Hi. My name is Janet and I’m here to tell you about the gastric bypass surgery that I had and my husband, Dennis’, after I had mine in April–he had his in September. He decided it was such a good deal for me that it was going to be great for him.
I’m a nurse and I had retired and put on–woah! Beaucuop weight. I was almost to the point where I couldn’t get out of bed and get to the kitchen. My knees hurt so bad, I couldn’t breath–everything was pushing on everything.
I was just–I thought like I was on my deathbed. I really did. I didn’t think I was going to live another year, and when I looked into it and found out about the surgery–I was going to have knee surgery first to get my knees replaced–but when I found out about this I decided I would give it a try first.
And, lo and behold, I think I have lost at least 10-15 years–at least! It felt–I feel so much better. I can get up. I can do anything. I can run. I can do jumping-jacks. I can breath. Everything. I mean everything is just fantastic.
And now I’m getting ready to go back home; go out and do some farming–that’s hard work–but, I Iove farming.
Anyway, I’ve had a wonderful experience and these people here are just–Oh, my gosh!–I can’t believe how helpful and how supportive and it’s just like–it’s unreal!
The way that things have gone; I had no problem with the surgery; I got out of surgery–I didn’t even know I had the surgery. I was ready to do jumping-jacks when I got out of surgery–I was so happy!
I was able to walk around and breath and everything, just right away because I did have a problem…I think a hernia, or something, that Dr. Umbach–Dr. Tom–had fixed while he was in surgery, and I think that was 90% of my breathing problem, which I thought I had COPD. I thought I was really dying.
From there, it was just a matter of keep going and changing my diet and coming to support group and helping–getting help from everybody–as far as they’re telling me what their experiences were and then I was telling other people what my experiences were and it has just really worked out wonderful.
And my husband looks at me and says, “Hmm…Hmm…She’s doing too good!” And he’s concerned because he’s a semi-truck driver–he’s got a CDL license and with the CDL these days, now they’re talking about if your neck is too big around, that you have sleep apnea, you have other issues, then they will take your license away.
You get high blood pressure, you get diabetes, you get any other issues, you get too big, they’re going to stop you from driving anymore and we didn’t want to lose his job and so he decided to go ahead and do the surgery after he saw how I was doing.
And now he’s doing fantastic, too. And he’s getting around a lot better and he’s feeling 100% better as well. Now he’s planning on driving his semi a lot longer than he thought he would and he doesn’t have to go in for a once-a-year physical for his CDL license.
He only has to go every two years, like any normal person. But there for a while he was looking at going once a year, and maybe getting pulled because of his blood pressure got too high or if something else was going on.
Y’know, his big issue was his size and he already had one surgery to stay in the military. So, here we are, now he’s got this done and I think this time it’s going to last–it’s going to stay with him.
