January 23, 2017: Meet the Surgical Team

January 23, 2017 actually starts around October 12, 2016.

Johns Hopkins Center for Bariatric Surgery starts their process with a twelve page application to see if you are a good candidate for their surgery. A week after submission, an applicant can expect a phone call with an initial appointment. My initial appointment was set for January 2017. The online information session recommended I contact my insurance about their requirements to bring that along to the first appointment.

October to January was a weird time. I had not really told anyone I was thinking about the surgery, and I think I wasn't sold on it either. I decided I would go in with an open mind, and if I still hadn't decided I would at least start the process. Somewhere along the way I decided surgery was the way to go, which opened the floodgates for a bit of a three month long rumspringa.

The meeting with the team on January 23 set the tone for what I was about to go through. The Nurse Practitioner saw me first and painted the picture of the appointments to come, and even gave me the referrals for all of the needed appointments. Remember those appointments that I looked up from my insurance company? Yea, I sat there and compared, right there in the examination room, and everything lined up.

In order to have my paperwork submitted to insurance I had to do the following:

1. Four appointments with my Primary Care Provider known from here out as PCP (or three appointments at JH Bayview)
2. An appointment with a Nutritionist
3. An appointment with a Psychiatrist
4. Attend a Group Support session
5. Have an EGD done
6. Have a sleep study done

The meeting lasted 90 minutes and I had tons of time to speak to the Nurse Practitioner and Surgeon and felt comfortable with their ability to answer my questions. I went into the meeting wanting an RNY gastric bypass, and my surgeon thought that given the amount of weight I had to lose that I might be a good candidate for the gastric sleeve. I left the meeting taking her consideration, and going forward as a gastric sleeve patient. In another post I will explain the difference as I see it between RNY and gastric sleeve.

I left that meeting and got to business. I was told that Psych would be the most difficult to schedule so I literally called them from the parking lot, and they were right about that being difficult to schedule. Psych was scheduling for May, and again, this was January 23. Furthermore, they could not schedule me until after my initial appointment with my PCP or my appointment at Bayview. When I figured out this was going to take til the summer, I decided to save my gas and go to my PCP locally rather than drive to Baltimore monthly.

I got home and called my PCP and got in with her later that week, and I also was able to schedule an EGD on January 30 (some things do move fast in this process).

More importantly, I had to start thinking of myself as a Bariatric Patient.

One important thing I took away from the meeting was to start living the lifestyle change now. I was told this would contribute to future success and also if I did resistance training it would help to avoid "skin surgery" after I lost the weight. I want to avoid surgeries at any cost, so I started taking this very seriously.

This story can be taken a few ways. First of all, there are a lot of steps to go through, but this first step, meeting with a surgeon, can be as cheap as a specialist co pay. I felt confident that I could have walked in there, heard something I didn't like, and decided that surgery wasn't for me. But these initial days helped to solidify my decision, and I began to own it.

Next up: The PCP meetings...