Confused on Pre Surgery and Vit D

I've had some mixed things suggested to me on what to take for vitamin D. First I was told 1 400mg then 2 400mg and now 3 400 mg on my last visit to my bariatric centre.

How much do we really need? And what recommendations of what brand.

Also do we need one with calcium, if so how much. Thanks!

You need calcium with vitamin D, rather than the other way around, just to be persnickety, but remember that you can't absorb more than 250 or 300 mg of calcium at a time, so don't get a megadose calcium in one pill, it doesnt work that way.

Vitamin D is a weird thing, because its a fat soluble vitamin, you can "overdose" on it, but there are differing camps on how much is too much.

I'd land somewhere in the middle, and see how your levels are.

Your need for Vit D is also dictated by how much time you spend outside.

I originally believed we couldn't absorb more than 500 at once and I asked the dietician and she said that I could take my pills two at a time twice a day which meant more than 600 at once.
All this conflicting info drives me nuts.

Do you think my pharmacist made a mistake? I'm taking 3 calcium citrate pills a day, here is the stats per pill:

Calcium 250mg
Vitamin D 1.25 mcg/50 IU

For the people on pre op vitamins, what are you taking? I don't want to O.D. On vitamins.

I take two Mega Cal Calcium (chocolate) chews a day. Each comes with 650mg of Calcium and 400IU of Vitamin D3. I take one at lunch, one at dinner - not with multivitamins.  My clinic said we can handle  My clinic recommends between 1200-2000mg of Calcium and 400-800 IU of Vitamin D per day.

This is all post-op.

My clinic suggested taking 1,000 IU of Vitamin D pre-op, and didn't say anything about Calcium. 

I don't have any dosage amounts with me at work here, but I can tell you a couple of things.  Apparently we in Canada are all Vitamin D deprived compared to those in the south because of how much exposure to the sun we get.  I definitely supplement with vitamin D, mostly in the winter.  I just got back from a week in the Dominican Republic and man oh man did my hair and nails ever grow in that week!  Kind of makes me think that I should increase my vitamin D even more, but I will have to check numbers for toxicity.  Also, my understanding is that a Dry vitamin D is recommended for those that malabsorb.

I take 2000IU of dry D3 as a pre-op and my values are still low. The best thing to do is to get a test and find out what your number is and then supplement accordingly. You could need up to 50,000IU a day if your values are very low, so taking doses of 1000IU a day is perfectly safe and probably much too little.

Man I feel like an idiot,I forgot to include my one dry "centrum materna aka pre natal" that has among many things:

250 calcium per pill

400 UI vitamin D per pill

I still feel that wasn't enough, so I popped into the nutrition corner and picked up some Swiss natural chewable peppermint Vit D that has 1000 UI per pill and I will be taking 2 of them a day bringing my Vit d to 2400 UI plus the 150 UI from my cal citrate

Check and make sure all your vitamin D is D3 and NOT D2. D2 is poorly absorbed.

It's funny. At Guelph I was told to take a prenatal multivitamin but other than that it depended on how my blood work was. So at six months and a year all things were good so they didn't suggest anything else.
I was asked what extra supplements I was taking. I was taking calcium citrate with vitamin D, Vitamin B complex (which they said I didn't need to take and if I had to take later down the road to use a sublingual one) and that was it.

I'm glad to hear that Sandy said her hair and nails grew well in the Dominican. I am gone down to Nicaragua for three months and I hope my hair grows longer and fuller while there. At 16 months out from surgery my hair is filling in and I like it but it would be nice to have it all get back to normal. My nails haven't been strong since the surgery