Great Teen Lap Band Story

So, I get off on kicks and read everything I can find. While looking for articles about lap band studies on kids, I found this article by Andrew Binion for the Kitsap Sun – which is quite lovely. It’s about then 12 year old Hannah Siparek. Her mother, Marsha, had wrestled with obesity her entire life. She was never full regardless of how much she ate. Now, her beloved daughter was wrestling with the same problem.

At 12, on the verge of the cruelest year of adolescence, Hannah stood 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighed about 290 pounds. She could eat and eat and never feel full. She showed early signs of Type 2 diabetes. She loved soccer but couldn’t force her overburdened frame to run the field.

“She was always hungry, and she kept getting bigger and bigger,” said Marsha, who like Hannah, didn’t get the full, satisfied feeling that tells a person to stop eating.

Less than two years ago, Hannah was a morbidly obsese 290 pounds. Today, she packs just 150 pounds on her 5-feet, 5-inch frame and plays soccer — thanks to lap-band surgery she had in Mexico that shrunk her stomach, and her once-endless appetite for food.

“You have this infillable hunger, and it’s not just in your mind,” she said. “You’re just starvin

Mom had the Lap Band procedure and was quite happy with the results:

For Marsha, the results were dramatic. For the first time, when she ate, she felt full — and didn’t eat any more after that. She has lost, and kept off, 100 pounds since the surgery in November 2005.

Marsha was interested in getting the procedure for 12 year old Hannah, but none of the US doctors would agree to it because of her age. Finally, Dr. Pedro Kuri, who had performed Marsha’s surgery agreed to see Hannah. He’s performed over 3500 lap band surgeries and had operated on children as young as 12.

“Sometimes I have my doubts about teenagers because they don’t act like an adult,” Kuri said during a phone interview. “I have adults that don’t act like they should.”

Teenagers must have a long, serious conversation with him beforehand, and he has refused to perform the implant on teens who weren’t mature enough. He said Hannah was a self-possessed, confident, emotionally mature girl, and having a long talk with her convinced Kuri she could carefully watch what she ate.

He has given implants to 15-year-olds, a 14-year-old recently and a 12-year-old other than Hannah. He said the procedure doesn’t interfere with the maturation process. And, Kuri added, if left unchecked, the teens and Hannah would be beyond morbidly obese by the time they are in their 20s.

All told, he’s performed more than 3,500 surgeries over the past 10 years. And 99 percent of the patients were American, he said.

Age sometimes is the deciding factor. He was approached about putting the implant in a 10-year-old.

Now, fourteen years old, Hannah is slender and pretty:

As a result, Hannah is now a 150-pound, 5-foot-10-inch 14-year-old who hangs around the house in soccer shorts and dismisses talk of turning to basketball. Because of her age, Marsha said, her skin shrunk back in with her frame.

“She lost a whole person,” Marsha said, who hopes the implants are approved for other obese children as young as Hannah.

Hannah’s life is dramatically different now, than it likely would have been:

At first, Hannah didn’t have much interest in being a “bandster,” as Marsha calls it, and she didn’t have self-confidence problems. But as she watched her mom lose weight, and become happier, she came around to the idea.

Hannah said she has a sense of what life would be like without the band. She would not have lost the weight, she might have gotten heavier, and she would have likely dropped out of school. Marsha said she would have been home-schooled.

“I feel like a whole new person, I can finally be the kid I want to be,” she said. “When I was big, I’d stand in the middle of the field and wait for the ball to come to me.

“Now I go for the ball.”

One of the things I like about this article is that it has Hannah’s yearly portraits starting at age 3. You can see how severely obese she is. And how well she’s turned out now. It’s a great story and hopefully, we’ll see more kids rescued in the future as well.