Wheetsin

I was able to begin thick liquids such as pureed foods, yogurt, hummus and thinned oatmeal (only the instant kind) as of day 3 (today). I will be at this stage for about a week, and can then add in soft foods such as moist deli meats and eggs.

I'm here, a measley 3 days post-op. Feeling about the same as I did right after band surgery, but with slightly different sensations. This surgery has, knock on wood, been very easy so far - except for an extremely painful allergic reaction to an unknown med(s). One of my incisions is super puckered, like a button tuft. It has completely changed the shape of my stomach. That one hurts a lot. I don't really even notice the others (6 total). Surgery was Tue. morning, I was discharged Wed, spent a few hours early Thu morning in the ER (allergic reaction), but spent the majority of Thu evening out & about, and was out shopping for about 5 hours today. Moving very slowly, though. I don't know what my losses are. My NSV to date is getting rid of the pain from that allergic reaction. Still schlupping around in empire waist dresses (because they don't have waistbands) and flipflops (because button tuck incision makes me walk slightly hunched over, and how stupid would that be with heels), looking about as whiskey tango as I possibly can. Although "easy" this process is a little frustrating. I lived with my lapband so long that I knew its signals and symptoms. Now I don't know what these sensations are telling me. It's kind of hard to be the "noob" again, not yet able to interpret what my body is telling me.

I'm 3 days post-op and have not yet been able to meet my current Protein goals (30 - 40gm) or Fluid intake (40 oz) even though I feel like I'm constantly sipping. I've not yet felt hungry, nor thirsty. Today I got in about 22 oz of Water, maybe 4 tbls of yogurt (about 2 in the a/m. and about 2 more in the p.m.), 5 oz Protein Drink (these go down a lot harder than water), and two or three baby spoonfuls of Jello. I don't yet know what "full" feels like with this thing, and am probably undereating/drinking, but I don't want to push it this soon post-op. I'm not particularly tired. Yesterday and today I spent the majority of the day outside of the house. Grocery shopped yesterday, window shopped today, though I go slow and use a cart. I have one incision that is causing most of my pain. If it weren't for that one, I'd feel about normal (except the eating changes). Today was the first day for "thick liquids" on my post-op diet: yogurts, puddings, etc.

I've lived in Scandinavia and could never get past the smell of filmjölk. Or the texture, or the taste. If you try it, make sure you shake it up before you open it. It always seemed to be a lot stinkier if it had separated out at all. The fruit ones are a little high in carbs for my personal taste - about on par with fruited Greek yogurts. But with no more than what you'll be eating post-op, I think they are fine. I could barely eat 1.5 tbls of Greek yogurt this morning. What store did you find Siggi's at? DH loves it but the closest we can find is a Trader Joe's Lassi - not quite the same.

I'm 3 days post-op. I can do plain and flavored Water without any problems, any temperature, as long as I take very small sips and wait between swallows. I've not had anything that feels like a burning. If I take too big of a sip, or don't wait long enough between swallows, I get a pain/pressure that lasts just a few seconds, then subsides - often with some gurgling or a burp. While I was still in the hospital I got this pain on occasion whether I'd eaten or not, but now it's just with drinks. It feels similar to a painful gas bubble, but is definitely in the stomach area. Cold water in the a.m. seems to make it a little worse, but I'm not far enough out from surgery to have definitely picked out any clear patterns.

Doing great now. There are two small spots on each arm, near the elbow, that ache occasionally or when touched. It's barely noticeable now, and I suspect it will be gone by morning. Everyone involved is still baffled by the particular reaction I had. I'm just glad to be rid of the pain - words can barely describe it. In the ER I learned something I didn't know, that might be valuable to message board land... two of the best things to have on hand in the event of a medicine allergy are Benadryl and Pepcid. I didn't know this, but apparently Pepcid is an (accidental) H1 blocker. It was one of the first things they put in my IV in the ER. ER doc told me anyone with known medicinal allergies should always have Benadryl and Pepcid on hand.

I know a lot of people are nervous or busy the day before surgery, and it becomes easy to skip out on hydration - or even forget. But take this as a reminder about how important it is to be adequately hydrated when you go in. For multiple reasons, but this will be, chronologically, the first. My surgeon required a pre-op laxative. Usually it works in about an hour. For me, it took about 13 hours. The result was that I had major diarrhea AFTER my midnight cutoff for anything by mouth, so I was unable to replace the fluids I was losing. It took 6 people (after 3 fails, it's someone else's turn), 17 attempts, and over an hour to get an IV line in. I wish DH had taken a pic of me laying there with IV needles sticking out everywhere, it would have looked so much more dramatic than it actually was. Not all IV fails are pictured, just the ones that show up in bad lighting. (I REALLY wish I had a picture of the look on my surgeon's face when I told him my laxative (which takes several hours to run its course) had just kicked in 3 hours ago, so sorry if I pooped on the table but it was his fault for making me take it). DRINK YOUR WATER!

Reminds me of my Atkins pork rind pancakes days. Get a decent quality semi hard cheese like parmesan. The wheel slice, not the grated stuff. Hand grate a few tbls worth and arrange them in small piles. Bake at 350 until the pulesmelt down. Makes yummy lowcarb chips. You can lay them iver a fold of foil before they cool and make a taco shell shape.

Sleeve surgery was a piece of cake. Recovery was not nearly as bad as I expected. My pain level was noticeable and more than with previous surgeries, but I did not have any significant issues with nausea or gas. I was on morphine rather than dilaudid. Had someone not made that decision, I think my pain level would have been a lot less. Morphine is never my first choice (I was rating myself a 6 - 7 on the paint scale as I came out of anesthesia, wanting to manage it to around a 4). It was definitely more painful than band insert or removal, but nothing at all like what I expected. Surgery was at 9am and by 3ish my pain was completely managed. I was told to expect some extra soreness because I had a large degree of scar tissue/adhesions that had to be dealt with, so both surgery time and invasion were more than expected. I was fine to walk around by 6 or 7 that evening, so I went for about 10 walks during the night. Felt so nice. I felt great the next morning (Wed) & was eager to get home. Discharge took until about 2pm. Then came the complication. I had an aytpical presentation of allergic reaction to one of the medicines - we still don't know which, because it's not a documented side effect. Within a few hours of getting home, from my neck to both wrists the skin was beet red and purple, think horrid sunburn,radiating extreme amounts of heat, and with seriously intense muscular aching that was truly close to agonizing - and I have a high pain tolerance. We tried to draw the heat out with ice bags but the temperature of my skin would melt all the ice within a minute or two. My skin was so hot to the touch that it was uncomfortable for other people to touch me. I called my surgeon's PA and was told to take Benadryl and wait it out. That was about 5pm. By about 2am I truly could not stand it any longer so I went to the ER. My radiant skin temperature in the affected areas was nearly 22 degrees higher than the rest of me by that time and ambient air temperature was unbearable and would cause instant muscle seizure. 5 hours in the ER with IV predisone, pepcid and dilaudid had me feeling much better. It's now almost completely cleared up. Just a few sore spots left. Definitely manageable. I'm now at home, very comfortable, with an addl Rx for prednisone and something to coat my stomach so that it doesn't overly irritate the sensitive staple line. I've beent old to postpone the Arixtra shots (I don't mind that one bit). Omeprazole and Lortab as needed, but my pain level isn't bad enough to need the Lortab. I just feel slightly achy/tight except for the spot where my drain was. That's the only spot that's actually painful. I should've done this the first time around!

Starting a thread so I have a place to consolidate thoughts/info/etc. I've been bandless for a little more than 6 months now. Sometimes it's like I was never banded, and other times it's like I still am. Surgery is at 9am tomorrow, check-in at 7am. I'll be in the hospital for one night. My parents are driving down tonight to spend the week. Having them here to help with DD (and DH, and me) will be nice. Poor DH is a nervous wreck; he always is with things like this. I have twinges of anxiety when I think about how miserable I expect to feel tomorrow, but I'm not nervous. I rarely get very nervous, I just get pragmatic, I guess. And the closer it gets to time, the less anxious I am (typically). Thankfully! I suspect tomorrow will be all business. And trying to calm DH. My surgeon requires a 2-day pre-op diet. sugar free liquids + 4 Protein drinks. Check. Just chugged the bottle of Magnesium Citrate solution he also requires. DH picked it up for me and didn't think to get the flavored one (thanks DH). My best description is 10 oz worth of sour/salty boiled eggs. I developed a whammy of a sinus headache Saturday. Changing weather patterns. Usually a cocktail of ibuprofen and benadryl wipes them out, but both are on my pre-op no no list. So it has been a long few days... Still have a lot to do. Prep my hospital bag, make sure DD's clothes are set out, tidy the house, etc. I'm just a little lacking in motivation. "See" you all when I can...

How many pounds would 5% TBW be for you? I would never recommend it as a long term solution, but if you need a quick scale drop it's hard to beat an induction style diet. I noticed you mentioned you're already doing low carb, but are you kind of cutting carbs out, or are you REALLY low carbing it? By really low carbing, I mean Atkins induction phase or stricter. No more than 20g carbs per day, they can only come from certain sources, and only so many carbs can come from any one source. Atkins induction food list I think I lost about 14 lbs my first week, and 8 lbs my second. For a quick drop I would not look to exercise, actually.

As a former banded person, maybe you have anxieties around taking a permanent step. When I see your concerns focusing on far future times, that's what it makes me think of - that this isn't something they can just go in and unclip. We were all attracted to the band's adjustable/removable nature at some point in time, I'd guess. "It's not about the weight I'm going to lose, it's about the weight I'm never going to have to lose again." I'm not really a pep talk kind of person, but when I need perspective that's what I tell myself. I'm 36 and doing this as a parent. I wasn't a parent when I had my band. That's a part of it for me, too. I have more at stake if something goes wrong. It's not just about me anymore.

jerseylocks, when I had my lapband I went from about 380 to about 250 (so close to your 130 lb loss) very quickly and almost effortlessly. My body really liked 250. Liked, in an obsessive boyfriend who parks across from your bedroom window at 2am kind of way. I was at 250 for about... 18 months. I just could not go down. But I also did not go up. Then after about a year and a half, with me changing nothing, I lost about 15 pounds over the span of a few days. That's the mother stall if I've ever heard of one! There's this medical mathematical law about calories. We know the goal is to eat fewer than you need. And a lot of people cite this as fact, and that's fine. But what they leave out is that everything has its patterns. A deficit of about 3500 calories is going to result in about 1 lb lost. That's the pure math of it. But if I eat 3500 calories a day, and I don't eat tomorrow, I've probably not lost a pound come Sunday. Math gives you your results "on demand" but weight take its sweet time. And keep in mind, there can be things going on that mask the weightloss (fluid changes, muscle bulk changes, maybe you have to poo <- you need neither confirm nor deny that one!) Stick with it. You're not done unless you want to be.

We may be kindred spirits on the logic aspect of things. It may help you to know that this procedure has been around for a long time, just not specifically as a bariatric procedure. The majority of gastroectomies are still performed for treatment of gastric cancers. Did you know surgeons have been doing gastroectomies since 1881? Well, technically they were done before then, but that was the first successful one. And remember that you do not need a stomach to survive. So what types of long term fears are you considering? Or is it more generic than that?

I'm not a fan of the Protein shots (if you mean the test tube looking things like this: http://www.body-atta...in_Shot_500.jpg) I don't care for the quality of protein. Kind of hard to explain, but (IMO/IME) some Proteins are better than others... whey vs. soy vs. soy isolate vs. pea vs. hemp vs... Have you tried pimping your Protein drinks a little? I can send you some really, really good recipes if you'd like to try to make them more palatable It's all like wood to me. 70g of wood is 70g of wood. But if I burn 70g of pine, I'm going to have a much different pile of ashes left over than if I burn 70g of hickory. I want the smallest possible pile of ashes. My surgery is scheduled for this coming Tuesday (3/27).

I've had lap-band surgery, and will have my sleeve surgery Tuesday. My lapband install surgery was really, really easy. I would go so far as to call it a "cake walk." My lapband removal surgery actually hurt more, but only right after. When I woke up from band in, I had no pain. When I woke up from band out, I was rating my pain a 4 and wanting meds. Kudos to my surgeon for throrough port placement technique. I don't know if the nausea I see being reported in most VSG cases is a reaction to the anesthesia, or an effect of the stomach butchering. I see just enough people not having nausea problems that it seems almost like an anesthesia thing. I wonder how many nauseous sleevers did/did not have nausea with prior surgeries. You didn't have hairloss with your band? I did, Mad hair loss for a while. I expect it to be similar this time around. The duration of the hairloss is much more related to you, than your surgery. There's a huge functional between the band and just about any other WLS procedure in that with the band, the point is that you start with a HUGE menu to choose from, and then it narrows. I didn't have too many problems getting Protein in even though I had have restriction before I had a fill. I just snuck Protein powder into just about anything that went in my mouth: Jello, pudding, even Water. I'm going to try that this time around too. It will not be my day 1 focus, but if I can drink some water I may as well drink protein water. As long as I can tolerate it, that is. Here's an analogy. When I was in labor with my daughter, I just kept telling myself, "This is nothing. It's going to get so much worse." And I said that over, and over, and over. And eventually I reached a point where it didn't get worse, it went away. One of my first coherent thoughts after actually delivering her was, "Really? That's it?" I think I just expected it to be so horrible that I never realized the peak when it arrived. I'm expecting to feel horrible after I wake up from the sleeve surgery. I'm going to keep telling myseif "It will only get worse." I know that seems counterintuitive, but if I keep expecting worse, I'm always going to be mentally prepared to take on more than what I currently am, and eventually it's going to stop. Anakin Jay, that's an awesome break down. Thank you for taking the time to do that.

You know, I thought about sharing this earlier, but I didn't... but I will. At my surgery consult earlier this week there was (what I call) "one of those" ladies there, who think that because you're in a room, and she's in the room, there's some kind of automatic sisterhood. So I'm reading and she asks me what I'm reading, how is it, what's my favorite book (leave me alone), what surgery was I having, why that one, how much did I weigh (seriously?), was I married, was my husband fat, what did I think about RNY, what's my favorite food, do I think my surgeon is cute, etc. She proceeds to tell me that she was thinking about getting, and I quote, "A vertical seive with a 32 degree boogie."

Did you ask them about your turnaround time for a response? My first submission was with Cigna. Thir policy is at least 20 business days, up to 30, before they let you know. And sure enough they took 29 days. Second submission was to BCBS. I asked them how long and they told me, "A few days." I thought she was kidding. Submitted on a Friday, had approval Tuesday (IIRC). Best of luck to you.

I was making a joke, joke may have been lost. Bah, internet. I get the anonymity thing. I meant it more like -- lots of sexual euphamisms around motorcycles.... the way they're sat on, etc. Ba dum dum... He was so good he's now you're "motorcycle man wink wink... stopping while I'm ahead.

The mental aspect is startling. My sleeve (surgery on the 27th) will be my 2nd WLS so I'm going in to it prepared this time. Here's an excerpt from a previous post I made:

You hear a lot of crass comments from guys about sex with overweight women. References to things like gravy, Soup ladles, and fire hydrants. Skinnier sex opens up more positions, There are some things you just can't do fat, and probably some things that you just shouldn't do fat, whether your man loves you as-is or not. Do you call him Mr. Motorcycle because of lastnight, or because of how he chooses to ride around town?

I assume you mean through your military benefits, and not civilian? If so, Tricare started covering the sleeve effective 2010. I'm not sure what their current requirements are for surgery or for revision, but I know that in 2010 my father had to have his lap-band removed and wanted a revision to a sleeve but it was denied. I'm pretty sure they do require a 6 month supervised diet. There are some MTFs that perform the surgery but I have no idea which. Try searching "tricare" here and you will find some good information. HTH

I have a bad habit of information overkill. I really do.

We have very similar stats. I'm 5'10. I really don't know what my starting weight will be. I intentionally don't own a scale so I will have them weigh me the morning i go in (Tuesday). My low with the lapband was about 210, I think. I had just broken a long stall and was heading down again, then found out I was pregnant. Gets hard to remember exact weights after a handful of years. When my band was removed about 6 months ago I was about 290 so I'm probably now in the neighborhood of 330, judging by what my sizes have done. My healthy BMI weight would be about 175. I think I'll be thrilled with anything under 200. Although I haven't had my sleeve yet, with band and lost about 200 lbs. Here are my thoughts on your struggles. Getting 70g of Protein a day it is more like 50-60g... Are you still using protein shakes/supplements or are you able to get in your 60g on solids? I think 50 - 60 of solid protein is better for you in the long run than 70g from a supplement source, if you had to choose between the two. If you want to boost it, try little things like adding a teaspoon of unflavored Protein powder here and there... in Soups, into a pudding, whatever. If you have a number goal, every little bit will help. Drinking enough Water... I'm a chugger and I could chug with my band as long as I hadn't just eaten, so I will struggle with this too. I know I will. In fact, it's the single behavior around how I eat that I'm actually expecting to fight. I've already had to change all the other behaviors so it's more like "been there, done that." Dying for a coke from Mcdonalds... I used to be a big diet coke drinker. My first several weeks banded I craved, specifically, the burn from the carbonation. After that went away I was OK. 2 or 3 years post-op I decided to try a drink. It was one of the nasies things I had ever tasted. So... try to look at it this way. If you want to avoid drinking the Coke, just think about how completely synthetic and gross it's going to taste. Plus - that carbonation I used to love... really hurts now. I don't see how people do it. I cant' see the weight loss in myself/ mirror... (This is my big one) There is no cure for this other than changing your brain, and there's no quick way to do that. I see you have progress pics. So you know the change is there. Honestly, you may never see it. It may take years and years and years. You may have some defenses in place, like being afraid to believe it because dieting has taught you that it's all just temporary. I was down 200 lbs and would still be completely amazed when an old piece of clothing would hang like a tent on me. I ad, and still don't have, any concept of what I truly look like, in terms of physical body. I still feel larger than everyone around me... That will go away. It took me about 18 months. Mentally you're still the fat girl. About 2 years post-op I was out with some friends. There was a group of guys near us and one of them kept sort of blatantly staring at me. I was seriously getting pissed off, and was very close to saying something to him. One of my friends was like, "Duh, you're a tall, cute redhead. OF COURSE he's staring at you." It NEVER occurred to me that it would be a positive stare. I don't think I would ever assume attention was positive, ever. And it's all stemming from that "concept of self" that our weight has taught us. It was so common sense to her that it was positive attention, and so automatic to me that it was negative. Even though I was down to "a little pudgy" at that point, how I pictured myself in clothing or my mind's eye was still pre-op me. Which is REALLY weird, because pre-op, I always pictured me before I got fat and was devestated when I'd see a picture and realize Oh snap, I'm THAT fat?? Why can't I see it?? HTH. And BTW, do you realize you're almost at goal and it hasn't even been a half a year?!?! Do I really need to tell you how rockstar that is?

DD is going to be 3.5 yrs next month. I have some concerns about how she will process (cognitively) mommy only eating tiny amounts of food. When I had my band she wasn't really old enough to notice or mimic my behaviors, and when she was old enough I was slipped and mostly maintaining voluntary portion control so my meals were largely "normal" or I could just tell her "mommy's not hungry" or "mommy doesn't feel good in her tummy" and she wasn't yet picking up on the recurring pattern. This is going to be a totally different scenario. I know the effects that mothers with eating disorders can have on their children, especially female children. I'm starting to think about how I can help my daughter not be affected by continuously seeing mommy eat only tiny amounts of food, and process it in a way that's mentally healthy. What are you mommies of young ones doing to help your kid(s) not begin to see your few bites as a "normal" meal, and thus migrate that into their own eating disorders?