thankyou for your message appreciate it :-) bless you! yeah it is intersting and i have done a lot of looking on the internet but there isnt a great deal of positive information to be honest in regards to the op and later life with it. My surgeon told me that i can expect to be suffering from the side effects for years afterwards they dont really seem to know a lot about it themselves. the hospital told me to start eating solid food three days after the op which i cant even understand! I found it very difficult for quite a while afterwards and even still find there are times when i will sit down to eat and as soon as i start i cant swallow it and end up being sick it does get you down but i try to stay positive by thinking that i could be in a much worse state there are some people out there who are really suffering and after that i dont feel so bad. before i had the op i weighed around 14 and 1/2 stone and by the time i had reached my plateu of weight loss i went down to around just under 9 stone. i ended up having to see a dietician (which didnt help) and then eventually cause they couldnt put the weight loss down to aynthing else i was pretty much told that there wasnt anything else they could do and that i would just have to pretty much live with it! if theres any info you would like on the op and what not then i am sure that i can dig it all out for you i have loads on it if your interested? oh and by the way is that an actual picture of you or just one you found?