Fluffnomore

I think there's the issue of submerging the wounds but also the pulling and pressure you will put on them in the pool. I was a little antsy in the 6 weeks too but in the end I'm glad I waited. It went quickly.

Yes. But I work from home and mostly on the computer. I did find that working out during that time was really tough.

I would recommend that you check out twosleevers.com, which is the brainchild of our very own GamerGirl. I believe she is working on a cookbook, but in the meantime, there are lots of recipes on the site.

Nonsense! It is a reasonable question. I really believe that for me the key is feeling like I know what I can and can't do.

I get this a lot from one of my friends. When you look at habits, though? She has more disordered eating than I do. I'm happy not to eat everything on my plate. Even if comments make me want to punch someone in the throat. :-)

I was horrible at taking medication before the sleeve. Now I have my pills (including Vitamins, B12, D, etc) in a pill saver on my counter next to the coffee maker. Before I can have my cup of coffee in the morning, I take my pills. And I haven't forgotten once. :-) I also find that I need to add a little crystal light or something to my Water. Hope this helps!

The 3 week stall actually refers to a stall that many of us have around 3 weeks post surgery. If you search it under forums you will find probably dozens of posts about it. I weigh every day but didn't weigh from my approval date until my first post-op appointment, so I really don't know what the loss was the first couple of weeks.

Interesting, jjinWA. I know that for me, a lot of this year has been about making small, positive changes for myself. And yes, the family fights back. They don't want me going to CrossFit at 5:30 or 6:30 pm, when I should be busy putting dinner on the table. They don't want to cut THEIR carbs. They don't want me busy and engaged and happy, if I am not right here for them. My husband even said to me recently, "What I really want is a 1950s wife." He was shocked when I replied, "So do I, but I won't get one either so suck it up, Buttercup." It's possible that a few years ago I would have bent over backwards to try to be MORE. These days, I have a messy house, I'm really engaged in both my professional (free-lance) and volunteer work, and exercise, and there are weeks that my husband and kids have to pitch in to make things like dinner happen. They will live. This is very good for them. It is not always easy for them to hear that I am a priority too. And sometimes my temper is short and I do not have a go-to glass of wine to calm myself down. Again, we will all survive this. It's sad to think about the self I was that didn't want to EVER upset anyone.

Yep. I haven't lost much the last month or two but I am still mostly an XL in women's tops, and anywhere from a 10-14 in bottoms. I do have a couple of dresses that are 14W that I can still wear but most of them (and most of the 16 bottoms I have) are on the giveaway pile all of a sudden. It feels excruciatingly slow, but I have to remind myself all the time that it's a process. And I also am well-endowed, so I am trying to combat this by wearing things that show off my waist whenever possible, even if I can't get down into the next lower size on top.

Bring an extension cord for your chargers.

If anyone's interested in the sizes above, message me. Otherwise, you'll probably be able to find them in the west suburban Goodwills. :-)

It's hard. I had a friend who was sleeved about 4 months before me and she called me over the summer to tell me that feeling her feelings really sucked. By November, I kind of got what she was talking about. An interesting side benefit of all of this is that while feelings are really hard, I also find myself unwilling to put up with crap. Without the filter of food, or a bottle of wine, I am speaking my piece far more often. It is neither good nor bad, that part. Like Jane, I feel like those who have my back still do, and the ones that didn't or don't…will fall by the wayside. I am finding that I procrastinate things that I shouldn't (it's still a form of avoidance, right?) and that I haven't cleaned my office so that I can actually sit and work at my desk since before the surgery. It's some bizarre little control game I am playing with myself. The surgery has been an interesting wake up call to all sorts of behaviors, some of which I have tamed, some come to peace with, and some that I am still working on.

Are you serious? Most of the people on the thread were just sleeved. I don't think you can judge whether someone has had success until they're past a certain point. I also don't think you can put an algorithm on success. At 6 months out now, I've lost 60 pounds since my pre-surgery/approval weight. My practice considers me a superstar, but my weight loss hasn't been fast by any means. Then again, my surgeon's goal for me is in the 160-170 range, even though my goal is lower. I don't think it's fair to criticize others' rates of weight loss and to suggest a correlation makes even less sense to me.

LOL Beeteroo. That is exactly what I did after the sleeve. When I was asked, or when it was getting close to the timeframe, I'd buzz them and say my pain was a 6. It was closer to a 4. They'd bring the dilaudid, I'd sleep, and when it wore off I'd get up and walk the halls a few times. I will never be in the situation of not being able to get relief again, if there is anything I can do to help it. But the interesting thing is that I didn't have to take any of the painkillers at home. They gave me my last shot for the road about an hour before discharge. At home, I tried to take the liquid codeine and couldn't get it down (taste) and that was it. I was fine without it, and was amazed.

I drank G2 during the post op phase and will still drink it if I feel like I'm a little dehydrated (last Friday, had a business trip out of town in a single day and had a G2 before getting on the second plane.) I never bothered to Water it down because I drink more fluids if they taste good. Since the surgery I'm not nearly as likely to drink plain water. I don't know why, but I don't sweat it. I just add a crystal light or something.

I wasn't told to avoid potatoes during mushies. But once I progressed to the next stage they came back off the list.

I might have some 14W, 16 and 16Ws…unfortunately I have already given away a lot of those, but I can dig through a bag I've set aside for a friend. I definitely have a couple of pairs of shorts I've just put in a pile and I probably have some 14W, 16 and 16W dresses.

Kimba, it's not one size fits all, and some of us never completely lose the hunger feeling. There are many components to this. I agree that we need to re-learn cues, but it's just not true that all the ghrelin and receptors are gone in every single person. Some surgeons may cut differently, or whatever. I believe the language mine used is that "It is believed that we remove that part of the stomach responsible, but we don't know for sure" and "You should have a reduction in hunger." Not, it's gone and will never come back. I'm 6 months out, and I do get hungry. It feels the same way it used to, maybe not as intense, but it is there. Because it's been a while I can see that I misread certain cues my body gave me in the past, and that is where the re-learning becomes very important. I'm in complete agreement that the OP's issue is not about hunger, but I want to also make sure that people understand that there are no absolutes in this process.

I was talking to my SIL about this very thing, after she commented on how hard it must have been. I find that the less of a big deal I make of it, the easier it is. I had to go to a luncheon about 3 weeks post-op and I was very worried ahead of time. But you know what the meal was? Cream of asparagus soup, and a salad. Iced tea. Cheesecake. I was so early in that the soup was just perfect. I pushed the salad around, drank my tea, and said I wasn't interested in dessert. I went to a wedding six weeks out and ate every meal out (and had a two day road trip around it.) I ate lots of scrambled eggs and chili, but I learned that there is something out there pretty much everywhere. The one place I do not usually choose to go out to, is for pizza if there's nothing else on the restaurant's menu. Now that I'm 6 months out, there is something I can eat pretty much anywhere I go. The less I stress about it, the better. But, like many others, I keep almonds and Protein bars in my car. I'll have a shake on a low protein day. I don't keep Cookies or chips in the house.

Beeteroo, thank you. That is the best explanation I've ever heard. I tend to be very honest and direct, so if I say, "I am really in a lot of pain" I do mean that. Unfortunately, I figured because I said it calmly it was never heard. But I think you're right. It was also so HARD to get up the energy to demand, and I really suffered because of it. The joke was, when they admitted me they sent a resident in to check me in, and she suggested outside my door (loudly enough that I could hear it) that they send me to the psych ward for a workup. She decided that I was faking my symptoms to get painkillers, because I just wasn't presenting the way she expected me to. When she came back into the room I explained to her (quite rudely, apparently, LOL) that I was a mother with two school aged children, and if all I wanted was painkillers on a Friday afternoon I would go get a margarita. My doctor went back to her with my surgical results and basically told her that she needed to be careful; if she had sent me away I could have died. (Ha. Take that, disbeliever.) Ironically when I got the sleeve I had been working out for a couple of months; I had ab muscles; I recovered like a dream. It was really so different and I never understood completely why.

This is one of my (only) beefs with medical professionals, particularly post-op nurses. It is really almost impossible to judge someone else's pain. I had an emergency gall bladder removal in 2008, a "lady parts" surgery in 2011, and the sleeve in 2013. My post op pain level was minimal in 2011, slightly worse for the sleeve, and excruciating for the gall bladder. I don't know why, but I suspect that I had been really sick and/or run down prior to the gall bladder surgery and everything was worse as a result. I also happen to be a bit soft-spoken in that situation, and so the result was that the nurses routinely downplayed my requests for pain medication. With the sleeve, I was way more on top of it and took whatever they'd give me; and requested it at the earliest times they would let me. At any rate, I'm replying only because I am the same person with multiple surgical experiences and don't consider myself either a tough guy or a wimp. I think it just completely depends. I do have a friend who almost goes into shock when she accidentally hits her head or stubs her toe, and while sometimes I think, "Drama queen" to myself, I also don't really doubt that she feels pain way more intensely than I do.

All that said, I also just wanted to point out the obvious: there is really no social situation that requires the use of alcohol.

I did not have a dramatic decision making process. I first looked into the surgery in August, we determined I hit all of the qualifications (just barely, but still) and I went through all of the pre-surgery steps very quickly. Was sleeved in October. From my approval to surgery date was just over a week, which in my case was good. It literally gave me NO time to ponder, freak out, ponder, freak out…or anything. I had an out-of-body moment on the way to the hospital, one of those…"Oh crap, what if this is how I die?" But then, it passed. I went through the surgery with flying colors and had a better than textbook recovery. I might be an outlier because I was not yet to the point where surgery was the ONLY way out. But you know, I've been down the diet path in pretty much every way possible. Diabetes and heart disease run in my family. I was essentially a ticking time bomb, even though I hadn't reached critical mass by any means. My mother, who struggled all of her adult life with weight issues, managed to take off close to 100 pounds strictly with diet and appetite suppressants, under the care of a bariatrician. She tells me, she will be doing this for the rest of her life. She was too afraid of surgery. My other thing is that in the last 5 years, I have had two surgeries that, if not directly related to my weight, were certainly correlated: gall bladder and a mid-urethral sling. The idea that I should continue to fix things as they came up seemed crazy to me. So in many ways, when they said okay, I said let's go. And that was that. Good luck.

I will go against the majority and say that my surgeon gave me the green light between 6 and 8 weeks to have an occasional glass of wine. I do have wine fairly regularly but I am very mindful about it. (I'm 6 months out now.) Prior to surgery, wine was my go-to relaxer. Cocktail hour arrived, and I poured my first glass. But I was lucky; when I gave it up for the 2 months around surgery I really didn't miss it. It still feels habitual to me to want to pour a glass of wine around 6, and sometimes I do. Two things really help me: 1) my exercise class has two options: 5:30 or 6:30 pm. I'd rather go to that than sit around, and 2) The "habit" part of it has been mostly broken. I would also recommend that you take a wineglass and measure out your 4 or 5 oz exactly, and then only pour to that point from that point on. Limit to one, and don't let it become a habit or crutch. Oh, one other tip. NEVER lie to yourself about it. I track everything. Even when I don't want to see it. So on the very infrequent occasions that I've had more than one, that goes in my log. If I cringe when I type it in, that's a big message. Like anything else I think this is dependent on what you need to do to be comfortable and successful. I prefer having a little bit of wiggle room. But I didn't wiggle in the immediate aftermath of surgery. :-)

My amusement at the "easy way out" is that there are many of us who simply DON'T MAKE A BIG DEAL of what we are doing. And then it looks easy to the outside. Even my husband, who has his definite whingebag moments (since he was denied insurance approval for the surgery) has told me how easy I have it. I just smile and say, "Do a liquid and pureed diet for 8-9 weeks, or if you can't do that how about you only eat as much as I eat for a couple of days. Oh, and work out with me. Then we'll talk about how 'easy and effortless' this is." Dillbutters.