Drinking harder than eating - EUREKA!

On My 22nd, a couple of weeks after my last fill, I posted ("Saliva, tightness, choking and all that jazz") about the weird experience I was having of being able to get food down, but struggling with liquids. I had asked a number of people about this and although I found a few others who had experienced the same, nobody could explain the phenomenon. Logic suggests that liquids should go down much more easily than solid foods - but t'was not the case..... Anyway, today I happened upon a web site called http://www.fillprovider.net/. It has been set up by an anaesthetist Dr. Kai Rabenstein who, on one morning per week, runs a clinic (in the south east of England) providing fills for gastric band patients(at £75 a time). He started the clinic after his wife had a gastric band fitted. The web site includes some really interesting advice and guidance - interesting because it is particularly frank and honest. For example, he says:

"I think it needs to be spelled out clearly that, certainly for the initial weight loss period, perfect restriction sometimes means being so tight that you experience some regurgitation of food, drink and saliva - known as "productive burps" (PBs). Patients who are horrified by this prospect and the consequent need to develop strategies to hide PBs from others in a social context ....... are unlikely to find success with AGB [adjustable gastric band] implantation and should probably choose a different WLS [weight loss surgery] strategy".

I don't know about you, but I find this approach refreshingly honest. So, back to the drinking and eating thing. Dr Rabenstein says:

"Because the oesophagus (the gullet) and the stomach itself are designed by nature to actively advance food "down the line" through a wave of muscular contraction (called peristalsis), patients with AGBs may find that with tight restriction they can still swallow food (which is solid and therefore will be gripped and propelled beyond the band by the peristaltic movement) but not liquid (which is too "elastic" for peristalsis to get a grip on). That means that in case of temporary severe restriction, the need for an emergency defill can sometimes be avoided by eating sodden solid food or semi-solids."

So I wasn't going mad after all!!