Introductions

Wow blogs seem so 15 years ago!  My name is Brad and in January of 2017 I weighed 425 pounds when I first heard the name of Dr. Zavalza and GoLight Bariatrics.  I had thought about bariatric surgery for years, but it was not covered by my insurance and my friends whose insurance did cover it had many hoops to jump through only to have it 1/2 covered leaving them many thousands to pay anyway.  When I found out I could get it done for about $4200 (then) I decided to contact GoLight.

By March I made the decision and scheduled a sleeve surgery for June of 2017.  I started the preop diet right away and over the next few months I dropped in weight from 425 to 366 pounds on surgery day.  Over the next year I would continue to drop and the lowest I ever saw the scale was 269 pounds about a year after surgery.  I was ecstatic.  I fit in normal clothes and could do lots of things that I couldn't do before (like sit in an office chair or ride a roller coaster with my kids).  

I cannot say that I followed the diet and healthier lifestyle requirements as well as I should have (I have a sweet tooth), but I did not completely go back to bad old habits either.  Over the next year I regained and settled at about 315-320 where I stayed for almost 3 years until the fall of 2021.  

My wife had encouraged me to get surgery and was a great cheerleader through all of this.  She also suffers from obesity, but did not exactly have a favorable outlook on surgery for herself.  She wanted to lose the weight on her own and for 4 years she said that over and over again.  Then in January of 2021 her best friend had surgery and she went along as the companion.  She was impressed by what she saw but stuck with her "do-it-myself" opinion through the summer.  We planned a family trip in the spring of 2021 to Florida and she set some weight loss goals for that trip and ended up not achieving them.  

During that summer because of her friend and I, her opinions and feelings about whether surgery was right for her began to change and by September we were talking about surgery.  She knew that I had considered a revision to bypass and together we reached out to GoLight and started the process again.  By October our surgeries were scheduled, money was secured (I borrowed from my retirement account), and we scheduled for January 14.  I started the preop diet again at 325 pounds. The next few entries are a log of our experiences.

I tend to be quiet in person, but quite verbose when writing.  If my rambling gets to be too much, each entry will have a "Too Long (TL)/Didn't Read (DR)" summary at the bottom.  Obviously this blog will have lots of entries at first and will taper off to occasional, rare, and then never again.  Enjoy, and I hope it answers your questions.


TL/DR

First surgery

High weight: 425; surgery weight: 366; lowest weight:269


Revision (my wife is having surgery too)

High weight: 325; surgery weight: 310; current weight: 296 (10 days post op).


(The family at Hogwarts, my son loves making silly faces, believe it or not, this was the best picture)

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