morelgirl

Best of luck!

Thanks so much!

Thanks, Caribear! My excitement is gearing up, and I'm happy with the decision I made.

Good luck, Heather. You sound like you're in a great place for surgery and for taking the first step toward a new life. I'm sure you'll do great!

@WickedWitch -- Don't be too scared of the pain. Everyone's surgery experience is different, and while Greekie has been bothered by pain, I've had almost none. It varies from person to person. Your pain might not be bad at all! If you're really scared, remember than you will be prescribed painkillers to take home, and you can and should contact your doctor if they don't give you relief. Your doc won't want you to be in pain because it can interfere with the healing process. Good luck!

Apologies to anyone who is (like me) old enough to see that post title and now has the Grateful Dead stuck in their head. At least be comforted that I am in the same boat. It is appropriate, though. I am truckin' along here 10 days post-surgery. I'm really enjoying my mushies over last week's liquids, but I am trying to keep an eye on my calories and getting as close to my minimum protein goals as I can. On that score, I can't wait until I can actually eat meat again. It has sooo much more protein than the softer eggs and beans and cheeses I'm most comfortable with at the moment. Honestly, I'm so comfortable and having such an easy time of it, that I'm guessing I could probably handle soft solids if not solids already, but after pushing for early mushies, I'm trying not to rock the boat too much more. And honestly, I'm not really having hunger issues yet, either. I mean, I get hungry, but it pretty much corresponds to mealtimes and 1/4 to 1/2 cup of food keeps me satisfied for hours. I still worry, though. I'm a bit paranoid about whether I'm inadvertently stretching my pouch, but I think my volumes are small enough to be safe. Fingers crossed. Some soreness around my largest incision still, a bit worse today after I overdid it a little yesterday on the bending at stretching, but nothing liquid Tylenol isn't dealing with. First fill should be in 18 days, and I'm marking the time off with eager anticipation!

Congrats on your successful surgery and positive experience. Definitely take the pain meds as prescribed and do NOT wait for the pain to become bad before taking. My dr and nurses were very insistent that any pain over a 3 needed to be medicated. Basically your body can either heal or fight pain, but it can't do both at the same time, so don't be brave! Hopefully the meds will help you sleep tonight, but propping yourself up so you aren't completely flat might help, too. All the best!

Good luck to you. 7 am is the first surgery slot in most hospitals, so you've got a good shot of going in on time. And even so, delays don't always happen. I went in within 30 minute of my noon scheduled time. I'll be sending positive thoughts!

@queenbea I had exactly the same experience with the sweetness of the protein shakes. I didn't use them pre-op, but being on them post-op for a week nearly drove me bonkers. I had to beg to move on to mushies. It turns out that it isn't unusual to become a bit hypersensitive to sweetness after bariatric surgery of any kind, so I can't promise you have it any easier after surgery. Unfortunately, the bottom line is that you need to follow doctor's orders, but there may be a couple of things you can try or at least ask about. You might be able to do broths after you've gotten your protein down, which at least might relieve your taste buds a bit. Also, there are people who make unflavored protein powders. I used one made by Now Sports. The benefit of it is that you aren't wedded to one or two favors like vanilla or chocolate but can mix it with whatever you want. Maybe if you used that mixed with skim milk it would be less sweet and more palatable to you? It's worth a shot. Good luck!

Puréed black bean soup with salsa and lite sour cream is my new best friend! I also gave myself permission to do mashed potatoes with rf cheese melted and mixed in. It's not low cal and will be a no-no in the future, but right now my focus is on healing and feeling good rather than losing weight. At least until the first fill. I also have done okay with soft scrambled eggs, but I think the key is to go slow and listen to your body. Not everyone can tolerate the same things at the same stages.

Actually, I feel pretty great. The shoulder pain was the worst, and something I didn't expect, but it only really lasted about 2-3 days. I didn't have much issue with gas, but I know some people do, so I did Gas-x preemptively and maybe that helped. My incisions itch, but have never really hurt. The largest one feels sore (like a mild pulled muscle) but it's much better than I expected. At my 1 week follow up appointment, I did have to beg the surgeon to let me try mushies, because liquids were driving me bonkers. Everything I was allowed to eat tasted sweet, and I have never been a fan of sweets. Since I was doing so well (not even a titch of nausea since waking from surgery) I got the okay. Let me tell you, a quarter cup of puréed black bean soup and I felt like a whole new woman! Lol.

Got mine February 1st. Good luck to all those still waiting!

I wish you all the best of luck, Charlie, and totally support your decision. I, too, have been overweight to varying degrees since I started school at age 5, and by the time I was 9, I had started dieting. Here's the thing, though, the bug secret that no one tells you: DIETING DOESN'T WORK. In fact, it has a 95% failure rate. Can you name one other thing that humans do with that failure rate that they continue to preach and push and make others buy into? Of course not, it would be ludicrous. The band, though, CAN work, if you work with it. You never failed by not losing weight by dieting; you just didn't have the right tool. Here's hoping your new tool helps you build a better future!

Oh, ditto times a million on the soft foods. It was like becoming human again to have something other than liquids! Glad to hear all is going well for you.

I haven't seen the movie, but I've done enough research to be afraid--very afraid!--of the industrial food complex. I try to limit processed foods and make sure to buy ones I can find at Whole Foods or the like. I buy my veggies either organic or--in season--get them from a local organic CSA. As for meat, my best friend and I did some research and now buy our beef and pork from local formers who only grass feed and humanely slaughter. We need chest freezers because we buy a whole pig and a quarter cow at a time, but I feel so much better with the decision, and the meat actually TASTES better, too. Luckily, we can get chickens pretty much the same way, either from local raisers or at the farm market.

The emotional down, that is. Hopefully, there will be lots of down happening on my scale in the weeks and months to come. My last entry was a bit on the depressed/depressing side, and I'm going to work not to let that take over. After all, things are actually pretty good. The surgery was surprisingly easy, in more ways than one. Since my insurance excluded the procedure from my policy, I ended up paying cash for it, and let me tell you, that certainly speeds up the process--so much so, that when I gave my surgery date to the program coordinator at the center where I had the procedure (a little less than three months after attending the mandatory information seminar on bariatric surgeries in general), she informed me that she thought I had set a new speed record for the pre-op phase of the process. And the surgery itself was way less scary thanks could have been. In and out of the operating room in 1 hour, and home in my recliner within another six. Surprisingly, the incisions ended up being the least noticeable pain after the fact. The shoulder pain, which I hadn't heard of but now know is normal, was much more uncomfortable. In reality, the incisions just itch a lot. Only the largest one is a problem, and that's mostly just sore, as if I had pulled a muscle there a few days ago and it's now slowly repairing itself. It only really bugs me when I stretch. All in all, the recovery is going smooth and easy, just like the surgery. Let's hope it's an omen of how the weight loss will go as well. So really, I should be feeling pretty good. And I am, on top of the underlying low grade fear. This could mean very good things for me, especially now that I'm on mashies; it's amazing how that one little step can make a person feel sooooooooo much more human. In two and a half weeks, I go back to the surgeon for what I hope will be my first fill, and then the journey can really start. Please, bandster hell, go easy on me. I'm still feeling a little fragile.

I'm starting this with the uncertainty whether I hope or dread anyone reading it, not to mention the hard-earned inability to believe that even this step will really be able to accomplish the thing to which it seems I've dedicated my life: losing weight. Unsucessfully, natch. I remember being on my first diet by the age of 9; I got my lap band (a Realize band, actually) on February 1, 2012, a little less than 3 month before my 37th birthday. Did I give up on losing the weight on my own? Maybe, but I prefer to think of it as giving up on the DELUSION that I could lose it on my own. Yes, I said it--it was a delusion. Delusional thinking. I've dieted for almost my entire life; if dieting actually led to weight loss, I'd be f'ing Kate Moss by now. Heck, I'd have melted away to nothing more than a decade ago. Atkins? Did it. Sonoma? Did it. Cabbage soup? Grapefruit? Mayo Clinic? Done, done, done. Jenny Craig? Check. Weight Watchers? Which of the nine times do you want to discuss? Counting calories? Yup, as well as counting fat, counting carbs, and counting numbers of bites. I became a human abacus. I saw a nutritionist for two years, and a therapist for even longer. I worked on my issues even as I worked harder at losing weight than at anything else in my life, but the lesson I learned from all of that work was that dieting doesn't. It doesn't work, and it most especially doesn't work for me. Enter, the band. Through five little incisions right in my belly. It is even now wrapped around my stomach and giving me a new (if still shaky) hope that maybe I can finally solve this problem. You know the one. The one that makes buying clothes not only difficult, but occasionally humiliating. The one that makes other people's gazes either slide right over you, or linger in that way that makes you want to crawl under a rock and hide. The one that makes doctors blame anything you ask for their help with on the same thing, regardless of symptoms, cause, or duration. The one that makes anyone in the medical profession ask if you've ever considered losing weight, as if you hadn't noticed you were fat and the idea of attempting to be thin had never even occurred to you. Yeah, that one. The issue here is that one week after surgery and 13.7 pounds down from my pre-pre-op-diet weight, I still haven't decided whether or not I believe this solution will work. I hope--God knows, I hope--but I can't quite commit to optimism yet. All I've got at the moment is that hope, and the kind of anticipation you feel before a huge exam. I know I studied, and I know the material backward and forward, but I still can't help feeling that I still could fail, just because I've done it before. Still, fingers crossed and breath held and band installed. I've even begun to transition (with desperation induced permission from my surgeon...I couldn't take liquids anymore) onto purees. Maybe this will work. Maybe I'll blog here more than this once. I don't know what the future holds yet, but I really hope it's good.