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Dr. Ellner shares what a woman can expect during her first office visit for bariatric revision surgery.
Dr. Ellner:
If you are a patient needing a revision, the first visit to a doctor’s office will frequently be after you’ve had an endoscopic evaluation of your pouch. So the surgeon, when you visit with them, will already have the measurements of the pouch and the stoma to really have a very good conversation with you about what the options are.
I spend a great deal of time with every one of my patients coming in for an initial consultation trying to discuss what went wrong the first time. Let’s figure out where the weak link in the chain was the first time around so we can make sure that going forward with the revision, we don’t make the same mistake again. Most frequently in my discussion with patients, I would find that the patients really weren’t educated about how to use their tool in the first place.
I had a patient yesterday that I was speaking to on the phone and I was running through just the basics of how to use a gastric bypass, and by the end of the conversation, she was flabbergasted, saying, “I wish I had known this the first time around because I probably wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation with you.”
So there should be an extensive conversation with the surgeon about what happened the first time around with the gastric bypass or with the banding, then discussing the surgical options, and then discussing the expectations after surgery.
I frequently tell my patients to get started on the appropriate post-operative regimen for whatever revision they choose before surgery so we can identify any eating behaviors that need to be worked on, any exercise schedules that need to be worked out, so we make sure that all of our ducks are in a row. Then the patient comes in and has the surgery, and they are off and running.
About Dr. Ellner, M.D.:
Dr. Julie Ellner, M.D., is a bariatric surgeon and medical director of Alvarado's Surgical Weight-Loss Program at Alvarado Hospital.
Visit Dr. Ellner at Alvarado Hospital