Liverpool Meeting, Feb 2010 The WLSinfo 8th Birthday Party
March 6, 2011
The Liverpool winter meeting is like a mini-AGM. Quite a few people travelled from afar so clearly we were in for a great time.
Ken Clare, Chairman of WLSInfo.org.uk and founder member of this group welcomed us all and introduced the first speaker.
Dr Euan Shearer, gave a very entertaining & informative talk which touched on the development of anaesthesia. Many of the ones we now take for granted are surprisingly recent, when he started training just 20 years ago there was a very basic blood pressure monitor and anaesthetist used the patients pulse to monitor them.
There is now highly technical invasive continuous monitoring which is one of the reasons there has been such a dramatic increase in safety. The bottom line? It is old-fashioned to think the morbidly obese are a huge risk for surgery, that risk has decreased enormously and is least in the higher volume centres of bariatric surgery. (as low as 0.3% which is the same as any other individual undergoing a Gallbladder operation).
Members expressed their surprise & delight at this information at the Q&A afterwards and it was a huge reassurance to our pre-op members in particular.
Then Mr Clare gave one of his famous off the cuff talks about how we had come to this particular day. It turned out his intention was to set up a website for Liverpool men who had had a Bypass. After a hilarious rounds of hands-up who? we were left with just 2 hands in the room for Liverpool men who had a Bypass and concluded that he would have been lonely had the site not grown to be as inclusive as it currently is. He paid tribute to the people who were there at the start and helped it grow to what it is now, on its 8th birthday.
There was an extremely well organised and delicious supper and disco/karaoke organised by the Liverpool group. The food was spectacular; the entertainment was some of the best fun many of us have! Aside from the amazing voices displayed at the Karaoke, all seemed to enjoy the disco too. Many thanks to one of our members Phil Green who provided the entertainment for free.