So today I wanna talk about all the crap you gotta do to get approved before you can have the surgery. Okay so back in January I decided I wanted to look into getting weight loss surgery. I was for the first time truly unhappy with my body and the weight I put on and further when I visited my doctor for my physical the doc recommended I think about surgery. This was actually the first time a doctor really talked to me about my weight. Crazy right? You would think that on every doctor visit my weight would have came up since according to the docs I'm morbidly obese. Not fat or thick or even just obese but morbidly obese. But no Dr. Theodore, this cute little Indian doc was the first to bring it up. And he tried to do it in the nicest way but at the same time he made it clear that my weight was a serious issue that needed to be addressed asap. I left Dr Theodore's office with a referral for a weight loss surgeon.
I contacted my insurance company which is Cigna and asked if they covered bariatric surgery (weight loss surgery) and they instructed me that they do. I got all the in and outs. Cigna covers 80% and I'm responsible for 20%. Stay tuned because we will talk money later on. Okay so great my insurance covers the surgery. I say the surgery because I wasn't sure which surgery I wanted at this point. There are several weight loss surgeries out there and each has it own benefit. There's gastric bypass (that's mine), gastric banding aka lap band, gastric sleeve, and a couple of others. So in order for my insurance to cover the surgery they required several prerequisites. First, they required a 6 month, physician supervised diet and a psychiatric and/or psychological evaluation. Okay so great I thought. Let's get this thing poppin.
So I contacted the bariatric surgeon Dr. Theodore recommended and that was Dr. Halmi at Blue Point Surgical group. I made an appointment and visited with Dr. Halmi. He also stressed the importance of losing weight. Now eventhough I'm morbidly obese I virtually was in perfect health. No diabetes, no high blood pressure, perfect cholesterol so I had thought I was good. But Dr Halmi explained. Eventhough right now I'm perfectly healthy, all the weight is putting alot of extra stress on my organs and in several years my organs are not going to function right. So we are talking about my kidneys, liver etc-pretty important stuff. Dr. Halmi said he thinks weight loss surgery is needed asap as I'm nearly 400 lbs and am perfectly healthy (meaning surgery can be done with no complications). If i get the surgery now versus waiting till later I have a lot less chance of complications. He also gave me a lot of literature that talks about some scary percentages. One statistic I read was that 90% of people who loss weight (without surgery) gain the weight back. WTF!! 90% that's scary. So that statistic scared me right into enrolling in Dr. Halmi's office 6 month nutritional program which would count as the 6 month physican supervised program I needed for Cigna.
For 6 months, once a month, I visited the office with about 10 others considering surgery and we talked about nutrition with the dietitian. You would be surprised, fat people actually know more about nutrition than skinny people-we just don't listen and eat anyway. The classes were 1 hour and generally focused on one topic. Sadly the classes were kind of a joke. Yes, we went over nutrition and got educated but it wasn't impactful. Or maybe I just wasn't motivated I'm not sure.
Okay so while I'm doing the 6 months of nutrition classes I figured I should do some of the other stuff I needed to get approved for surgery. I had my pysch eval and surprisingly I was found to be "normal" and not suffering from any mental conditions. lol I know some of you may disagree with that diagnosis but hush ur mouth.
One of the things the shrink did talk to me about is the notion that I'm addicted to food. For those of you who know me well, know that I come from a family with addition problems. Now this is an entirely different topic that I could have a completely different blog about but let's stay on task. As a child of parents with substance abuse problems I have a very addicted personality. WHAT??? I'm addicted to food? I still kind of have trouble agreeing with this but I also can see the truth in it. Great! So just like pookie can't leave the crack rock alone are u saying I won't be able to put the drumstick down? geesh I hope not. Okay i digress.
Next on the agenda, sleep study. For years I've been known as a snorer. So what? both my mom and dad snored crazy loud growing up but as I got older people began to tell me that I just didn't snore but that I would stop breathing. My poor mommom would constantly encourage me to visit a doctor to see if I had sleep apnea so I did eventually. And guess what? I do. I had to spend the night in a weird doc office that looked like a hotel with all these gadgets hooked up to me to measure pretty much everything. The sleep study found that I have moderate sleep apnea and stop breathing almost every couple of minutes. This means that I'm never fully rested. Everytime I would enter into REM sleep (the part of the sleep study where you are the deepest in sleep and your body actually rests) I would stop breathing and wake myself up. The longest I stopped breathing in my sleep was almost 2 mins. That's crazy. So they gave me a CPAP machine which is some crazy looking bio hazard mat people looking like device that I was supposed to sleep with. I say supposed to, because I hardly use it. TSK TSK I know!!! but if you saw this thing you wouldn't want to use it either, trust me.
Last thing to get done before my case was submitted to Cigna was to have a Gastroenterology Consult for Upper Endoscopy..alot of crazy technical terms I know. I had an endoscopy which is where the doc puts you to sleep and then inserts a camera down your throat to see what's going on in your GI aka your stomach and throat. And guess what they found? I have hiatel hernia. what's that you may ask? well it means that part of my stomach is sticking through the hole in my diaphragm and is going into my esophagus..this means bad acid reflux. I had no idea i even had something wrong with me. The doc told me that this problem is pretty common with over weight people. Because of all the weight pushing down the hernia is common.
Okay so great I thought I was 100% health but thru this process I found out that I have sleep apnea and hiatal hernia. Okay well that's still not too bad. So I was ready to submit my application to Cigna for insurance approval. I was nervous. What if they say no? I'll be fat forever or what if they say yes than I may be getting surgery. The approval process took less than a month and I was approved. GREAT!!!
Now before I was approved I had to decide which surgery I wanted. Remember I talked about all the surgical options above. I'll go into how I made this selection next time. But to make the long story short I decided on gastric bypass. Okay great now i'm approved for surgery. Up until this point I was iffy. I told those closest to me that I was considering surgery but I still wasn't sure if this was def for me. I was a little scared. I mean surgery is a big deal. People can die from it. I actually knew a guy who did die after gastric. Back when I worked at Barclays a co worker got gastric bypass and died. That's some serious stuff. Now his case is different because he had alot of health issues but still I took this decision seriously.
Once I received insurance approval I just had a couple of other hoops I had to jump thru. I had to meet with the doctor again, I had several visits with a dietitian, I had to have extensive blood work, and several medical tests including an EKG to make sure my heart is healthy, chest x rays, an ultrasound. I think that's all. And eventhough I had to go thru all of that, it's actually not that bad. Most people have several other hoops they have to jump thru.
Last hoop for me is a 2 week modified Atkins diet right before surgery. Oh this diet is something I will def write about. Don't worry. I'm in the 2 week period before surgery (Dec 20) so i'm on this diet now!!!! all i'm going to say is...I"M HUNGRY!!!
I've included a pic of me as I'm getting all of these tests done. The second pic is of the big people chair the hospital has for plus size patients giving blood. this chair is HUGE!
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