Guest guest Posted August 28, 2001 Report Share Posted August 28, 2001 In a message dated 8/28/2001 3:01:25 PM Pacific Daylight Time, melaniemag@... writes: > http://www.yakima-herald.com/cgi-bin/liveique.acgi$rec=37890?home Dr. Heap is 62????? OMG I met him for a consult before finding out I'd have to self pay and I never would have put him in his 60's....LOL I was a phone call away from making a date with him....He's a good surgeon!! ~*~ AJ ~*~ Age 37 5'8'' Post op 7/24/01 Open BPD/DS self pay - Dr Baltasar -Alcoy Spain 07/24/01 BMI 64 415.1 08/06/01 BMI 59 390.2 -24.9 lbs! 08/16/01 BMI 58 387.0 -27.9 lbs! 08/24/01 BMI 58 386.5 -28.6 lbs! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted August 28, 2001 Report Share Posted August 28, 2001 Yakima Herald-Republic Top Stories Home Front Editorials Letters Weddings Births Death Notices Weather Calendar Search News Local Sports Stories Outdoors News Columns Body & Soul Community Entertainment Families Life Business Taste Travel Unleashed Voices of the Valley National and World Subscribe Place an Ad Find a Home Classifieds Write Letters Advertisers YHR Jobs Newsroom Circulation Directory Exec. Directory History Surgeon Trims Yakima Woman's Stomach Published in the Herald-Republic on Saturday, August 4, 2001 PAUL DUNN/Yakima Herald-Republic Pat Mahoney goes over a list of questions she'd brought to Dr. Heap during her pre-operation exam. Dunn/Yakima Herald-Republic A monitor attached to Pat Mahoney's finger helps track her vital signs during surgery. At 7:45 a.m. nurses wheel Pat Mahoney into the operating room, where she lies on her side, tubes sticking out of her like vines on a trellis. She's ready, but restrained. " I'm starting to get kind of nervous, " she'd said as she waited in the hospital lobby. In a few minutes the Yakima woman will be unconscious as her Richland surgeon, Dr. Heap, performs a distal gastric bypass with duodenal switch. The controversial procedure, which involves removing a large portion of the patient's stomach, forces dangerously obese people to reduce their food intake. Mahoney hopes the operation starts her on the road back to self-respect -- which has been in short supply lately. She's been told, though, that the after-effects of the surgery will be tough. Take it one day at a time, doctors have advised, and rejoice in getting through those first few post-operative days. She scoffs at the notion. " Are they kidding? " she asks. " I've had two C-sections, when they cut you open and then give you a baby to take care of immediately afterwards. Now that's tough. " Heap has been encouraging, but he doesn't want to get Mahoney's hopes up too high. " I'm not God, " he tells her, " but I do the best I can. Your chances of having a complication through me are one in 400 patients. I'm not particularly worried that I'm going to kill you. " Bright lights engulf Mahoney as she lies on the operating table. The anesthesiologist, standing behind her next to a vital signs monitoring machine with a dizzying array of knobs and graphic displays, asks if she's ready, then slowly pumps a strong anesthetic into her arm, sending her to dreamland five seconds later ... Mahoney, who is 5-feet-7, has doubled her weight in the past two decades, ballooning from an athletic 125 to her current weight of 250 pounds. During her Army days, from 1975-78, she ran five miles a day -- whether she wanted to or not -- and ate whatever she wanted. But then she got married -- and pregnant soon thereafter. That's when the pounds started to pile on and wouldn't come off. The day her second child, , was born, Mahoney weighed 199 pounds. " I remember saying at that point 'Harpoon me if I ever get over 200,' " she recalls. " If I would have kept myself in shape after the first baby (, born in 1978), I would have avoided all the heartbreak of all the years after. " By 1996, the harpoon had plunged, wiggling clockwise like the needle on a bathroom scale. A hysterectomy that same year didn't help matters; pretty soon Mahoney began feeling despicable. She had become the enstein of obesity -- burdened with the fat and the scars to prove it. The forthright woman with the easy laugh was at the end of her rope. Mahoney's health demanded drastic action. Her goal: to lose 115 pounds. She's had 22 surgeries -- many of them directly attributable to her weight. She's tried every diet imaginable, every diet drug on the market and every prayer in the world to shed the pounds. Her exercise program, such as it is, has been severely limited by her surgeries -- including seven for knee problems. Her right knee looks like the deflated crown of Mount St. Helens -- the kneecap having been removed a few years back because it couldn't stand the strain. And though the obesity surgery Mahoney elected to try will, in many eyes, make her more attractive -- it's just the icing on the cake. Mahoney's more concerned about walking again without pain and fatigue, having more energy, improving her demeanor and being less self-conscious about her appearance. The surgical staff gathers around her as she lies on the operating table, belly exposed. Heap enters the room with the confidence of a man about to do battle with a foe he knows he can conquer. " OK, " he asks the anesthesiologist " are we ready? " A nod and a " yes " signal the beginning of the 21/2-hour surgery. Heap carefully cuts an 8-inch path down Mahoney's midsection -- from belly button to breasts. He has to work at it to get through the 2 inches or so of fatty tissue that encase Mahoney's intestines. Once the cavity has been opened, he sticks his arm inside and rummages around, feeling for areas of concern: ulcers, ovary problems. It's an odd sight -- a regular Thanksgiving turkey stuffing. Heap's obviously used to it, though -- his manner suggesting a practiced routine. Small cloth rags are used to soak up blood, then discarded onto a tarp on the operating floor. Suction devices keep the surgical area free of welled-up blood. Once Heap's satisfied that no surprises await him, he gets down to business. To the untrained eye, Mahoney's insides are a mish-mash of squishy, rope-like tissue. But Heap and his staff are unfazed. " It's just like looking underneath the hood of a car, " Heap explains later. " If you've never seen one before you're not going to know what you're looking at. " Minutes fly by. Heap calls out for instruments, suture twine, suction -- and his assistants respond with assembly-line precision. The occasional miscommunication draws an " Oh, come on, " from the gray-haired surgeon. After an hour or so, Heap gets to the stomach. Using a device that he first clamps down, then slides at the top to shear the tissue, he cuts around the curved end of the organ, taking a couple of passes to complete the transection. He has to push hard to get through the stomach walls -- no delicate shilly-shallying here. Finishing the procedure, he triumphantly displays the 80 percent of Mahoney's stomach that she now no longer owns. A moment or two later he reaches back into Mahoney's cavity and cradles the remainder of the stomach in his hand, holding the transected flaps together as he sutures them shut. Mahoney's stomach, once the size of a football, is now just a banana. At this point, a royal blue tracing fluid is pumped into the new stomach, causing it to bloat like a miniature bota bag. " We're making sure the new stomach won't leak along the suture line, " Heap says. Satisfied the pouch is fluid-tight, he works to hook up the new stomach to the duodenum, the first segment of the small intestine, which he has transected at about 2 inches beyond the pyloric valve, which regulates the emptying of the stomach's contents into the small intestine. After all the right connections are made, Heap checks Mahoney's intestinal cavity to make sure the procedure has gone as well as possible. Finally pulling his hands out of Mahoney's open midsection, he declares the procedure complete, and loosely sutures his patient's gaping incision. The attending nurse then staples the slit closed. " Well, how did it go? " Heap's second-in-command -- a nurse with 30 years of surgery room experience -- is asked as Mahoney lies on the table before being wheeled to post-op. " It was really smooth, " she answers. " He's a master -- makes it look easy. " A few minutes later, Heap's operating crew gives a heave-ho and Mahoney slides from the operating table to an adjustable bed -- which is then wheeled into the post-operation room. Mahoney's face is waxlike, pale, worn. Every few minutes her eyes flutter open and she moans, then falls back to sleep, her intermittent snores breaking the silence in the room. An oxygen mask is placed over her nose and mouth to help her along. Mahoney's attending nurse speaks to her every so often, judging how much pain medication to administer and how well Mahoney's enduring her surgical anesthesia. " Pat, how are you doing? " the nurse asks. " Hurt, " Mahoney replies. The nurse gives Mahoney an armful of a pain drug called " fentinyl, " which she says is 10 times more powerful than morphine. " Even with the drug, though " the nurse adds, " some of the patients directly after surgery are writhing in pain. " Mahoney isn't writhing -- she isn't awake enough, yet. After about an hour in the recovery room, she's wheeled into an elevator just big enough to hold the bed and levitated upstairs to her room -- where she'll spend the next couple of days. She's still not fully awake, but cognizant enough to remember why she's there. " I'm so thirsty, " she tells the nurse, then falls asleep. ©2001 All Photos, Content and Design are Properties of the: Yakima Herald-Republic Partners- For questions or additional information about this site, e-mail us at: webmaster@... or Send your comments to: 114 North 4th St. Yakima, WA 98901 Attention: Webmaster Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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