Bariatric Surgery and Death

We often go to McDonald's for a Sunday breakfast. It's a bit of a tradition thing for the family, a bit of a familiar routine in which I take comfort and the family accepts as a quirk of my own (although I think my son is simply a fan of the scary clown-man mascot).

We've been there enough that the morning manager knows us. But the sad parenting and horrible habits implied by a weekly trip to a fast-food joint for a meal notwithstanding this has led to finding yet another person with a connection to bariatric surgery.

When the manager found out I had had Roux-en-Y surgery she told us about her brother in law. He died four years ago the night after having the surgery.

We're told before the surgery that there are risks. We're warned about them, but I don't htink the numbers really don't sink in. We're bolstered as we hear about the success stories and meet many other people that we never suspected had the surgery...I mean, probably half of the nurses attending to my recovery in the three days post-op said they had the surgery and never regretted it.

This was the first time I had heard of a death of a patient from someone we know.

To be fair it was a complication of the surgical procedure that could have happened to anyone who had surgery. She said that he had sleep apnea, undiagnosed, and basically that night had vomited in his sleep and choked to death.

I couldn't imagine it happening in my case; I was hooked to monitors up the wazoo, I had nurses on rotating shifts checking every hour, I had excellent care fresh from surgery with a one-on-one nurse until I was transferred, eight hours later, to a room...

My wife said that this was four years ago and it's possible that in that time things have significantly changed in procedure, or maybe it was a per-hospital thing that made the difference, although this hospital where it happened is a rather big name for our state; one that if you lived in our state or in a nearby state I'd bet you've heard of them.

I was aware of the chance of dying. I think you'd be unhealthy not to have some fear of it going in...especially faced with the knowledge that someone is about to wrap his fingers around your intestines. Not even my wife can say she did that and we tend to have been pretty intimate with each other. But I also realized that if I didn't have the surgery I was facing a slower death from the comorbities of my obesity...diabetes, heart attack, stroke...all of which carry a greater chance that I'll die prematurely. Essentially there was a slim chance of death by surgery vs. the very high chance I'll die later but prematurely compared to a successful surgery.

I was also aware that the surgery carries a risk that there will be complications not just during and soon after the operation, but years down the road something could happen (such as twisting of bowel or blockage in the digestive tract); the more time that goes by the further from the woods I would get, and right now I'm probably in a pretty safe place.

So if you're considering the surgery you do need to educate yourself on the risks and at the same time put them into perspective. Things can and do happen. Bad things. And you'll definitely not have a necessarily simple path to follow. As I've written before here this isn't a magic bullet and it's not simple...even my own surgeon doesn't have all the answers on how this works with the body's reactions to food and weight loss, and now, nearly two months down, I'm still struggling with issues like figuring how in @#% I'm eating less than a cup of food three times a day and still my weight is "stuck" at a plateau (stupid body...fighting weight loss...retaining water?...but that's going off topic again).

Where was I? Oh yes. Educate yourself. Be aware that there are risks. But put them into perspective. Perspective was the saving grace that got me out of bed the morning of the surgery and told me not to run away down the hallway with my gown flapping in the wind before the doctor could pull his favorite scalpel out and get to work on me.