How one resident bounced back after getting Bariatric Surgery
WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY)– “During COVID, I had put on like two hundred and forty pounds. I ballooned up, and I got really depressed. I wasn’t living, I was surviving. I was alive, but I wasn’t living. I had to do something at four hundred pounds,” said Jimmy Sanchez.
At more than 400 hundred pounds, that something was Bariatric surgery.
“As they go in, they take two thirds of your stomach out, and they make like a little egg like pouch. You can hold about four to six ounces of food there. That is pretty common. They also do a modified gastric bypass. They go in and they reroute some of your intestines, they bypass the main portion of your intestines, and they reconnect it about three hundred centimeters from the bottom,” said Sanchez.
Jimmy Sanchez is one of about 270 thousand patients that have Bariatric surgery each year in the U.S.
Sanchez’s surgeon, Jayme Stokes, says the procedure is step one in the process.
“The surgery alone doesn’t cause weight loss. The surgery is in consort with lifestyle changes and dietary management, and then sometimes augmentation either before or after surgery with the medications. So, no one tool is perfect. We try to take a very tailored and personalized approach to each patient with alternate weight loss medication,” said Stokes.
Where does Bariatric surgery lie in the age of weight loss drugs like Ozempic? will they make the procedure obsolete? Stokes says no. “The medication has not replaced surgery, if anything it’s a gateway to the Bariatric or weight management world. We work very closely on the surgical and the medical side together to sometimes do both for patients.”
For Sanchez, Stokes told him to do the surgery, and now two hundred pounds less, he has a bucket list.
“I’m doing everything I want. I’ve been skydiving, so I made a bucket list. When I realized I got my life back, I’m wanted to do everything. I made a bucket list, I went skydiving, I’ve been bungee jumping, and I’ve been ziplining. I trained for my first 5K and ran it on November 8th at UNCW in Wilmington,” said Sanchez.
