brad garland

Well tomorrow is my surgery day. I had to go in today to do some blood work today and had a bit of a fiasco. I should preface this story with two things: 1) It’s about needles, so you don’t like ‘em, don’t read this. 2) I have only been poked about 150 times in my life and totally don’t have a problem with needles.

With that said: I totally passed out for the 1st time today. Looking back I had the deck stacked against me due to me being on a near liquid diet for the past two weeks but still, I’m a big guy and didn’t see it coming at all. The guy was having problems finding the vein on my right arm so he switched to the left. Not a big deal to me since I’m used to them not being found but he switched to the left and still couldn’t find it. He was moving the needle back and forth trying to find it and that’s when I started feeling woozy. I was like, “I can’t believe this yall, but I think I’m going to pass out.” I started getting real dizzy, nauseous, and instantly sweaty. The next thing I noticed they were throwing a cold pack under my arm and telling me to open my eyes. So they had to tote my lame ass into the ER and lay me down and finish getting the blood through the top of my left hand. Sigh, I felt pretty silly all said and done.

So that was today and I gotta go back tomorrow, at 5:15AM mind you, for the surgery. Surgery is supposed to start around 7:30am and will go for a couple of hours. Currently, I’m not nervous at all but that might change in the morning. I keep having battles in my head about whether I’m jumping the gun on this or not. But when I re-read my original post on my decision I feel like I’m making the right decision.

I still need to take some pictures tonight to be able to compare against and I think I’m going to take Carrie’s path of grabbing some clothes that fit now and hopefully watch them shrink on me over the months.

I’m supposed to be in the hospital at least 24 hours so that should have me back home by Thursday or Friday. Wish me luck! I’d appreciate any comments/thoughts/prayers you could send my way.

[tags]gastric bypass surgery, WLS, weight loss, surgery, lapband, brad garland[/tags]