Michael’s Story – Linx Procedure Patient

When I was 17 years old, I started to find that certain things that I ate irritated my stomach and what originally was just an irritation, gradually over time, what turned out to be 20 years, turned into just suffering. If I drank a glass of water, it wasn’t just spicy food that did it to me. A lot of people would say “well did you eat something spicy, that will upset your stomach, that will create acid in your stomach”. It wasn’t just spicy food, it was anything. If I ate pasta, if I ate bread, if I drank water, if I drank milk, anything I put in my stomach, it didn’t agree with my body. We couldn’t figure out why.

One of the most prominent memories of Dr. Malladi is going to be the first time I met her. We sat down and talked through my symptoms, talked about the number of years I had dealt with this. We went through all of the medications that I had been on and that we had tried and Dr. Malladi was listening and taking everything in. She was asking me questions, everything that the other doctors had asked me, and what I was sitting there thinking, well she is going to prescribe me another medication. I’ve been through this, it’s been 20 years and so I almost started to feel a little bit of loss in it. Then, she said “it sounds like you have tried just about everything, let’s go ahead and fix this problem”. I kind of sat there and I kind of looked at her and I said “fix it, meaning you think you can make this go away”, and she said “oh I know I can”. She said there was a procedure called Linx. She went through the device and through the procedure. She explained to me what it would entail. I cannot tell you, to the point that it would make me very emotional, where I was looking for a 10% increase on my living and how I felt just in day to day life, she didn’t give me 10%. She gave me 100%. What I had fought with and dealt with for 20 years, which when someone looks at me, you think well there is no way you could deal with something for 20 years. I was 17 when all of this started. She took it away and it went away 100%. It was something that I kept waiting and waiting, it’s going to come back, any day now it’s going to come back. We are over a year now post surgery, I have zero days of having suffered from what I dealt with for 20 years. When I think about Dr. Malladi, a lot of people ask me questions and say weren’t you scared to do this, she knew what she was doing. When she said it, when she made the statement “I can fix this”, she didn’t say it with a question, it was a statement. It was factual. It was, I am sorry you have suffered but I am here to fix this, and I’m here to take it away. I trusted her and she was right and she has and she changed my life.