Folks I have added a link with the article from The Register Guard. If you visit the article you can see a picture of Kimberly
News Article
www.registerguard.com | © The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon
November 2, 2002
Girl enjoys lighter side of life after operation
EDITOR'S NOTE: Last February, Kimberly Duncan underwent gastric bypass surgery in a drastic effort to help her lose the weight that was threatening her health. She was among the youngest people to ever get the operation. The Register-Guard told Kimberly's story last March. Today, we tell you how she's doing.
By TIM CHRISTIE
The Register-Guard
Kimberly Duncan isn't the girl she was last winter.
Back then, at age 12, she weighed 325 pounds. She was painfully shy and ridiculed by schoolmates. She suffered from sleep apnea and high blood pressure and was borderline diabetic.
Now, eight months after surgery to shrink her stomach to the size of a golf ball, Kimberly has lost 140 pounds. Her obesity-related ailments have disappeared. She has boundless energy, wears makeup, flirts with boys and has become downright sassy.
"I don't get any guff from anybody," Kimberly, now 13, said this week at her Bethel area home. "I give the guff."
Kimberly Duncan, 13, laughs as she holds a skirt she wore when she weighed 325 pounds last winter. After undergoing gastric bypass surgery eight months ago, Duncan has lost 140 pounds.
Last February's gastric bypass surgery has produced dramatic changes in the young girl's life."She's much more of a typical teen-ager now," said her mother, Monica Keene. "I'm glad she's got some spunk to her. Sometimes it's a little bit much. She's gone all the time."
"So?" Kimberly interjected.
In fact, Kimberly disclosed that she's been grounded twice in the past month for talking back to her parents. After taking a year off from school, she's had mixed results in her studies at Cascade Middle School: Kimberly said she got two As, a C, a D and an F on her most recent report card.
She's figuring out how much she can eat and drink without throwing up, a common problem with people who undergo gastric bypass surgery.
Overall, she feels good. She said she rarely watches television because she's so busy.
Before her surgery, she said, "I never wanted to get off the couch. I wanted to keep the curtains closed so no one would see me from the street. I never wanted to leave the house."
And now? "The highlight of my day is leaving the house."
"I can walk around the mall and hang around with my friends and not worry people are staring at me because of my weight," she said.
Her surgeon, Dr. Kenneth Welker of Eugene, had never done a gastric bypass on a patient as young as Kimberly, and he said he's pleased with how she's doing.
"She's certainly had a profound weight loss," he said. "The one thing we noticed the last time she was in the office was the psycho-social change was so obvious.
"Prior to surgery, she wouldn't look you in the eyes and there was a shame. In her last visit to the office, there was eye contact, there was engagement, there was spontaneous conversation, this sort of excitement."
Lab tests show Kimberly isn't malnourished, which means she's doing a good job in choosing foods that have "nutritional density," he said. Kimberly and her mother said she eats a lot of salad, a few bites of meat and drinks lots of water. She eats small snacks throughout the day. She takes vitamins and gets a monthly vitamin B-12 shot.
As Kimberly's weight loss slows down and stabilizes, Welker said, he'll try to change her focus from weight loss to how it makes her feel: Being able to fit into smaller clothes, going to a restaurant and sitting behind a table, running around at the park. "We'll start asking her how she's doing with those activities, to reinforce not so much the exact poundage as the fact that she feels so much better," he said. "The last thing we want to do is continue to encourage so much weight loss we could end up with an eating disorder."
Welker said he likes to see his patients lose 75 percent to 80 percent of their excess weight, rather than 100 percent.
"To be at 100 percent excess body weight loss means they're losing lean body mass we don't want them to lose," he said.
Kimberly, he said, "is right on track." In three to four months, when she loses a little more weight, she will have plastic surgery to move folds of excess skin, which will take another 10 to 15 pounds off. In a five-hour surgery at Sacred Heart Medical Center, Welker stapled her stomach down to a 1-ounce pouch and bypassed a stretch of her intestines.
It's estimated some 90,000 Americans will undergo similar surgeries this year, though few are as young as Kimberly.
The surgery does several things to force weight loss: It makes it physically impossible to eat more than a few bitefuls of food at a time. It bypasses a part of the intestines that would be absorbing fats and nutrients. And when the new, small stomach gets stretched out, that signals the brain that it's full, which cranks up the body's metabolism to burn fat.
Kimberly's parents are delighted with the change in their daughter, but the surgery - which cost about $31,000 - has placed an enormous burden on the family finances. Kimberly's stepfather, Russell Keene, has health insurance through his job at Western Pneumatics, but the insurer, Eugene-based Pacific Source, wouldn't cover the operation.
So the Keenes paid cash, cashed in Russell's 401(k) and borrowed money from Kimberly's grandfather. Still, they've struggled to pay their bills. Monica's car was repossessed, and they've been threatened with foreclosure on their house.
But Monica said she has no second thoughts about going in debt to pay for the surgery that transformed her daughter's life. "My heart swells. I feel nothing but joy and excitement for her," she said. "It's worth it. It's worth anything. We'll get through it. We'll get by."
Rosa In NJ
Surgery 2-7-02
5 ft 5in BMI 46 (288/165 ) Lost 122lbs
Surgeron: Dr. John H. Holup/Pascack Valley
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