Well, I'm Allie from the Dallas area in Texas. I haven't been on OH in quite some time! I actually lost my previous login so i had to make a new account.

SO much has happened since last i was here. To back track, i had problems with my Roux en Y I had in April 2007 starting at 6 weeks out. It was a never ending nightmare of not being able to eat or drink without horrible pain and dealing with malnutrition and PICC lines and TPN and constant hospitalizations. That went on for 6 1/2 years.

Then i had a year that was actually good. I could eat and was keeping on weight. I had gone from 450 to 170 in around that first year,but then I started actually gaining some. Then came October of 2014. I started vomiting. It started at about 50% of what I ate to almost 2 years later it was virtually almost everything I ate. In August of 2016, I finally got some nutritional support via a J tube. But the tubing community was going through somewhat of a crisis with a mandatory change in connectors to a tube that hadnt even come out yet...so we were all left with adapters that didnt always connect with our devices...at least not mine for sure. I then went through 4 J tube changes in as many months...which then led me to not even be able to tolerate my feeds at all anymore. That led me to having to be put on a PICC line and TPN in January 2017.

I finally got referred to a world renowned surgeon for doing revisions, Dr David Provost. He proposed a radical reconstruction of my Roux en Y. He performed an endoscopy and found my initial pouch was made too big. It was skewing for some reason and basically closing itself off which was why i was throwing up so often. He performed the surgery for reconstruction on March 20, 2017. He removed my useless J tube at that time. He turned my 120cc pouch into a 5cc pouch. It was discovered at the time of surgery that my pouch had grown into my remnant stomach, which he had to detach...but that was something we never saw in any imaging or upper GI series or anything. After surgery, I then could finally hold down food. I kept the PICC line in for an additional 5 weeks and it then came out when i was allowed to start eating solids. I was excited by the prospect that I could finally eat like a normal human being again! While to this day I can still eat, I have to eat every 2-3 hours literally...like as much as I can...because Ive been malabsorbing so badly, im losing weight at quite a pace.

Ive dropped 50 pounds since November and have quite a few severe nutrient deficiencies, despite taking 4 times the daily amount of required vitamins for an adult. I also am fat malabsorbing which has been observed in the hospital in my stool. No one has a clue as to why this is happening other than maybe my newest pouch was made to small. Im again left in a position of having no idea whats wrong with my body, no way to fix it even with my best efforts, and not getting any answers from the people i should or getting the nutritional support that i obviously require again.

This is such a frustrating situation. I deal with the effects of being chronically malnourished for literally almost the whole 11 years since ive have my WLS. I have left sided heart failure that gets gradually worse as the malnutrition persists. I wonder if things were done wrong in one or all my surgeries and i have no clue where to turn for help now. I dont want to die from the aftermath of WLS and WLS reconstruction....but i dont know that my body has any reserves left to it....and its super scary.

I guess i just wanted to tell this community that id been a part of for years in the past my story, and seek support that i havent received since last i was here.. from people that have been through it or similar...that may understand the struggle I still deal with. And not knowing whats ahead of me is scary...and i know i cant do it alone anymore with no support.

Thank you for reading my story and offering any support you can ?