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Surgeon: Dr. Peter Crookes, University of Southern California Hospital
Surgery date: October 2, 2000
Pre-op weight/BMI: 575
Current weight/BMI: 522 (as of November 4, 2000)

 
Above (both): Pre-op

by Jeff:

I'm a 35-year-old truck driver who lives in Southern California and have always been overweight. I spent most of my Junior High School years on a diet it seems, and never lost that 20 lbs. that I needed to lose. From my youngest memories I've always wanted to eat more than everyone else in my family. Up until age 16, it was mostly kept in check by my domineering dad, but at 16, my parents got divorced and I had free reign to eat what I wanted, and boy did I eat.

After gaining 100 lbs. between my 16th and 18th birthdays, I went on Nutri-systems and started my long uphill spiral to where I am now. I'd get serious and lose 100lbs, only to put it back and more as soon as I'd reached goal. In addition to Nutri-systems there has been Weight Watchers, I've had a quack Dr. give me amphetamines, I've joined gyms, and I just kept getting bigger and bigger. I finally topped out where you see me now, and have been here for about 5 years.

I guess when I hit 35, I started my Mid-life Crisis stage of life and decided I'd had enough. I'm tired of never flying in a plane, having problems buying a car because I can't fit in most new cars, never being able to go to the beach anymore, making career choices based on how desperate the industry in question was for people, and most importantly never getting into any kind of relationship because, so my thinking goes, anyone who would find my attractive has to be crazy or desperate or something.

So I started investigating wls and was ready to break down and get RNY despite all my misgivings about the quality of life afterward, when I found a reference to DS on the AMOS web site, which led me here and to the most fantastic discovery I could find. I can be cured. I can live the rest of my life without throwing up after every meal, or being sick after eating sugar. I can be a normal person with normal eating habits.

I'm looking forward to this journey to a new kind of life. I don't quite know what life has in store for me, but I know it will be a lot better than what it has in store for me if I don't take this step.

Nov. 2nd, one month after surgery: The good, the bad and the ugly.
I had surgery on Oct. 2nd. I've got to start this by giving everyone at USC my highest praise. I had never had any kind of hospitalization and everyone I dealt with was just fantastic. I reported at 5:30 in the morning, they took me in to place my epidural with wonderful Maria holding my hand the entire time, and after that was out until I woke up in the ICU unit. My actual surgery was very successful, taking about 4½ hours. Unfortunately I had some complications.

The first was the fact that my back muscles, because they had 575 lbs. pressing down on them without moving for nearly 5 hours, had gone into spasm to such an extent that they produce toxins. This happens to anyone having surgery but my toxin level was so great that they thought I might have kidney failure. I had to remain in ICU for a week while they flushed as much liquid through my system as possible to keep my kidneys clean and lower the toxin level from 25000 to around 150. The side effect of this situation was that I had excruciating back pain. They gave me a morphine pump in addition to my epidural but I was still in incredible pain. I never once felt pain from the incision, the epidural worked great, but the back pain just killed.

My second complication came the second night when I developed a heart arrhythmia. All of a sudden my heart started beating fast and I got all sweaty. They were able to control this pretty quickly with medication. I didn't have another incident while I was in the ICU.

My last complication was getting nerve damage in my left arm and hand. They can't tell me if it is from somehow lying on my arm during surgery or if an IV somehow damaged a nerve but I lost feeling and movement in my left hand. It's been slowly coming back and is more annoying than anything right now.

After a week they determined that my toxin level had gone down enough to move me to a regular room. That didn't last long though, within 2 hours I had another heart arrhythmia going and they had to put me back in the ICU to give me the right drug. I was there another day when they again tried to move me to a room (the VIP suite this time - they figured I'd earned it at this point). That night I started having an arrhythmia again but we got lucky this time, we figured out that I was having them right after the central line that was put into my neck was used for something, and they determined that it must be touching one of the walls of my heart. They removed the central line and no more problems.

I was in the hospital a total of 2 weeks. I was still pretty weak when I left, I could walk the hallways with the help of a wheelchair to lean on, but I wasn't running any marathons. At home I didn't do much but watch TV for the first week, I couldn't even sit at my computer.

It's taken about 2 weeks home before I had the energy to go outside or to sit at my desk. I get better every day though, and I haven't had any problems eating anything since I've been home. It took me about a week to shake the diarrhea but things are pretty good now and I had my first weigh in at the doctor yesterday and I'm down 50 lbs. so I'm pretty ecstatic about that. Despite all my problems I'm very glad I did this procedure and if it takes me longer than most to recover than thats what I'll have to deal with. I'm in good spirits and my body slowly gets better every day.

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