Nip/Tuck & ER Visit

Strange title? Yep! It helps me keep my posts organized ;o)

I was feeling great on Thursday. Had my doctor's appointments, and that evening went to my Weight Loss Surgery Support Group at WFUBMC. It was Nip/Tuck night at Group. The guest speaker was Dr. Andrew Schneider, MD from Forsyth Plastic Surgery in Winston-Salem. I'm only 6 weeks out from surgery so I'm far from even thinking about extra skin and some of the unflattering results of extreme rapid weight loss BUT it was good to hear about the options and see what could happen in the coming months and years.

The reason people have excess skin is because the skin has lost it's elasticity, and is not able to bounce back into place after weight loss. According to Dr. Schneider, the longer a person is overweight, the less elastic the skin may be. So the younger you are, the better.

Several people in Group have had the 360 Body Lift (I can't remember the medical term for this). Which is an incision all the around the body at the hips. The skin is then pulled up and down, and the excess is removed. In short, it is a way to iron out the wrinkles.

Another common surgery is an abdominoplasty or Tummy Tuck. This helps to get rid of excess skin in the lower abdominal area.

According to the doctor, there is little you can do to get rid of flabby skin after weight loss. Exercise will tighten the muscles but it does nothing for the skin. I found this interesting because this is the opposite of what I've been told and read among WLS blogs.

Plastic surgery is one of the procedures that is usually not covered by insurance. I was (pleasantly) surprised to hear that in this area of NC, plastic surgery starts around $7,500 and goes to $15,000 depending on the procedure and complications.

So that's the long and short of what was covered in Group. Informative but not something that's on my radar right now.

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my ER visit...
Friday morning I bolted out of bed at 5am with severe back pain on my left side, and was sick to my stomach. (Not good for someone who doesn't have anything in their stomach.) I took a 25mg Phenergan - my surgeon gave me a prescription after surgery to use as needed to help with nausea. The Phenergan helped for about an hour by the pain in my back escalated. I took some Lortab Elixir (a pain med I was also given) and it didn't even take the edge off. At 10am, I told Richard something was not right, and he took me to the emergency room. My bp was up, and I was running a low grade fever. They did some blood tests & I was diagnosed with a severe kidney infection. ER for a kidney infection = embarrassed. So I got some meds, and I've been holding the couch down since then.

Even though I wasn't diagnosed with it... I think I may have had a kidney stone. This same thing happened back in October, and they called it a kidney infection too. The sudden pain seems to add up better with a stone. Anyway, I'm going to talk to my doctor about it at my next appt. For now... I'm on the mend :o)

Yesterday (2/25) I woke up at