Hells to the NO!!!!

Eddie and I talked about going through this 1-800-GET-THIN place. I was not thrilled about it. It gave me a bad feeling. But he started the process anyway to see how far he could get. The first thing he did was go to a medical facility and have some blood work done and an endoscopy. On our way there though, we went to his primary care doctor and had a full physical. This may seem strange, but the physical had been scheduled months before and I wanted his current physical condition in his medical record.

We got the blood test results back from the primary doc a few days later. Blood sugar was normal. Cholesteral and triglycerides high.

Eddie went back to the homeless shelter, I mean, 1-800 offices, to do an overnight sleep study to see if he had sleep apnea. I had suspected for quite a while that he did suffer from apnea. He does the strangest things in the middle of the night and he is never fully rested in the mornings.

Now that all the testing was done, all we had to do was wait to hear back from the 1-800 people and schedule surgery. But we didn't hear back from them for quite a while. Eddie called them almost every day for a month and wasn't able to speak to anyone.

Eddie actually got a call from our insurance provider to offer him support as he goes through this surgery and transition. She asked Eddie if the doctor had explained to him how to handle his diabetes. WAIT! WHAT?????? Eddie doesn't have diabetes. The insurance person said the report the doctor sent over showed that he had diabetes and sleep apnea. This was the first we had heard any of this. We knew for sure his blood sugar was fine when he did the blood tests. The insurance person also asked if he had been fitted for his CPAP (sleep apnea machine). NOPE!!!!! We hadn't heard anything about the results from the sleep study.

So now we started to really think about this 1-800 place more and more. The surgery was to be done at a surgical center in either Beverly Hills or Doheny. Eddie got a call with the surgeon and the location and date. So Eddie started researching this doctor. Come to find out he had just lost a LapBand patient on the table that week. He decided right then and there that he was NOT having this doctor work on him. In his research he found the doctor had been in several different states. It just didn't feel right.

Then we started researching more about the 1-800 people. It made us sick to find out that 1-800-GET-THIN is their 3rd name so far. They keep getting sued and just changing their name. The "surgical center" in Beverly Hills has also changed it's name 3 times because they keep getting shut down, yet they are still owned by the same 2 people. I would call them doctors, but they have BOTH had their medical licenses revoked. These two men are the ones who own 1-800-GET-THIN. (Which has now been asked by the makers of LapBand to quit using the words "LapBand" in all of their advertising. They are giving LapBand a bad name.)

We also started to find reviews from other people who have gone through the 1-800 people. The same story as ours. They had a lot of tests run, insurance was charged up the wazoo for the tests and then you can't get in touch with anyone at the 1-800 center anymore.

Eddie was able to convince some girl, probably a newby, to fax him his blood test results from the testing they did. His blood sugar levels were normal. They just falsified the report that they sent to the insurance company.

About 5 months passed and all of a sudden Eddie gets a call from someone with his sleep apnea results. He has moderate to sever sleep apnea. His airway closes an average of 22.5 times per hour and he had 2 hours where his airway closed 35 times each hour. Someone was out to our house the next week with a CPAP machine. The first night he used it and woke up rather refreshed the next day.

It has been 6 months since the 1-800 debacle. Needless to say, he didn't get surgery through them. During those 6 months though, he was back to researching and finding someone else to the LapBand from. Insurance told him that since he was already approved, he just needed to find a different doctor and have his authorization switched over to the new doctor.

Here we go again...