My name is Ivan McManhon. I’m originally from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the home of Cajun cooking and one of the reasons why I got as heavy as I did. I had my surgery on September 19th of 2016 and I lost a little bit over 100 pounds total so far and I feel pretty good about doing that. But this was the best one for me and the least invasive as far as internally in my body and I had a friend of mine that had the surgery and he used Dr. Ganta and when he use Dr. Ganta he got some great results from it and he was very pleased with Dr. Ganta and the report that he had with him and actually the staff that Dr. Ganta has is great. And I really didn’t find that part out until I actually started coming to Dr. Ganta and visiting with him and visiting with his staff and they made you feel warm and welcome when you walked in the door. They knew your name as soon as when you walk in the door they knew who you were. I was like well how they know who I am and it just made me feel real good about that and just over time when they started explaining everything to me I realized that this is what I need to do. This is the surgery for me.

My biggest fear when I first started doing this was the fact that I might die from this surgery. I was thinking and said if I have it I might not wake up from the surgery. I was still a little nervous about having it but then I looked at some photos of myself before and I was like I need to do something because my biggest fear was not waking up from the surgery but my fear then switched to being hey if I keep going down the path that I’m going down I’m going to die from this and I need to do something different. It was like a light bulb clicked for me and I said to myself that fear is irrelevant not waking up from the surgery. My fear now should be if I don’t have the surgery what could end up happening to me.

They just made me feel warm and welcome as far as having. They made me feel like part of the their family whenever I walk in and that is one of the things that made me glad that I came here instead of going anywhere else. Just talking to my friend and the experiences that he went through and then me coming and meeting Dr. Ganta it made me realize that this was a place for me to go.

I feel so much healthier. I’m off of all of my medications. I used to take a diabetic medicine. I take blood pressure medicine. Cholesterol medicine. I don’t take any of that stuff. I’m all through all of it.

First get yourself mentally ready for it because it is a life change. It’s something that will change your life but it will also change your thought process of how things should be and how things are but leading up to the surgery just getting yourself mentally prepared to have it and knowing that if you don’t have it things could end up getting worse than what they are. When you’re at your heaviest weight and you take things for granted of things that you cannot do and I look back on it now and look at things that I can do now like some of the things like it’s just scratching my back. I can scratch the center of my back now with no problems. I can tie my shoes with no problems. Whereas before I’d be out of breath if I were to do something like that and just preparing yourself for what could be afterwards and what you’re going through right now is you can – there’s the end of the rainbow.