My name is Tasha and I’m from Austin. I had the gastric bypass in June of 2015. I have currently lost 210 pounds. My weight has always been a theme in my life. I was always a very large child in comparison to everyone else. It started off with me just being taller and then I just was much much larger. I had to buy women’s clothes when I was ten years old. So wearing floral dresses when everybody else is wearing t-shirts and shorts and things and I couldn’t do that and I got to around the age of 30 and I tried to really honestly make a change was my health started to digress and that effort would kind of didn’t go really well at all and I just kind of gave up and then flash-forward to about a few more years I was 34 years old and my health I was living on borrowed time pretty much at that point. And a little bitty cute bundle joy came into my life in front of my niece. She’s two years old now and she needed somebody to take care of her and I was the person and it was one thing when it’s just me but when somebody else needs you you can’t really be that selfish and continue to live your life that way and so I had to make some very strong decisions and I made this decision. It was probably the best one I’ve ever made for myself.

My initial research was just to see like what options I had in general that wasn’t surgery based and then just looking at all of my ailments, all the medications and everything that was going on in my life I realized that I need to look at surgery and just as the option and I started at the very basic you know forms of surgery and then when the facts started to build up I realized that I was probably going to have to do a gastric bypass given how large I was and my health. From there you have to look at who is in your area and who is highly recommended, who is highly certified qualified and has a base the medical base that can support them and you can support you as well and Dr. Ganta kept coming up at the top of the list every single time.

The fear you have with anything especially when you talk about surgery is that it’s surgery and there’s always the possibility of things not going well at all. The great thing about this office is that they’re very open and honest about everything. They don’t shy away from the scary part. They put it up front and then they talk about the precautions and the things that they go through to make sure that that is minimum for you. I personally had to do a lot of additional testing prior to the procedure to make sure that I was physically sound in order to even go through it and that was really important to me that I did they weren’t just going to say yeah you can have the surgery they wanted to make sure that I was a viable candidate and that it was going to be the healthiest option for me and that made me feel really at peace when I made my decision.

For me personally this is the person that I’ve always been I just couldn’t accommodate that at the size that I was. I literally was dressing other people all the time helping them pick out their hair, the hair color, you had to get their nails done, what shoes to wear, how to present themselves; all those things because I couldn’t do it for myself and so to be able to go and do those things for myself it really I thought I was going to have a harder time dealing with this emotion because I spent so many years being that large person. I was very big in person so I try to be super soft and super nice and super agreeable all the time even though I had as much that doesn’t make sense I don’t like this but I didn’t want to impose myself on anyone because I was so physically imposing in my mind and then to be able to kind of dress that back and just be myself and be as flamboyant as I want to be it just made me feel good about myself all over again. So there was an emotional adjustment but I was surprised that it wasn’t as tough as I thought it was going to be because once again I was just really circling back to the person that I actually was.

They’re so much more different than a lot of other doctors and because it’s not about what he wants to accomplish, it’s about what you want to accomplish. The questions he asked and his staff asked of you our questions that are really zero down to what your goals are and that way they can assist whether or not they’re the right people to help you out. Quite often you’re trying to figure out yourself can this work. They try to make sure are you the right patient you don’t have the right mindset. They have all the tools to help you but you had – this is literally just the beginning of everything else like this is going to be one really important day and then you have all of this work ahead of you and if you’re not the right patient all of his efforts and all their efforts are for not and they’re not you know mean or rude or disrespectful they’re just very honest with you. One of the things being a very large person quite often when you go to a doctor’s office is they don’t want to hurt your feelings and so that they are on it but it’s softer but here is not that they’re terse or curt they’re just very specific it means zero down to what you need so that when you make your decision whether you want to work with them or not and whether they want to work with you or not it’s very honest and clear and you understand why the decision was made and for me that’s it’s crucial because you’re talking about your life and your health and if somebody that has that in their hands can be that honest and open with you then it says a lot for the partnership you can have in the future because this is going to be a long process.

If you’re kind of teetering on whether or not this is the right thing for you I mean I really want you to step back and look at your life right now and say is this working out. Every time I come into the office most of the individuals that I see are late 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and they didn’t just get big yesterday. So you probably have lived your life 10, 20 years that size and maybe you’re okay as a young person as you got older like how much pain are you in physically, how much pain are you in emotionally, how much money are you spending on clothes, how much money are you spending on food, let’s be honest about all those things. How much easier will it be, will it be easy for you to do deal with those things if you can take one little piece out of it. If you can take this big cushion out of the way then you can honestly deal with those things and then your life will be much better. It won’t be what it is right now whatever it is. So I mean there that’s the real decision is do I want to keep living the way that I am right now or do I want to give myself an opportunity to live a different way and at that point if you can make whatever decision you make that’s fine but that’s the more honest way to look at it I think.