crosswind

Dr.Aceves does three leak tests in the hospital, immediately. I think the reason is twofold: one, these are tests that might have to be ordered separately from the surgery in the states -- but two, in his case my sense is he wants to make sure it's clear that if somethings goes wrong later on, it is not because it is something *he* did. Its either something your body did spontaneously or something YOU did, like stuffing your head with Papa John's pizza three days out. He's basically proving his work before he sends you home, which gives me peace of mind but it also makes sense for him. Leaks are possible but they really are rare. Surgeons don't really expect them to happen if all conditions are met for a safe surgery. If you are covered by insurance for this you can march right back to the hospital if you get a fever and have them do that same barium swallow I did back in mexicali. I wouldn't sweat it.

Lol meggie, I gotta check that out.

I know, y'all, it's just boring, right? I watched two back to back episodes of "Ancients Behaving Badlly" on the History Channel, took a nap, and then went back to the TV room until I heard what the voiceover was saying on the "How It's Made" show: "Just imagine, for a moment, what life would be like without....PACKAGING..." Ugghhh.

Hey Indiana, you lost 40 pounds already? Christ on a cracker. I'm glad I'm not the only one bothering Gaby. I think I've written her ten emails. And yep, I am so bored I am counting the days before I can have cream of broccoli Soup and butterscotch pudding...

Recovery from surgery is boring. I'm not really hungry anymore. I don't want anymore juice. I can't go swimming. And I think I need to wait a couple more weeks before I start my new life, you know? I kind of want to go back to Mexico and get *another* surgery because it was more interesting than sitting here making Protein shakes and changing my tedious gauze. All the drama happens beforehand, this part is just incredibly dull. I had a little bit of drama yesterday when I got diarrhea and it came out green. I mean *emerald* green. I don't even own a color that major. I wrote to Gaby last night, she told me it was the blue dye from the leak test a week ago, can you believe that? I thought I was dying, I thought my liver was doing its last River Dance before it exploded. Yawn. Anyway. Drama solved. Back to watching the paint dry.

optasia, Mexico was awesome! I want to go back!

Congratulations Meggie! You really crossed all your eyes and dotted all your tees on this one. I predict you will also be not dead very very soon!

Seven days post op. My incision is not infected. I am not sick or throwing up. I have no fever and no pain. I am obsessed about getting Water, Protein, taking small sips, not putting anything into my mouth the doc said not to, taking my nexium, getting lots of rest...etc -- because I literally can not afford a complication. However. Just to let ya know. So far, if you're thinking about going rogue over the border ( with a GOOD surgeon) and no insurance -- seven days out and I'm still not dead.

That's just completely shitty, I'm sorry. Is it your iron count? I have low iron all the time because I have very heavy periods and I'm always bleeding. It may not be serious. Maybe if this is also the case with you you could explain this patiently to your doctor. Iron levels take about a month to bring up if you're religious about taking your pills. I never do because they make me incredibly sick. However *if* the problem is iron anemia and it's because of the problem mentioned above, go to Whole Foods and get a tincture of Shepherds Purse which slows bleeding to a normal level over time so your levels don't get so. Also you can go and get another blood test in a week and call your doc -- http://www.personalabs.com/panels.aspx?PanelID=417&PanelGroupID=4#Remark_121679 It's 130 dollars to do this and they have places all over the country.

I think the thing that's most abnormal is to have to constantly battle your environment to keep food out of your mouth. It makes absolutely no sense that the place you live, that feeds you, is full of stuff that's going to kill you. If you lived a place that had poisoned Water, you'd leave, right? You'd think right, I'm not staying here to drink from the poisoned stream, I'm getting out of here, this is stupid. It's normal to want more food that tastes good or makes you feel good. In fact it's normal to eat as much of it as you can. It's normal to eat food that's readily available and eat if whenever you want, if you can. Back in the day the only reason to stop eating was that you were out of food or that Urrgh, Sbpabo and UngaUnga were going to kill you if you ate their portion. Eating food that keeps our engines running cheerfully with no health consequences is a reasonable expecation. What I really think is that *this surgery* is the wave the of the future. I really do. More surgeons are going to learn how to do it and get better at it, so it's going to get safer. I think we're the early adopters. I mean enough is enough with this.

Sounds like you solved your problem. You probably also healed up your back a bit. Your trainer should hook you up. Good luck!

I have lost a hundred pounds twice already. Once when I was pregnant. I started out weighing about 180 and got up to 278 before my kid was born. I dropped twenty pounds and him with it, and eventually, about a year later, I was back at 180. 180 is still a bit overweight for me, but I liked what I looked like and I felt good. But the weight would never stay off. I would go on serious diets to get back down to 180 but would never make it to my high school weight of 155. Good, but not good enough. So I would drift up and then bash it down with pure and total concentration -- low fat, low carb, shakes, drinks, bars. I'd get up to about 230 and panic, smoke like crazy and be afraid to quit, get back down to 210...on and on like that. Then around 2001 for some reason ( or lots of reasons such as depression, exhaustion, frustration, and various other shuns) I gave up and let myself get up to around 278 again. I just didn't care and refused to go out, and then one day I decided to go on low carb for real and inexplicably was able to stay on it for seven months. I lost 100 pounds and then finished up the year pushing my weight down with low carb and exercise to 153. I said 153. My hair fell out and grew back. I was a size eight. I really thought i had a handle on the weight thing after that, I thought I'd be a lowcarber for the rest of my life. So then the same thing happened. I would just get tired of *obsessing* so much about this. I would let myself go out to dinner, eat carbs at night, and did I *really* have to work out for two hours a day every day? I mean how is this possible to keep up month after month and year after year? So by 2009, I was way over 200 again. 250, 265...my mother died and I went on Medifast and lost 40 pounds for her memorial. I hated the idea that all her old friends would be looking at me and thinking oh, wow, she got fat just like her mother did. All of 2009 was like that. 220...250...265...240...then 2010 I gave up dieting because I was just so damn TIRED OF IT. I stuck around 250 for awhile but then I got meds for depression, which brings me to a little bit before now: 285. What I was thinking all through the winter was that I was going to be fat for the rest of my life because I was *never* getting back on that ride again. I would not not NOT keep fighting with my damn scale day after day> I was not going to go through the sweat, blood, tears and obsession over something so completely STUPID only to gain it all back again. Truthfully, *dieting* has been my true career. In fact, so far I'm not finding the post op diet to be hard at all. Do you know how many times I've done this? How many times I've lived on liquids only, diet shakes, Protein sparing fasts? ALL MY LIFE, DAMMIT. I'm not convinced my metabolism is screwed up but I know my head is. I've learned to dread social outings of alll kinds because I know people will expect me to eat and I can't. People ask me out for coffee, I say no because I can't have a cappucino and a muffin, all I can have is plain Water or decaf with splenda. Or? I weigh 250 pounds and that muffin is no fun anyway. Insert clockhands moving around a dial to depict me ranting on endlessly into the night about this, but here is what I am really wondering: Why is everybody so fat all of the sudden? It used to be you'd put a woman who'd lost and gained a 100 pounds twice on a television talk show for people to murmur at. It used to be that a 300 pound person was direly and directly gawked at, it used to be that a 500 pound person was a medical oddity. Why are we like this and how did we get here? I no longer think the problem is *me* anymore. Or that I was doing anything particularly wrong. I think there is something wrong with western culture or our environments, something they are putting in the water, some kind of mindfuq going on between the womens magazines and the producers of high fructose corn syrup...*something.* Because it's just weird that so many of us, increasing numbers are in the place we're in right now. Don't you think?

Alewive Peach Blast...Razzleberry Monkfish...Goldfish au Caramel...

I tried two flavors, vanilla and Cookies and Cream. I bought them because I wanted something that had a more "shakelike" consistency when I mixed it up with ice and Water but I have never tasted anything that weird in my life. Cookies and Cream has no flavor but it smells of fish. The vanilla has no flavor but it smells like fish and goes down like chalk. I tried to cover up the chalky squid taste with more vanilla extract and some sweetener, but then it just tasted like fish, chalk, vanilla extract and sweet and low. What a disappointment. Skip.

Rejoice all ye therefore!

I bought those canned Atkins shakes at CVS in anticipation of the "thin liquid stage" and I'm not sure if I can drink them. Instructions say " Protein powder drinks mixed with Water." Ok or not ok?

I can totally relate to not wanting to see anybody anymore. There gets to be a threshold where there's just no point.. Good luck to you, congrats on your loss, bon sante

I think it's a low-cal, low-carb diet. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2405506

I literally can not imagine this procedure not working. Even if you ate ice cream and brownies all the time, it just makes no sense that having eliminated hunger along with eighty percent of your stomach you would not at least lose something. I think there are people who gain their weight back -- there is always a small rebound effect with extreme weight loss over time and it might be hard to keep off some of the creep. But there is just * no way* you can fail to become reasonably smaller than you are now. Of course it's going to work. Maybe there's the possibility of ultimately only losing sixty percent of your excess weight over time instead of a hundred, , but as far as it not working at all -- it's not possible.

Two scoops unjury chicken Soup Protein powder. One ramen noodle spice packet. Ate it. Survived.

Thanks wareagle.

Lol, yay, I'm a church lady. I should be grateful, I guess, that my biggest problem is the tiniest little bit of blood on the gauze. It could be worse!

What you're saying doesn't sound right. If you're eating a thousand calories, working out five times a week, not eating carbs and nothing at all has happened in the past eight months, something is unique here about you. Your metabolism has to be *really* freaking *low*. Dudes are a little different than women though. Women tend to need less carbs because they're little estrogen tornadoes and those carbs push all kinds of imbalances. With you it's testosterone and testosterone likes Protein and needs a few extra carbs to rebuild muscle in the glycogen cycle. One thing you haven't mentioned is your fat intake. Fat is thermogenic. The fat on your body likes the fat you eat because it's then encouraged to burn both. Fat also releases the least amount of insulin -- zero- in your system. Your pancreas turns carbs into burnable sugar but it also turns protein into some percentage of burnable sugar. Fat, it just uses. You really can't get fat eating fat unless you eat the carbs to go with it, because there is no insulin accompanying it to effect the change into burnable sugar. So maybe you need more. So...this is what i would do. I would try keeping my carbs down and adding some fat. Give that a couple days to a week. Any fat is fine -- nuts, a scoop of Peanut Butter, etc. If that didn't work I would switch it up and try adding a few more carbs and keeping the fat stable at about twenty percent of intake. And if that didn't work I would go see a doctor and get a hormone panel because something is definitely off. The only time a thousand calories is normal for a 235 pound man is if he's 97 years old.

I'm skittish about a drain incision infection because from the literature I've read, once these infections take old they can be a sort of gateway to other complications which I can't afford. So I'm worried about packing my gauze -- in the hospital they put two layers of gauze on the wound: one was folded over in half directly over the incision and the other held it in place, full size, over top. I am not sure if they did that because it was meant to be more absorbent over the site, or if there is some advantage to packing the wound more tigthtly. Does anybody know? Also, when I woke up this morning and checked it there was the *smallest* little but of blood at the tip of the brownish drainage. There is a lot less drainage -- just a little every day -- and no real redness, hotness, or inflammation but it does sting a little sometimes and yesterday it started to itch. I read that "bleeding" at the incision site is one thing to look out for -- is what I just described "bleeding" or am I just being a church lady about my incision?

Lara I don't think anyone expects you to start running marathons right now. I think fatiigue is perfectly normal, and here is why: Your body has a basal metabolic rate and a weight setpoint that it is attached to. This doesn't just have to do with your calorie intake, it also is locked into your endocrine system and your brain. Even though the sleeve bypasses the problem of the stomach not feeling full enough, a large volume of food, etc: this is not the only system that is in place to keep you from starving. It's like a nuclear reactor: it's a dynamic system. It has backups. So first of all, when you stop eating, your thyroid banks your metabolic fires until it can adjust to a new, lower level of energy input. Your blood sugar typically stays low and that means your brain has very little sugar to burn, which can make a person feel spacey and weak. Part of the reason a lowcarb diet is good for this is because it pushes ketosis and forces your body to burn fat, which it does not like as much because what it means is that out there in the world there are not too many carbs out there, which signals *famine*. On top of that, you just had a major operation. Getting holes punched in you, having your stomach cut apart, and going under general anesthesia are all deeply traumatic to the body and every calorie you have is going to your recovery. So my personal opinion about this is that you should get as much rest as you can now and concentrate most of your focused moments on nutritiion. Take a nap if you need one, go to bed early, don't walk if you don't want to. You have the rest of your life to become ironwoman. I believe that if people push themselves too hard without adequate nutritional energy, they're going to get sick. Listen to your body and don't push. About your hair -- you could be an old lady for a while. Go to the salon on Sunday afternoon after sleeping in and get a wash and blowout, which should last you through Tuesday. Tuesday night, shampoo and blow out before you go to bed. Just do less, you know?