So, today is 11 days post-op. I'm doing pretty well. My incisions are healing fabulously. I'm walking every day. Now, with this I should put in a disclaimer...I walk every day in bursts. LOL. I still get tired pretty easily. If I can keep my mind occupied, then I can walk for a longer time than when I'm trying to do household chores or something like that. For instance, my mom and I went to Burlington Coat Factory. That store is so much trouble! LOL I kept falling in love with all the clothes that I'll be able to wear once I reach my goal weight. Plus their housewares area is unreal. Such great prices! I was able to walk around the store for about a half hour before I REALLY had to sit down somewhere. And I've noticed, standing still....not a real great idea. It makes me more sore and wears me out so much faster than actually walking around.

Even a week and a half out I'm still pretty sore in my tummy. But again, that soreness is usually amplified by sitting in one place too long. Like tonight playing Castle Panic with the family because it's Saturday - Family game night. It's a tradition we instigated several months ago where my kids, me, and my mom all get together for pizza and games and/or movies. It's a time for family bonding and it's almost always awesome. Only time it isn't awesome is when one of us is not feeling good or is in a rotten mood and pretty much kills it for all of us. It's life. It happens. Thankfully, it doesn't happen often. Tonight was hard though. I LOVE pizza. Hot pizza. Cold Pizza. Cold Pizza for breakfast. Cold Pizza for lunch. Hot pizza for supper. Veggie pizza, meat pizza, everything pizza, pineapple and ham/canadian bacon pizza...just no jalepenos please. LOL. I even found out before surgery that BBQ Chicken pizza isn't bad either! After not eating anything solid for 13 straight days, the smell of that pizza everyone was enjoying was so hard to endure even though I was "full" from my protein shakes, broth, and water. Believe me, drinking an once of fluid every 15 minutes with a tummy the size of an egg keeps me pretty full all the time. I have an alarm set on my phone to go off every 15 minutes to remind me to sip some water. I've made it my theme song. It's Rachel Platton's Fight song. I felt it appropriate since I'm fighting to take my life back from my food demons. 

The other hard part is dealing with the people in my life who are resistant to change. Like my oldest son. He wasn't happy about me getting this surgery. At all. He likes having something to hold on to that's more than the skin and bones that he is built like. He doesn't like change of any kind. He's fought his senior year every step of the way because it means change. He still doesn't understand that change is inevitable. And you can either roll with it, or be rolled over by it. I used to thrive on change. Until 2013 happened and there was so much change in so little time that my mind couldn't deal with it and pretty much ceased to function correctly. I fight every day to get my mind to function as it once did. To thrive on change again would be such a blessing. But my son. He has never dealt with change well. So, instead of supporting me, he teases me. Just like his father used to do every time I tried a diet or tried to lose weight. He'd purposely get something that I could not eat. That he knew I couldn't eat. And he'd bring it to me and say "Here hon, look what I got you. A chocolate glazed donut with bavarian cream filling. Your favorite. Oh...that's right. You can't have these can you? I'm so sorry. I guess I'm just going to have to eat it myself." And then he'd proceed to eat one of my favorite donuts in front of me, pretending to savor every last morsel. My son hasn't been quite as cruel as his father was, but he'd get a kiwi and slice and eat it and slurp the sweet juice from it and say things like "Gee, mom, don't you just wish you could have one of these right now?" Then he'd laugh and finish eating his kiwi and walk away. Or, hey mom, don't you just wish you could have a slice of this delicious pizza. I'm so sorry you can't. It's SOOOO good!" So, that's been really hard the last week or so. I really didn't care the first week because I really just wasn't hungry for anything at all. I had no appetite. Nothing sounded good, nothing tasted good. Not particularly. And after 4 days of chocolate shakes I was ready to scream. Now, after 2 solid weeks of nothing solid and only sweet protein shakes...I've already got supper for next Thursday, Friday, and Saturday planned out! Salmon,  bunless Turkey burgers, and pizza!!!! with sauteed zucchini and mushrooms....mashed cauliflower......stewed tomatoes.....asparugus, spinach, tilapia, cottage cheese!!!!! Yogurt! OMG, I'm making myself so hungry...I really need to stop. See, I don't see my surgeon again until May 4. The last time I ate anything solid was April 16. 17.5 days without anything solid to eat. I'm about to go mad. But it will be okay. I know I can do this. I have to do this.

I saw my primary care person yesterday. (She's a nurse practitioner, so technically not Dr, but might as well be.) My weight there was 258. Actually one pound less than what I was the morning of my surgery! She took me completely off my diabetes medicine. And I see her again in 6 weeks. Then, she's sure she's going to be taking me off my blood pressure medicine and my thyroid medicine. So, I'll be down to only the medicines for my back pain and my acid reducer, so 3 medications! Quite a change from the 7 or 8 I've been taking the past few years. I'm really excited.

Well, that's all the updates I can think of right now guys. Oh!  But let me tell you something about those 4 in 1 protein shakes (you know, the ones that have all the vitamins already in them so you don't have to swallow a handful of vitamins quite yet or chew those nasty tasting chewable)....

If you get the vanilla flavor (I imagine it could work with chocolate too, but not with as much variety) you can add things like the Sugar Free Orange Crush water flavoring to the mix and if you drink it cold, it tastes just like an orange creamcicle! Raspberry Ice is really good too. Cherry is okay, but not one of my favorites. You can add unsweetened cocoa  powder to the mix to make a chocolate. Add Unsweetened cocoa powder along with the Raspberry Ice to make a chocolate raspberry shake. There's so many possibilities. The only problem I've found is that you get really tired of the sweet stuff all day every day. I look forward to supper when I have my cup of Bone Broth (the beef is my favorite) It's by Great Value if you have a walmart in your area. It's the only broth that I found in the entire store that has 7 grams of protein per serving. All the other broths only had a whopping 2 grams of protein per serving!!!! Anyway, nature is now calling again (one of the drawbacks to constantly drinking...lol)

Praying for healthy, happy, love filled days for you and yours!