Press Releases

New York Expatriate in South Korea Travels To Rockville Centre For Complex Procedure

(October 1, 2010 - Rockville Centre, NY) For the past three decades Dorothy Acquaviva has lived all over the world - in France, Germany, Belgium and currently in South Korea. But when she needed complex weight-loss surgery, her worldwide search for the unique expertise required to perform the procedure led her back to her native New York State and Dr. Shawn Garber at Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Centre.

Dorothy has traveled worldwide with her husband, who is a civilian employee of the Department of Defense. Eight years ago, she underwent gastric bypass surgery while residing in Germany and lost 68 pounds. But, as sometimes can happen over the course of years with that type of surgery, she recently started to gain back some of that weight, and needed a revision procedure known as Gastric Banding Over Bypass.

Using the Internet, she searched the world from her home near Seoul seeking a surgeon to perform the complex operation, but found there are few with the expertise to tackle it using the latest minimally invasive techniques.

Fortunately, Mercy's Chief of Bariatric Surgery is among that select group, and Dr. Garber was able to schedule the surgery on short notice in late August to coincide with leave from their overseas assignment that Dorothy and her husband were taking to visit their home town near Syracuse.

"I couldn't find many doctors who do Gastric Banding Over Bypass," said Dorothy, "And of the few I could find, only Dr. Garber responded to my e-mail inquiries from Korea."

A month after surgery, Dorothy had lost eleven pounds, and prepared to return to South Korea looking forward to losing even more.