crosswind

Absolutely Roseib.

Congratulations Oregon Daisy! Your posts have been among the ones that made me take the plunge and go to Mexicali. No going back now .

. I don't know, cmsumom. I stopped weighing myself a while ago. Too dreary. I'll update the board when I do.

Dr. A sleever, Mexicali Mexico, March 29. I paid 8750 but I also flew first class for 2K; you could probably get much cheaper tickets than that to San Diego. Can't say enough good things about the guy. I still write their office like every day with ridiculous questions and they don't seem to mind. I can't even remember how I got started with them but I think I called the number on this site. http://www.mexicolapband.com/contactus.php

Congratulations! I would give that last ten pounds another year. The last ten are always very *slow* to come off.

I'm not sure if this is a "learning" thing -- it's too subterranean for that. Between a real live doctor's warning that your stomach could explode if you eat incorrectly and Mr Tantrum ready to stab you from the inside the minute you screw up, you just stop putting your hand on the stove without really remembering why you don't do that anymore. Some things about recovering from surgery are hard but they get easier so fast how you used to do it becomes a blur. Meggie, I remember those balloons. I did this religiously because my surgeon told me to do it. The key I think in this whole situation is, you know, for once, do what they tell you. No improvising, just do the things. It's funny how I was willing to take the advice of like, Valerie Bertinelli about all this when I could have talked to a bariatric surgeon the whole time .

It seems strange Dr. A's office told you three meals a day and no snacking. I have an email from Gaby from about a week ago saying I should be eating 5 or 6 small meals a day. Maybe you should write or call to clarify. I write to them all the time, practically bomb their email box. They might have some good advice for you.

Please call your doctor. I don't want to scare you but you could have, or come down with, pneumonia. It's too early out to self-treat for something like that. Do it now.

Oh Indy what a drag! Even without the sleeve I've never even *entered* maggianos; it just seemed like there was a hulking carb monster inside the doorway who'd been waiting to meet me my whole life. Maggianos, out to dinner, lasagna, with people you don't know very well...holy macaroni talk about a trial by fire! I don't think I would have survived that without a belly ache the next day either. Sorry that happened to you, you know Italian restaurants have been trying to kill us all for many years. I had a similar thing happen to me the first day of mushies -- I made and ate way too much food and felt completely sick all night long. I felt okay the next day though and made a point of being careful and backing off. I'm glad you shared Dr. A's advice. I'll remember it if I'm ever the victim of a lasagna bomb.

ybnormal, I am sorry for the pain and loss in your life just like I'm hella sorry for mine. My point is really that the vsg is a great surgery for weight loss but it sucks for dead relatives, rotten financial decisions, lost romantic opportunities, homelessness and unfortunate decor. All it does is stop you from eating too much. I think, though, everbody kind of wants to tell the story of how they got fat. "The story of how I got fat, " is always just a f**king abysmal story. It's a true story, but it's *awful* -- usually -- unless there is a pregnancy involved or you're from one of those African tribes that pay many many goats for a really chunky bride. Now I could tell you my story which involves a dying relative, career detonation and being wrongfully chased across the US by the FBI ( no, really) but personally -- and I don't mean this to make your story irrelevant -- or *anyone's* -- but I am not sure if it's relevant to the problem of being overweight. It might have contributed to the story of how you got fat, But it might not be helpful at all in getting rid of the problem. I wonder sometimes if that's part of the issue here. I mean is your life *really* so bad that you gained a hundred pounds or could you have actually had a very shitty life or a very marvelous, Oprah-type life and gotten fat anyway? What I'm trying to say is that I suspect attaching "the story" to being overweight is an unhealthy practice emotionally. It takes all your failings, losses, miseries, bad decisions, abuses, and karmic unfairness and slaps them on your thighs. That's a lot of misery for one pair of thighs to manage, you know? The truth of the matter is that none of those things are in fact on your thighs; what's there is thousands of excess calories. Our surgeons are not treating General Life Suckitude, they are treating a medical problem: obesity. If we all go on afterwards to win the Nobel prize or learn to resurrect lost relatives, well then, rejoice therefore, But it's not really within the scope of treatment here. I should also say that recovery from surgery tends to be a sort of introspective, Proustian period wherein lots of drugs are draining from your system and your internal organs are learning to operate on an alternate channel. This can really take a toll on your emotions. I'm reading people here who leapt out of bed and started doing the Safety Dance but mostly, I'm reading people like me who are already evincing co-morbidities, who have been comforting themselves with carb overloads for a fair number of years, who do not feel all that f**king well thanks because they just had majory surgery. They don't usually sound so thrilled with life frankly until a bit later. So my other point is, I don't think I am personally any more challenged or melancholic than anybody else. My life is not *particularly* shitty. One problem I had is going to clear up over the next year, who knows what's going to come up next but the vsg is not going to help it. The good news is this is the internet and my toes are safe .

A planarian was the first live animal we were ever allowed to fully destroy in seventh grade science class. Planaria are flat worms with heads that look like arrows pointing to either a spelling mistake or a sale price. I have no idea why the world of secondary education is so taken with with these things. I never understood it. I had to learn all about this damn thing in seventh grade and then I had to cut it in half for no reason I could really fathom. How is cutting a worm in half educational? You know if you're at my house you can get in big trouble for that? Once the boys in the neighborhood put somebody's new Stretch Monster on the railroad tracks and oh man did they ever get in trouble. I tell you, school for me always seemed to present more mysteries than it cleared up. Sure enough though, when I went to visit my son's seventh grade class, there they were with the planaria again. Cutting worms in half in seventh grade is not just part of compulsory education, it is a little known *institution* upon which any preteen may ponder, Actually I remember the central lesson about planaria. Planaria are unlike many other species because of their capacity to regenerate, If you cut a planarian in half, you don't havce one dead planarian, you have two, living planarians, both equally clueless. This is supposedly what made it so fun to cut them in half. It would regrow a head but you know just because you can cut something in half and make it grow another head doesn't mean you *should*. I was thinking today about my stomach and how I am starting to respond to the fact that I barely have one anymore. Now why, you might ask, would this be associated with a flatworm I was forced to mutilate in seventh grade? Because I have a weird mind, that's why. What i'm doing here is adapting. We're amazing machines. It's fascinating to realize that the fact is you never needed all that much of that organ to begin with and there are people all over walking around entirely without one. The body has no intention whatsoever of allowing a detail like a missing stomach to interfere with its consumption of nutrients and oxygen and warmth and sex and sleep. Nope. Like a planarian or a lizard regrowing a tail. It's just going to find another route to town. Today is one month and I am getting tired of counting the days. That's clue number one. The first few weeks just dragged on and on interminably: I think day eighteen was the worst for that; a month out seemed like a train scheduled to arrive at the end of the world. Now I'm more interested in what I'm having for dinner, which today turned out to be a Taco Bell bean burrito -- or at least the inside of one. Being quite capable of inhaling one of these things accidently before, it was pretty stunning to open one up and realize all this time I was being sold two teaspoons of Beans inside a tortilla with the circumference of a basketball. But eating is getting easier and that means life is getting easier. I had oatmeal for Breakfast with milk which tasted like a krispy kreme doughnut to me. I had cottage cheese and more oatmeal for dinner ( hey man, it's got seven grams of Protein in it) and day by day my diet is getting more varied and something more like what an actual person would eat. Somehow when that happens something eases up and instead of obsessing and checking your temperature every five minutes and wondering if that last swallow of Soup was in fact the cause of your demise..it all starts to feel more and more like you. One month. Not dead, since March 29, 2011.

You're right. I didn't have an issue with not being able to eat those calories, I just had some weird idea that since I started at 500 and I had lost thirty pounds I should stay at 500. I've been allowing about 7-800 now. That's plenty negative. And with that and a couple of gummy Vitamins a day and two prilosecs, I'm getting some mojo back here.

"I know how it feels to distract others by making them laugh and the whole time crying inside and hope like hell no one can see it. It tears me apart to see you going through this. If you ever need to talk I'm a phone call away or feel free to send me a msg here, either way, please don't let it eat at you for too long...it's a deep dark place you're headed toward and I worry for you." A darling, concerned person named Renee wrote this to me on another thread. I was surprised. I had to think about this; am I headed to a deep dark place? Maybe. The thing is no one has seen the deep dark place I was in before. If you knew all the shit I've been through in the past five years- and I was almost going to say two because those were really the worst -- you'd probably be amazed I was still walking aorund forming words and paying bills. But I don't think it's just me -- I think anyone who is near three hundred pounds, four, or five -- well this is not a happy circumstance for anyone. How cheerful can you be when your appetite turns on itself and starts eating you? Personally, before this surgery I was almost three hundred pounds, on my last marriage, without any family and basically, I think, I was trying to die. Or at least I did not want to *be* here; consciousness was just too tiring and painful. Then I realized it was not going to work. Or at least, not in a timeframe I was really comfortable with. Every single person with an extreme weight problem has a painful story to tell. How their bodies betrayed them or their lives did, or their support system blew up one day when they were seven or eighteen or fifty -- every single one of us has that kind of thing going on and some of us, I guess walk around with waves of pain rolling off our bodies like steam off a radiator. And here's a tip; if you eat enough you can cover that up and redirect peoples' attention to that instead. I guess. I mean I should probably say that every human being has a painful story to tell whether they have an extreme weight problem or not. Overeating might be a way to manage that pain. Maybe. Maybe. As a person pretty much saturated with fat consciousness I've read all these books, heard thousands of metaphysical, psychological dramas. For some reason one day I was thinking about this episode of a very old tv show called the Professor and the Nanny. Ever notice how many Magic Nannies have been on TV? When I was a kid I didn't think too much about it but I watched a lot of TV and so some of these life observations and smalltime miracles kind of stayed in my head and looped into my childhood consciousness. This is what I got instead of math and science and money management. This is the theme song from the Nanny and the Professor: Soft and sweet Wise and wonderful Oooh our mystical, magical nanny. Since the day that nanny came to stay with us Fantastic things keep happening. Is there really magic in the things she does Or is love the only magic thing that nanny brings You know our nanny showed us you can make the impossible happen. Nanny told us have a little faith and lots of love Phoebe Figalilly is a silly name And so many silly things keep happening What is this magic thing about nanny Is it Love? Or is it Magic? Nodnod. Yeah. Anyway one episode the Nanny was upset because she thought she was gaining weight. There was all this light comedy surrounding the Nanny getting fat and then somehow she manages to go on a date and go for a walk in the park and eat some ice cream. And she loses the five pounds or whatevever. And then she winds up the show saying, " I know how you solve a weight problem! Happiness!" or something like this. And I remembered it because I was seven at the tim and the Nanny had demonstrated how to conquer her problem. Ice cream and theme music. This is the kind of metaphysical crap people have been upsetting themselves with for years inside this topic. It's not that i think that unhappiness is better than happiness or that people don't have weight problems rooted in their bad childhoods or traumatic love affairs or whatever, but take someone like Geneen Roth, who brings women on these retreats to teach them how to love God instead of a salami sandwhich. Fat in her opinion is a spiritual flaw. Or its a psychological flaw. So, dutiful and concerned as we are, we go through all this self-excavation, praying fervently, deeply wishing to know what is wrong with us, and we go to the therapist and we pay these fake weight loss priests to help us and at the end of all this, where are we? Fucked up in the head is what I think. Just fucked up, I mean if you spend forty years in a state of severe anxiety over food, eating, and the condition of your body; convinced you have a "problem" that separates you from the rest of humanity; obsessed and freaked out every minute by your relationship to the scale -- how can a person *not* be? So my point here is I have had kind of a shitty life. I am also so totally not the only one. But my decision to get WLS was more a statement that said: "Fine. But I'm not gonna be FAT." I'm not going to buy all that stuff right now, which may be perfectly viable stuff, it's just not practical. If I had to develop true happiness and and complete self-actualization *before* I lost a hundred pounds I'm not sure if it would ever happen.So forget it, my life is terminally screwed, I am 46 and at the end of my third marriage, my kids are grown and out of the house and I have no idea what I';m even still doing here but goddammit I lost 30 pounds this month. To me the decision to do this was a decision to live. It's depressing to be me I guess but then I don't know you, it might also be hideously depressing to be you. But there's one thing I do know if your stuff is as bad as my stuff: you are not suicidal. You're still fighting like hell.

Amen! Hey it worked! I just got a deal on a Toshiba Satellite at Radio Shack for 400 bucks. Well, we'll see how lucky that really is, right?

TOM came today. Also I'm not sleeping enough: I fell asleep oneish this morning and was up at 7:30 this morning, feeling like the contents of my blender. I was wondering when the beastly part of the month was going to rear and charge. I'm tired and crampy and my fuse is very short. The sky is doing its imitation of concrete. Add this to an extremely annoying phone call from my ex and you've got the whole divx download of Day 27. This leads me to want to fill this whole space with an entire encyclopedia about my ex but I won't. It all sucks but it's all just as normal and crummy as it was before my sleeve. All the regular crappy things about my life are still operating perpetually to wreck my good will and pleasing comportment. In sleeve news, though, I got some reassurance from Dr. A headquarters that mild pain and morning nausea are also completely normal. What they said was that I was making enough stomach acid for a whole stomach as opposed to a thin slice of one and recommended that I take two prilosecs a day instead of one, and that worked well enough. On the other hand I had all kinds of other morning unpleasantness. And in other news....sigh. My computer's power source just died. This is the end of the road for this one I think so if there is no post here on Day 28 don't assume I have expired. I'll be at Best Buy spending too much money. As usual

Amanda thanks for the compliment, that was a very nice thing to say. I don't really think this is my best writing; I'm usually a bit cleverer than this but as you know I was recently abducted by aliens and taken to a foreign locatioon whereupon some of my insides were removed. It's true, it does sort of creep up on you. I'm about thirty pounds lighter but not quite there...yet. It does get better every day, although a couple weeks ago I was too logy to realize I even had anything to get better from. Cheers

By the time the late afternoon rolled around I felt much better, which is what seems to always happen in the tummy wars. I'm convinced my stomach has squirrels. But they calm down or find something else to do besides gnaw on my stomach after making themselves known and this gives me a chance to demonstrate every day and once again that I am not dead. It dawned on me about three o clock that if I sat around and moped about whether my stomach was about to explode, I was going to miss a fabulous opportunity. It was Easter, and the health club pool was OPEN TIL MIDNIGHT,and it was almost four o clock. Absolutely nobody would be there, they'd be cutting apart a lamb made of butter or napping after church or sorting through easter basket loot leaving a wide open empty indoor swimming pool to me and me alone. It was too good to pass up, squirrels or no, so off I went. And I was most excellently right. The place was deserted except for two little kids who were leaving. It was so blissfully empty that I actually swam diagonals across the whole pool and back again and then floated on my back doing otter meditations. I made sure I took a hot shower afterwards because five days ago, when a swam myself to a state teary exhaustion there was nothing I could do all night afterwards to get warm. When I was a kid I loved the Water. I was one of those kids who would throw conniptions when it was time to come out. I would stay in there until I was turquise and chattering enough to cause seismic activity. I loved being bouyant, that weightless feeling. I could not understand why things couldn't be that away all the time. And I hated the return to gravity when I hoisted out of the pool or flopped back up on the beach. When I was a teen i was a passable sailor and I remember my favorite thing to do at summer camp when I wasn't sailing was to swim all the way out to the milemarkers in the gray lake and then back again. But you know, by the time you turn 16 the beach is no longer a place to actually swim. It's a place to wear a bikini. It's a place you diet to go, to starting three months beforehand. I wasn't overweight by much back then but the problem was that I was five ten and sturdy and so I had to learn the fine art of teen summer starvation began to bleed through to the fall and then throughout the year. Come to think of it, I might not have eaten anything at all in 1986 and 1987. I was part-dolphin but that only takes you to mid-adolescence. Then it's all no fun anymore. Sometime after that I developed a pernicious ear perforation that has never entirely gone away. Diving underwater feels like someone shot a nailgun through my head. So this is a new/old joy thing for me. It's kind of cool to be old, buy a size 24 speedo and walk around thinking f**k it, I don't have to look at me. I bought the world's finest ear protection and made my head watertight and seriously I could just paddle around for hours. Literally. Just like a chubby, bluelipped fourth grader . So that is were I ended up on Easter Sunday, after a morning of squirrels and several tense and melancholy phone conversations with my family and my ex-husband.I tried to eat eggs when I got back. They still will not go in me. I think I ate 400 calories today; I have five days until I am clear to eat all solid food and I am having trouble even imagining "normally" if a mere egg causes havoc. But there's a whole lifetime between how it is now and how it was 26 days ago. I'm thinking a solid recovery, with a smaller suit and no Easter Squirrels next year, is pretty darn likely.

That's interesting -- and also interesting about negative calories. My calories are low -- about 500. I was absolutely starving last night and didn' eat. I'll try all your suggestions, thanks! Love this board. I started to feel a little better after I ate but before that I was thinking crap, this is it, I screwed the pooch, I gotta get my affairs in order...

Thanks Kelly, that's a good idea, I will

. I've stopped by there a couple times Oregon Daisy and no one was around . Bad social timing, But I'll check again later on

It doesn't happen every day but it does happen, say -- every *other* day. I wake up in the morning and I feel sick, like my insides are trying to eat each other or maybe morning sickness. Not enough to expel anything out either end but..queasy and allover kinda bad. I checked my temp and it was 98.8 this morning, but it was 98.1 last night. That concerned me a little because it's supposed to be the other way around. Funny thing is I felt fine yesterday -- the day before that I felt crappy in the morning. I take my PPI immediately after a glass of Water and then have another one right after and sort of try to walk it off -- most days it goes away. I did not sleep well at all last night and really didn't get to sleep about six am which puts me at five hours -- I don't know, maybe that has something to do with it? Also TTTOM should be starting like any minute now. Anyway -- anybody else feel like this in the morning or does it sound like a Bad Sign?

I posted a whole field of pixels here a minute ago and it all got eaten by the internet. Highlights? Recovering from surgery is like getting bitten by a vampire. You can't exactly explain what happened but it wasn't good. But I'm starting to feel more like myself and less like the zombie version. Also, I caved and started eating the leftover Medifast I was using before I got fed up with an entirely powdered diet and decided to spend ten thousand dollars on the Hail Mary. I really did not want to touch it again but it makes life a little easier, has 15 grams of Protein per serving and is designed for bariatric patients, which I now happen to be. It's something new sleevers might consider since they make a couple of flavors of protein clears along with shakes, pudding, oatmeal and Soups that are all protein supplemented. If you really don't want to have to think that hard about what you're eating while you're recovering from surgery -- it might be worth it. But it is expensive and it gets old *vvery* fast. There is also WonderSlim and bari...something -- basically all the same product but these two are cheaper. I walked in the park today, cleaned and did laundry and did not cry once. I am still babying my left side. I am starting to feel like a barn that leans. That is all.

. Lucky girl. Ask him if he has a brother. Or...you know, is the dad still alive?

. Meggie I was watching one of your vlogs and I think you were talking about your SO. Y'all are so lucky you have supportive, loving spouses. It makes such a difference, or so I can only imagine....