crosswind

Yesterday I woke up with a neckache and a backache and a jawache. There was some kind of weird effluvia on my pillow and I was in a terrible mood. Not stormy terrible, not the kind of terrible where you call up AT&T to complain about service cutoffs to telephones that don't exist -- terrible as in teary and and panicky, like I was just about to turn on the news and find out my town was most definitely going to be sucked into the center of the earth due to a lack of liquor sacrifices to the Town God. I watched a woman have a fullon meltdown in the lobby of a hotel and wanted to smack her silly. She was one of those blonde sucked-in too-skinny women close to fifty who always seem to have sequins on them somewwhere; with the shortish yellow madonna hair that screamed she'd been cute all her life and planned to make everyone around her suffer at whim. Then I thought I lost my debit card and called the bank, who refused to send me a new one to my new address because I got my security questions WRONG. I was exhausted. I needed a nap. It was beautiful outside and that just made me cranky. Then it dawned on me. I'm sick! And I was. I went to the clinic and got liquid Keflex for an ear infection that was so bad it had by that time crept into both ears and had turned me into an emotional toddler. I was seriously dehydrated and suddenly understood why my incision was still an incision and not a scar. No wonder I had been crying all week. By yesterday I had nothing in my head except a black crayon scribble. I had gotten books out of the library and couldn't concentrate through half a chapter. All of this, I thought, was because I got my stomach cut out less than three weeks ago. But apparently not. I feel a little better today but my big plan to dive into the pool on Day 21 has been scrapped. Anyway I guess the moral of the story here is that not everything is attributable to surgery. You can get sick *in addittion* to having no stomach and the results are specacularly miserable. It's hard to know exactly what's normal but I'm thinking the ability to read and comprehend sentences might be a clue. On antibiotics for ten days. Sill grounded. Eleven days to solid food. Suck. Oh...and I lost 25 pounds. So there *is* that.

.You're welcome! I was understandably terrified to do this and I'm still not sure what came over me. I mean what the hell, who does this? But I did it and I didn't die and in a way...in a really odd way...it was sort of a good time. Good luck to you 2b!

JEALOUS!!!! I'm dying to get back in the pool. I am waiting for my knife wound to heal, i feel like I got grounded or put in the penalty box or etc. About the calories -- your body will let you know if you're overdoing it. Look out for a lower immune system, more frequent colds, etc. Usually when I was really overtraining, back in my Ironwoman days, I'd get hit by some hideous, gluey disease state and realize it was time to throttle back.

. So yesterday at the grocery store I mulled it over and decided to give baby food a reasonable and fair assessment. On my safe food list it says that boiled pureed fruits are okay, so I bought Gerber "Naturals" baby banana puree. So it's in my fridge this afternoon and I crack one of the vacuum sealed plastic Jetsons serving pods and bury a spoon. Oddly, there are really not too many baby food choices on the shelves these days. Just a couple of old standards, stuff I remember from when my baby was a baby -- banana, squash, pear -- and by this time, considering the absolute explosion in every other grocery market demographic, including Chef Ramsay in a can for cats, you'd figure babies would at this point be controlling a whole corner of the store. When my baby was a baby, I don't think I ever tasted anything I gave him. No idea why, something having to do with the food not being for *me*, so this stuff would go from the jar into his mouth and he would swallow it and that was that. If he spit it out, well he didn't know how to eat yet, right? Now I see why there has not been an exponential catfoodesque explosion in baby food flavors. I also see I've made a massive childrearing mistake. He did too know damn well how to eat. He was right on the ball there because I have *never* tasted anything as plain old noxious as Gerber Naturals banana baby food. I did not taste anything even *remotely* like a banana on that spoon. I did not tase anything I have ever tasted before in 46 years on that spoon. It could tell you what it tasted like but I'm not going to because we're all recovering from stomach surgery and I fear the description would send half the board running for their Compazine. I am picturing my rubbery little peanut spwooshing that stuff out of his mouth with a look of utter disgust and horror as if to say, " you can can't possibly mean to tell me this is food." Which is exactly what I did. Dannon Light & Fit and cream of mushroom Soup for lunch. You know, this is a lot like trying to see how long you can hold your breath underwater, only you're never not going to be underwater, so you better start growing some gills. In other news, my back hurts. I really think it's from holding myself in weird positions to try to completely insulate my jerryrigged stomach from any trauma whatsoever. After some more mulling, I crushed up a vicodin and drank it out of a wineglass. Don't tell your kids, but that is really one dandy way to down a painkiller. There's freezing rain today and tornadoes down South. I spent the morning painting a landcape I took a picture of a couple weeks ago in watercolor pencil. Could be worse I guess but I give it a C.

. Your dog needs a thought balloon over his head that says, " Okay, that's just wrong." That's AWESOME, congrats!

Hmmmm. Thanks all. Guess I'll try a full caplet tomorrow. I have no insurance. My real goal here is -- that sleeve came out beautiful and nothing is wrecking it if I can help it. I'd drink Isostupid for a year if that's what it took.

I'm seventeen days out. I think I'm supposed to wait at least a month to swallow a pill. I know they sell the mups thingies by prescription but that means I have to go to the uninsured clinic and explain to them that I've just had weight loss surgery, which I doubt will go over well.

Thanks Rootman. I am apparently not using them as directed except I am trying to follow the directions from the surgeons office. What did you do for your ppi? Just swallow a pill?

Thanks for the offer. I'd rather learn how to operate these. I'm wondering if they're defective or if I'm missing something essential here....

I ate all the Nexium mups the doctor gave me in Mexicali and I am now using Prilosec caplets. I made a mistake the first time and bought the tablets -- what on earth difference would it make to them that they would make both? Anyway, so the instructions are to eat this stuff sprinkled on apple sauce. Dutifully. I cut open a caplet and pour the fairy dust into two ounces of organic apple sauce but the problem is that *half* of what comes out of it is a TABLET and not a sprinkle. Now I don't know what to do. Is it a tablet because the real medicine is in the sprinkle so they're trying to weigh it down? Why would they make a caplet with a tablet INSIDE it? Do I eat the table, crush it up, dissolve in water, discard?

. Aw...that was a very nice thing to say, thank you, I don't think they do mandalas at the Guggenheim. Although now that you mentioned this I'm getting this vision of a performance art piece about getting a sleeve. Interpretive dance, you know, with a Greek chorus crying alas, alas, their arms waving in the air whie half a stomach flies away on Spiderman wires with a little halo on..

Oh my God! I forgot about that! There was a "Shakeweight" there!

. I love coloring too. And dammit, I am 46 years old with a grown child and I just got a major organ removed from my body cavity and I am going to color if I want to. I remembered it, actually, because it's what I finally gave up and started doing a moment not so long ago when I got divorced and my mom died the same year. I found out about coloring mandalas from a new-agey friend of mine but if all they had was Disney Princess and Matchbox cars I would color those. In public. I'd just go to the damn Starbucks and start filling in the flesh tones on Ariel the Mermaid. Hey man, I'm a paying customer! Mandalas: Sometimes when I'm in an artsy mood I make my own, but there are tons of free printable onels online, You can also order whole books of these things from amazon along with the coloring weapon of your choice. One kind of cool thing to do is do them with watercolor pencil and then do a careful wash with a brush and clean Water. It's *at least* as satisfying as watching Mildred Piece in my opinion. And thank you thank you thank you for telling me I could take off my surgistrips. There was some sort of black stuff I could see under them that I thought were big beetle-y scabs but when I took em off...nothing. A touch of discoloration. A pucker. Amazing. In re the coloring. I didn't cry today -- first time since I came out of surgery. So either coloring is magic or I'm almost Soup.

I've become obsessed with my incisions. The drain incision is scabbed over and looks kind of like a satisfying knife wound, like if I had a body to put a bikini in I'd walk around in it and wait for people to ask me what happened, at which point I would tell them I got into it with a shaolin cashier. The other two are still nestled in surgistrips and I am starting to resent them. They were supposed to fall off six days ago but they are clinging to their profession for dear life. I want to see what's under there first of all and second of all I want to know what a "completely healed" incision looks like so I can look at it and put my swimsuit on. I paid a year in advance at the health club to make sure I would get around to actually going. I spent A LOT of money on stuff like this before I caved to surgery. I bought that stuff, Sensa, you're supposed to sprinkle on your food to make you eat less of it. I bought fat burning supplements. I bought a whole workout tape suite from Beachbody.com complete with rubber exercise bands, a hundred and fifty bucks, thanks, and I hated the workout, it was Tae Bo. I am even suspicious of people who say they do Tae Bo, I don't believe them. Two years of that and you'd be on a diet of aleve, good whiskey and cortisone shots every other week. . I bought special shakes. And I finally thought, seriously, fuq this. I exactly the desperate clueless consumer these salespitches work best on. Last night at Walgreens ( you wouldn't believe what I was doing at Walgreens, I'll tell you in a minute) I walked past the magazine display and there was a new copy of For Women First up there. For Women First, in case you're not aware, is Satan. Their diet of the week this week was Japanese Probiotics, which are "taking the country by storm", are "better than a diet pil", and are " a secret Japanese women have known for centuries." Now this magazine, I've decided, is actually out to destroy the mental health of American women. First, you get pages of advice about what to eat instead of going to the doctor. You can find the answers to all your problems at the grocery story. Migraines? Try blueberries. Muscle aches? Karo syrup. Blind in one eye? Canned pumpkin, which has more antioxidants than raw fresh pumpkin. Then you get to the Miracle Slimming Secret picturing one previously-fat fictional female aged about 35 in a collage with various arrangements of food, mostly Water crackers and celery and tomato slices or whatever. Then the rest of the magazine is full of recipes that have nothing to do with being healthy or slim or sane. There absolutely nothing you can do in response to a barrage of sick female foodthinking except of course make an enormous table-sized cake depicting the Battle of Gettysburg. What else, right? I mean this is a magazine FOR FAT WOMEN. IN LINE AT THE GROCERY STORE. Anyway I was pretty mad at For Women First. But the reason I came to Walgreens was for something really weird. Crayonss. I was so wiped out mentally yesterday I decided what I wanted to do is make mandalas and color. I know that sounds strange but I still get so tired around five PM. I don't have any energy left and it's too early to go to bed and TV is basically just a salesman in my living room. So I went home and made mandalas and colored and talked to various people on the phone who were unlikely to piss me off. I think the third week is going to be the hardest week. Today I'm taking it easy, gonna have some tea, lay off milk and drink some Isopure Green Apples and Bad Decisions Protein Drink. I've never had a surgery before and I'm not used to recovering from one. It really does sort of blow. Today gets a C. There's going to be a tornado later and I'm going to do Sudoku and color. This is what it probably feels like to be 110.

I think it has to do with novocaine and swallowing stuff you shouldn't swallow. It's five more days to swim but the hot tub was kind of interesting. It didn't have to do with infected sutures -- she said after this kind of surgery I'm still very weak and I have to get my strength back before I sat in either a sauna or hot tub. Me? Weak? I'm five ten and previously was able to eat like a lumberjack. That's the first time anyone has used that word with regards to myself ever. Odd.

So this morning I did not have to put gauze on myself. One small step for man and one less reason to feel like a war casualty. Yesterday I got all kinds of buzzkilling news from Dr' Aceves office: gaby told me I could not get dental work for six weeks, laser surgery for six weeks, that I could not swim yet or go in the hot tub for three months and the same went for leaving the country. Chee. What's a girl without a stomach supposed to do with herself in that case? Well, yesterday, things being as they were, I went and blew 150 dollars on salon services just because I had no energy for anything else and no interest in a cheeseburger. I got summer highlights -- you know, hair stripes, caramel zebra, and then I went to the nail salon to get a mani/pedi. I don't know how often people around here indulge in this kind of thing, but when you can't eat any solid food, your nightly tearful exhaustion spell is about to set in, and you can't do anything of things at your health club that you want to do, this is not such a bad option. Lay back on the massage chair, dip your feet into the pristinely clean basin and watch the light show commence from the bottom of it, blue and purple and pink lights in swirling Water. There was a big screen tv with a slideshow of waterfalls and mountain vistas and iguanas, and spooky Yanni music filling the air. My toes are now electric blue, my hair is yellow zebra and my nails are Vampire Shellack. Today I hit the health club, depressed I could not swim but I went on the AirDyne for twenty minutes, and then I went to weigh myself on the industrial fatperson scale they have in the ladies locker room. There is weirdness with scales in my life, but according to that one I have lost 23 pounds since the last time I was there a month ago; and I only lost about a pound on the pre-op diet. Then I went to the library. I decided since I have nothing else to do with myself, I might as well read something. B plus. On the mend. And five more days until I can swim and eat food.

You know...if you kept that up you'd be down a hundred pounds in five months...

Yeah, this is what I'm saying: this is bariatric surgery -- in other words a therapeutic option for the morbidly obese. The underlying idea is that people with this problem have a chronic metabolic disorder that makes it impossible for them to maintain a normal weight taking in a *normal* amount of calories. The flux capacitor has gone kaflooey -- that's the rationale for performing the surgery in the world of bariatrica. The thrifty gene has gone beyond the pale and started hoarding happy meal boxes and cats. It might be true of you, it actually might only be true of you *right now*. But the bariatricors and bariatrixes are recommending what they believe to be a "safe" level even if you're not finding that's working for you. I don't think this is going to turn out to be true of me because I was so damn hungry all the time and I was probably putting away a full four thousand calories almost every day. I spent a couple months "eating normally" and watching this and it was breathtaking. I don't know for sure if I've got a bad capacitor yet but I might, considering this is the third time I will have lost the same 100 pounds. in the meantime, Powerade for all.

Two weeks out and I dropped another two pounds on the scale. This morning I had a bottle of water with Nexium in it, a hot cup of very weak decaf earl gray with splenda and milk, and I'm working on another bottle of Fiji. Last night I started getting tired around 6 PM. I also tried to eat a smoothie and every time I attempt one of these I can only eat a quarter of it so I'm starting to collect cups of infinished milk solids everywhere. My energy is for shit. My primal memory is recalling the days not so long ago that low energy meant Taco Bell or a bag of Tostitos so it's weird to look in the fridge, gaze upon the contents for several seconds and think...nah. It's just the weirdest experience to not be hungry. I used to have an appetite like a draft horse. I woke up hungry, was starving by ten pm wihether I had eaten breakfast or not, eat through whatever stress sonata my head was playing, take a break from paperwork by ripping open a bag of something, My hunger was so strong and so sharp I would never bother to cook because I really couldn' t wait that long, I also used to be a diet soda addict. I would rip into one of these just about the minute I woke up -- caffeine, bubbles, hydration, hallelujah. This morning the bottle of Fiji water on the counter was actually desirable. I wanted it. In fact after thousands of failed attempts to find something to replace my diet soda I realize there's nothing. Crystal Light blows. Fruit juice has calories and can be acidic. I can see all these mini-choices are going to add up to a completely different way of operating my refrigerator. in other news, this is the last day I have to pack that gauze. One more step towards becoming a person and not a patient. I'm giving day 14 a C plus.

pat Original instructions from bariatric surgeons is to stay around a thousand calories per day. The very simple reason for this is that one assumption about morbidly obese people is that they have compromised metabolisms and simply can not maintain a normal weight at 1500 or 2000. The whole rationale reads that there is an involuntary process at work of some kind that makes people retain weight that can't be rectified any other way but surgery. Anyway there *are* people like this and they really are going to have to maintain on a thousand calories. The thing is they'l do it comfortably now with their sleeve restriction.

Hey. I wrote this two weeks ago: http://www.verticalsleevetalk.com/topic/15683-i-left-my-stomach-in-mexicali/

. Good luck. You know, in this really bizarre way, it's going to be fun.

Thanks all. It's weird! And I bet it'll happen today too.. I'm leaning more towards the anesthesia thing than the estrogen at this point. I haven't really lost enough weight for it to be floating around in my system. However, fentanyl probably still *is* zipping around in my bloodstream. I've heard the thing about being weepy after surgery too, I just didn't connect them until it became a dailly pattern. Fascinating...

I'm not any more depressed than I was before surgery. I am not particularly upset to be missing part of my stomach. I am really fine except for one thing: every day since the surgery I have cried every day. I think it's the anesthesia but I guess it could be any number of things -- metabolic changes, processing physical trauma -- I don't know but this happens every single day. I just find myself on the verge of tears. And don't get me wrong, I am not crying over the fact that I have not lost any weight all week or that I can't have a cheeseburger. I do get tired pretty fast. But the other thing is...especially sometime in the afternoon, between roughly two and five, i am going to burst into tears. I was standing in line to get a train ticket and a guy told me to I had to go to another line: tears. I am sitting watching some dumb movie on hulu, not even really watching the movie, I realize I am on the verge of tears. Then I cry a little bit. Then I get better. Oh, today I was having a perfectly brilliant day full of a consultation with my hairdresser and a bowl of really abysmal strained potato Soup and then I felt myself get really tired, had to lie down -- tears. Also my temp spiked a little, to 99 -- an hour later, it was all over, I was back down to 98.6 and drained. Anybody else have this?

Oh fer chrissakes just go to Mexico. This is the kind of crap I just can not stand. Who is this person to tell you to *WAIT* and *BE FAT ANOTHER SIX MONTHS* to see if you get in a better mood? It's beyond comprehension. Just go to Mexico, get your sleeve and get your aftercare from the regular doctors and not the crazy people who have no idea what it feels like to be fat. Gah.