Pam Ramsey's Weight Loss Experience

weight loss

photo - night before surgery On October 31, 2002, I went into George Washington Hospital in Washington, DC, for an open RNY gastric-bypass surgery. My surgeon was Dr. Paul Lin who I would highly recommend personally and he was also just recently listed in the Washingtonian magazine as one of the best docs in the area.

I entered the hospital weighing 333lbs. at 5'5". I have been heavy most of my life (since about age 14) and it didn't seem to be stopping. I also am a type II diabetic on insulin (pre-surgery dose was 110 units twice a day!) and I also have high blood pressure and high cholesterol. I think the only co-morbidity I didn't have to qualify for the surgery was sleep apnea.

Ok, let's get to the nitty-gritty!

Day & Night 1: I entered the hospital at 7 AM on Thursday morning. My surgery was scheduled for 8:45 I think. Anyway, I went back to get prepared very shortly after signing in. I changed into the gown and they did the usual blood pressure and temperature checks while asking a lot of questions about my consent for the procedure. Then the anestheologist came in to ask if I wanted an epidural for pain relief or not. I decided that I did. Unfortunately I must have had a difficult back because it didn't go in so easily. I think they had to stick me three times to get it in correctly. It wasn't a very pleasant experience. I think that when you get one when pregnant you're already in pain so you don't notice it as much! :-)

So then it went pretty rapidly from there. I had to give my glasses to my mom so once that happened I didn't see much! They wheeled me into the operating room but I have no idea what it looked like because I'm pretty blind without my glasses. I scooted over from the gurney to the table and heard someone say "ok, just breath this" for a second as they put the mask on my face and I didn't even have time to panic before I was out.

I woke up in the recovery room flat on my back and feeling no pain. I had no sense of any time having passed. My mom was there and she told me I was fine and that the surgery went well. My throat was a little sore but I didn't stay awake long so it didn't really matter. I had to stay in the recovery area for quite a while because they didn't have any beds available in ICU yet. Dr. Lin always makes his patients stay in ICU the night of surgery even if there aren't any complications.

So then I finally get to ICU and I'm still mostly out of it but I pay attention when they tell me how to work the button to give myself the pain medication through my epidural! They wouldn't let Mom spend the night in ICU so I was all alone and I couldn't sleep very well. I started feeling some major pain so I pushed the button and waited, nothing happened. I pushed the button again after a while and again no lessing of the pain. After pressing it a third time with no success of pain relief I called the nurse. It turns out that my pain medicine had run out so pushing the button was doing nothing! I expressed to my nurse that I was in extreme pain and needed some help quick. She tried to replace the med in the machine but it wouldn't work. By this time I hurt so bad I wanted to scream but I kept trying to be nice about my pleas for help. Finally a pain team member was paged and showed up to give me a bolus of medicine until they could get the machine fixed. Well, apparently they gave me too much at one time and although that felt good to me all the nurses freaked out because my blood pressure plummeted to 50 something over 30 something which I guess is way too low! So because of that they turned off my pain med again so the pain came back. Luckily about this time, it was getting to be morning and my surgeon's residents came by for rounds and took control and fixed me all up.

Day & Night 2, 3, & 4: These days were pretty much the same. I wasn't allowed any water until the 3rd day. That was hard because I was so thirsty my mouth felt glued together. I had a nasal-gastric tube in until the 3rd day as well and I couldn't wait to get that out even though it hurt when Dr. Lin finally pulled it out! Boy, it felt good to be able to finally get the crud out of my nose (if you know what I mean....). I couldn't sleep well at all in the hospital and my back/buttocks started to hurt. I thought it was because of the hospital bed so I tried not to complain about it too much figuring it would get better when I got home. (Unfortunately it didn't turn out that way and I still have the pain two weeks later.)

Day 5: I got to come home! Yay!