Surgical Treatment of Obesity

The Procedure

Upon arrival in the operating room:

You will be greeted by the nurses and anesthesia staff who will participate in the procedure.
You will be given medications to go to sleep and a tube will be placed into your windpipe to breath for you.
Next, a Foley (bladder) catheter will be placed to monitor urine output and keep the bladder empty.

The procedure:

We believe the gastric exclusion procedure is best and that is the operation we perform. Under most circumstances, the incision will be made from the end of the breast bone to the belly button.
A tube is placed through the nose into the stomach while you are asleep. When you wake up, this tube will be present. It is extremely important that it remain in place, as it serves to keep pressure from building up in the small part of the stomach. It is removed on the 2^nd or 3^rd day after the operation.
During the procedure we will not only reduce the capacity of the stomach but we will also remove the gallbladder and place a tube into the bypassed part of the stomach to keep the part that we bypassed empty during the first few days after surgery. This tube will be removed in the office at two weeks. We remove the gallbladder because approximately 30% of those who have this operation develop acute gallbladder attacks following surgery.
More about gallbladder surgery
During this operation, we will thoroughly explore the abdomen. If we find something wrong, we will try to correct it at the same time.
At the end of the procedure, we place a small drain (tube) into the fat at the site of the incision to reduce fluid collections and infections in the wound.