – since my insurance doesn’t have it as a covered benefit, and we know that for certain now, every time they bring it up I’m going to ask if they’re willing to do it pro-bono. If not, they can stop offering me a procedure that isn’t covered by insurance, please and thank you. (Although I’m almost scared that he’d say yes.)