I’m Rachel. I’m forty-four and I live in Sheffield. I have spent half my life going up and down in weight. Named diets. Pills that left me odd. A gym I used until the doctor talked about prediabetes and my knees. I was not after an advert body. I wanted to stop hiding in family photographs and asking for the aisle seat on the plane.
Deciding on a gastric reduction took a year. At night I worked through the same list. That the staple line would leak. That I would never sit at a table without looking ill. That the hair would fall in clumps. That at three months, in the UK, nobody would pick up the phone. The NHS wait was measured in years. Private quotes here took my breath away. So I started reading about Turkey. Some of it was women who ate less and slept better. Some of it was reflux that kept them up, and a WhatsApp that went quiet. I typed is gastric reduction in Turkey safe? more times than I like to admit. I was not looking for a number on the scales. I was looking for a real hospital, and for someone who would still be there when I landed in Sheffield.
I wrote to Just Clinic Istanbul. I didn’t ask “how much?”. I told them the leak, the fear of never tasting food again, lifelong vitamins, and having my stomach operated on a long way from my GP. They answered like a consultation, not a holiday package. They asked for bloods, photographs, a history — not just a dress size. For the first time in months I felt someone was treating this as major surgery. I wanted that from Just Clinic Istanbul gastric reduction: a person who still picked up. Here’s the lot: the sleeve they did, the nights in hospital, the swallow they made me do before I flew, and the first rice I dared at home.
The two nights on the ward
Forum threads about fever, pain that doesn’t stop, and a rush back to theatre undid me. A leak sounded like peritonitis. I didn’t want a discount. I wanted to know whether they would check the line before I got on a plane.
I asked it on the video call without wrapping it up. I said I would rather stay as I was than live with that hanging over me. They did not say leaks never happen. They said it is not a fairy tale, and that in a centre with volume and an ICU it is not brushed off with “almost never, don’t ask.” My sleeve took the one to two hours they said. I stayed two nights in hospital, not in a hotel with a paper bag of tablets. They checked the line before they discharged me. They did not put me in a car from theatre and on a plane on day three. I flew when they said I could fly, after the swallow, not when a brochure needed the bed.
Five sleeves in a day, staplers of no known make, a person who appears for the photograph. I wanted a hospital with an ICU, not a shop window. I was in a real theatre, with tests beforehand, and a surgeon I had already met, not someone who walked in five minutes before the anaesthetic. The figure we agreed in writing in the UK is what was done. They did not sell a bypass on the table “while you’re under.” I stopped lining packages up for gastric reduction Turkey and wrote a list: hospital, stapler, who stays if there is a leak.
A sleeve can make reflux worse. Some people end up converted to a bypass. If I ate late, I already had heartburn. They asked this before they talked price. If it had been severe they would have talked about a different operation. A sleeve is not reversible in the casual sense. In my case it was a sleeve and clear rules: don’t lie down after eating, no night grazing, PPI for the period they set. Nobody made me sign a promise that I would never feel a burn.
The first rice
Food was comfort and shame in the same mouthful. Not sitting down to a Sunday dinner with my mum. Not having a bun with a cup of tea without thinking about it first. That weighed as much as the operation.
Nobody told me I would eat “normally” in a month. Stages: liquid, purée, soft. Small volumes for good. That part is true. The part about the table being over is a lie. I eat. Little, chewing properly, not drinking in the same gulp. I can taste a Sunday lunch. I cannot clear the plate. The first days I missed the old hunger. Then I understood: that wasn’t hunger. That was a habit. The first rice at home was a few grains, and I sat there and cried because they stayed down.
I had read about dumping: sweat, dizziness, diarrhoea. More common after a bypass. Less after a sleeve. I still hid in restaurants. They said the body can still answer badly if you bolt sugar or eat in a rush. I learned that at home with a carton of juice, once. It was not the end of the world. It was a lesson.
I am an expert at yo-yo. I was frightened the pouch would stretch and I would be back where I started. They did not promise a number on the scales. Most of the loss, they said, is in months six to twelve. If you drop the follow-up, if you drink your calories, some of it comes back. The sleeve is a tool. I am not publishing my weight. Hunger does not run me the way it did. That is on me, not on the stapler.
Boots vitamins
B12, iron, calcium, vitamin D. Bloods every three months. I thought the choice was: have the operation and become a lifelong patient, or don’t. They described the sleeve as the start of follow-up, not a full stop. Supplements are not an upsell. They are part of the operation. I left Istanbul with a written plan. My GP in Sheffield has the report.
Photographs of pillows full of hair at month three kept me up. Mine was already fine. They said telogen shedding is common when the weight comes off fast and protein is short. The sleeve does not pull hair out. The body chooses what to keep. Protein, iron if you need it, patience for a few months. Month four I shed more than I wanted. I did not go bald. By month eight it was back to a reasonable place. Anyone who tells you not a single hair will move is selling something.
The ugly fear was silence. I land, something feels wrong, and at the other end: we have already been paid. Months later, the person who wrote back to my first message was still answering. I sent photographs. I asked about a vitamin I could not find in Boots. She was blunt about what not to wait on. Fever, pain that doesn’t stop, vomiting that won’t settle — A&E here first, then her. Afterwards. Not instead of. My GP has the discharge summary. I did not feel dumped in South Yorkshire.
I wanted someone who had swallowed that contrast drink and gone home to a kitchen, not a caption under a before-and-after. I asked on the first call. They put me in touch with a woman in Leeds who’d had her sleeve a year before. I asked about the leak briefing, the hair, month three. She was blunt. You will mourn food. Then she said: “I still eat. I just don’t disappear at the table any more.”
That is what booked me. Not a filtered photograph.
It’s more than a year on. I am smaller. I am not a different species. I wanted someone at gastric reduction Just Clinic Istanbul who still picked up in Sheffield. I had a gastric sleeve in Turkey, two nights on a ward, vitamins I actually take. Gastric reduction in Turkey, for me, was the swallow before the flight and the first rice at home. When I sit down to eat with my family now, I am at the table. That was the point.
