crosswind

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?

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.

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.

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

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

. 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....

Ha. Awesome.

Yeah, not sure I'm buying it. Could be another case of "Pilates and Portion Control".

. I'm 46. I keep thinking about my ex-husband -- the one who I was married to when I got to Mexicali but our divorce was finalized the day of my surgery. He was *such* an asshole to me about my weight. He used to fly into rages going -- " There's a RIGHT way to eat and a WRONG way to eat" and I finally decided I couldn't live with him because he'd lose his mind if I ate an extra bagel. We still talk a lot on the phone. I was actually talking to him in Mexicali and he didn't know I was there. I talked to him every day before and after surgery and he still doesn't know. I keep thinking about it because the game with him was actually to make me feel like shit about myself every single day of my life and if it wasn't being overweight it was going to be something else. He just needed to be superior, especially over his wife. Anyway, I keep being tempted to tell him but I think it would just be one more thing I did absolutely and totally wrong in his opinion. It's so weird that you care so much about what people who secretly hate you think. Like anything is going to change their mind about you.

. Great post! Unlike you....quite honestly I barely researched anything. When I went I knew two things -- that I wanted to do this and it was reasonably safe and that in the four months I was pondering the sleeve I had not seen ONE bad review of Dr. Aceves, or even a report of extreme discomfort after surgery. Everyone who comes back from there comes back serene and confident in what they've done, so I basically just booked a date and got tickets and went. I was that sick of living the same way. I am really thinking of going back there for my three month checkup if I can get a cheap flight. To be honest I'd rather talk to him than some of these nutball surgeons I've been hearing about in the states.

At the Mexican surgeon, their recommendation is to avoid caffeine except for decaf -- which does, btw, have some caffeine in it -- and wait until after the solid food stage to drink alcohol. They're just not really all that concerned with alcohol especially after the stomach starts working properly which takes a while. That said, one thing you should be aware of is that there are reports of leaks and other problems much later in the story, at nine months or near one year.

. I love this announcement. Congratulations!

I've wondered that too. Stranger stil, Oprah is a lot of good things but also obviously obsessed with her looks. In fact I finally had the thought when she gained her weight back and said she was "ashamed" and did this whole confessional to the press -- Oprah, first of all you're a billionaire, you could live at at Elizabeth Arden if you wanted to. Second of all, truly, I've got a lot of stuff to do today, is it okay if I'm truly disintereted in how *you* look? It's clear she's had massive amounts of plastic surgery. While I was taking the plunge for this surgery I tended to notice her quite a bit in the media -- her skincolor is different, she's had a serious eyelift if not a whole facelift and total body recontouring ( or so it seems to me) -- just not WLS. I don't care really. It just seems weird to get all that other stuff done to yourself, just not *that*.

. Just googled. He looks fantastic. He looks *well*. Roseanne did it, why not John? Why not anyone? It seems to me that beyond not wanting to admit your gut so outranks the rest of you that it is showing up to engagements without your knowledge, there has to be something about people not wanting to admit they were that overweight to begin with. And I bet they're all getting it. In like Thailand or something.

Yesterday I decided not to weigh myself. I had been a little obsessive the past few weeks, kind of obsessive, and sort of endlessly disappointed the way I always am on the scale. You know there is that after-party feeling you get when you've just gotten weight loss surgery and even the loss of 30 pounds in three weeks somehow doesn't satisfy. It's the death of the fantasy-surgery in which you fly back from Mexico suddenly weighing 135 pounds. I mean it was weight loss *surgery*, right? Medical Magic? Where the hell *is* my flying car, by the way? I know there are people who give you this advice anyway. The Weight Watchers lady, the Jenny Craig lady and the Diet Center lady were all prone to the same advice and now thinking back on it they might have all been the same lady. Remember her? Skinny, size zero dress with a tiny waist and no sleeves, huge grin on her face and at least en years younger than you perkily dispensing dictums about how one should comport one's self in life. I swear she was always the same girl. And as far as I knew I was listening to a person who was subsisting on styrofoam and black tar heroin. Jenny Craig was probably the worst diet ripoff I ever encountered -- five hundred dollars "registration" fee and then I would come to get "my food", as they called the minsucule globules of prepackaged crap frozen dinners and "snacks" such as two thumbprint sized, elven lemon butter muffins. Jenny Craig is owned by Nestle Corporation. They are in the food business. The whole thing is designed to sell a vulnerable, aging and overweight population of females their crap food at an astronomical markup. It's all like this, all of it. All of it. What I keep thinking about still is all the lies and nonsense I paid for to try to lose a hundred pounds for the third time and I just knew I never would. I would just *keep buying products* as some sort of offering. Sure I was overweight. But I was doing something. I was spending thousands of dollars a year in extra shit I never used or got satisfaction from because those thousand dollars represented some kind of hope but then....after a while..it's just what you do. You're fat -- this is not a condition but a demographic, a role, a llifestyle. Your market speaks and your ears perk up right away. The salesman in your living room gets you to part with only six payments of 59.99 for some Chinese appliance wih moving parts you are supposed to press or move or kick; or some tape or "plan*. I will never regret the money I spent on weight loss surgery. What I regret is all that *other* goddamned money. Tangent, sorry. I decided to stop weighing myself because I am trying to save myself from the feedback loop I seem get sucked into with the scale. I know it's "stall week". I know I'm going to "stall". I would just rather not hear about it from that appliance. Because what it doesn't know is that I barely have a stomach anymore and I am eating less than six hundred calories a day on average so it's very *likely*, I mean one could *project* that I am losing a shit-ton of weight here. I'm sticking with that for the time being. For as long as I can stand it. It's very zen of me. And today was much better than yesterday. Special K went down with joy and peace in its heart; and then around 4 I went to Culvers and got a cup of bacon and potato Soup to dissect and pulverize. It also went down like a sleepy baby and gave me a nice, rounded, carby buzz. I had some juice in my veins today and did not cry, although I did get way too interested in mineral makeup products and at-home microdermabrasion which I had to force myself not to buy. I don't look all that great for a person who just lost thirty pounds. I look tired and kind of sucked-in and gray, which is what I hear happens to people who've . had surgery recently. But I decided it was not time to worry about that yet. It's really unlikely I'm going to look like Heather Locklear tomorrow no matter what I purchase online. A little more new normal today. And no scale, which to me should be the most normal thing of all.

I did this: I called a lady in Mexicali Mexico who made an appointment for me to come to a Mexican Hospital I had never seen, by myself, and get my stomach cut out under anesthesia and then I came home and I am still not dead. I still can't quite get my head around my behavior. I spent from about January to March mulling it over but I can't say I really researched it. I didn't have insurance and was not going to get any and I was so fat, and I was truly at the end of something, some rope, some road. My normal non-desperate self is, first of all, terrified to fly. I was just recently married to someone who was very keen on outlining how Mexico was falling apart and becoming an anarchic apocalyptic state. I am the woman who spends money on everybody else and not herself because frankly what difference does it make in the end? We all end up in pineboxes feeding the ecosystem, right? So who cares if you're fat, you're just an average human borg-ant marching around, what kind of hideous, vain, self-centered, irresponsible, recklesss, banana are you anyway? So what I sort of had to do is not let the woman in the previous paragraph know what I was doing. I had to just shut the whole system down, all of it, anything and anyone who was going to tell me not to do it. This included: my family, the insurance borg, my ex-husband, and the rest of patriarchy and my own neurotic fear-stricken personality. I had to sneak around behind my own back. Because you know what the neurotic parts of your personality do with a thing like this. Hellfire. Volcanoes exploding. A crater appears in the hospital bed where you used to be. Your legs *fall off*. Etc. I knew I wasn't gonna die. Everybody: you are not going to die. Fine, this is the most momentous, earthshattering medical decision you have probably ever made, but look on the other side of the operating table: the guy who is going to cut you open is *not* afraid you're going to die. He would not be doing it if he thought you were going to die, just from the malpractice alone it's a bad idea to kill people. And I finally figured -- life is just not that easy. If I developed later complications no way in hell was I going to get off with just a checkout card from God, no way, I'd get *saved* and then be harnessed with a trillion dollar medical bill I'd running from for the rest of my life. And I also at one point looked all of this right in its smarmy, ratty little face and thought, can it really be worse than everything I've been through in the past five years? I think not. It's almost three weeks later and I am still amazed at myself. I am not sure if I was desperate or if I was finished or if I just wanted a vacation or what. But I really did this. It was almost like I was doing something I had forgotten to do years ago. Reorganize the hall closet. Reallocate the 401K. Steamclean the couch. Get your stomach cut out. One more week and I'll be a full human again who can eat food and order in restaurants. What a strange, strange, little known fact about myself.

I was really looking foward to eating again but there are some drawbacks to coming off a liquid diet. First thing is your stomach wakes up and wants to have a long, serious talk with you,. I woke up today feeling a little sick. Just a little nauseated, a few cramps in my intestines. The tummy is pissed. The tummy wants to know what it ever did to me. And finally, the tummy is putting up with none of the shit I tried to lay on it before. Oh, no. It is in charge now. It is recovering from surgery and no way in hell is it parting with the TV remote. Eating was a little easier today mostly because I applied some of the principles I've read here on the board and also because I gave up trying to eyeball what I thought would go in my stomach and broke out the kitchen measuring implements. 1/2 cup Special K Protein Cereal. Out of the measuring cup and into the bowl. 1/2 cup milk. Slowly. 30/30/30. 1/2 cup Healthy Choice red Beans and rice Soup. Chew. Swallow. Slow slow slow. 1/2 cup cottage cheese. It all went down pretty well but the whole time I've felt guilty for eating at all, and also nervous that I had to measure. See the thing with me is I can either be hyper-undisciplined and just dive into the carb ocean, fall asleep inside a cherry pie. Or I can be like this. Obsessive compulsive. How many calories? How many carbs? If I get it into my head to eat according to the numbers no kitchen implement, measuring device or obsessive thought goes untouched. I was hoping that this surgery would free me of *both* things so I could be a normal person so really just the introduction of digestable food has given me a case of nerves. I caught myself thinking today that I might have gained weight because I ate a mashed potato yesterday and felt vanquished. Okay. So this is all stuff I've read people on the boards saying before. Learning how to eat again is weird and miserable and usually causes some kind of strange breakdown somewhere later in in the first month. I did not actually regret what I did to myself but there was a sudden realization that all the unconscious food assumptions i had made up to right now were no longer going to help. Because my stomach simply was not going to let me get away with a single bad choice. My son told me he thought the reason that WLS works so well is tha basically you're afraid your stomach with explode if you eat too much. It's actually not like that, it won't explode. It will *complain*, the way the villagers complain via pitchforks and barn burning. My stomach now reminds me of my mother, who I would rather kill me than *complain* at me. I allso went swimming yesterday and loved it. I've been looking forward to that for three weeks but a few hours after I got home I felt cold and squeezed out. I couldn't get warm for the rest of the night. I turned the thermostat up to almost eighty and snuggled a heating pad. And finally I realized I overdid it. An hour in the pool after recenly...well, recently...was just too much. Just because you can have a mashed potato does not mean you're fully recovered. On the contrary, it means you've got all this other crap to do like count the number of times you chew your oatmeal and figuring out how to not be so overcome with stupidity you don't even know it's time to get out of the pool. . Recovery is ongoing. Today I recovered from overdoing it in the pool yesterday, and overdoing my portions yesterday because when your stomach says NOT ONE MORE MOUTHFUL it is truly not kidding. And I am also recovering from my fear of food. I figured it was going to be stall week this week and I also figured one possible reason is the stomach's getting back to it's job of digesting stuff. The problem is I didn't figure on how I would feel about it. I am afraid I will never lose another pound now that I am eating again until I can get somebody to take the rest of my stomach out. But that is completely irrational and I know it. I ate 380 calories today and to do it right with no pitchforks it took a lot of attention and effort. Simultaneously I'm worried I am starving and/or gaining back the thirty pounds. This cannot be the new normal otherwise my stomach has just become my new career.

When I first found out about dietary restrictions after VSG they didn't sound so bad to me. Couple of weeks of liquids -- fine -- my innards would have been shredded, probably wouldn't be a good idea to order a pepperoni pizza after that anyway. Ten days of "full" liquids...hm. Challenging. But doable. At the end of all this would be "mushies" and then solids which in my head seemed like "eating normally." Restrictions like only eating three meals a day seemed ludicrous and something to simply ignore -- I ate *alot*, there was nothing that was going to stop me from having a latenight chipfest. Mashed potatoes at the start of the fourth week? All *rriiiiigght*...that's what I'm talking about. No problem! Just a couple of weeks of a liquid diet and then back to plate-juggling ala Crosswind. I imagined myself bolting through a single serving of cottage cheese and making sugarfree butterscotch pudding and then maybe some lowcarb Protein Peanut Butter Cookies and so forth. None of that has gone according to plan at all. Today I tried eating and failed the team. For Breakfast I tried two scrambled eggs with a spoonful of chili Beans, salsa seasoning and a dollop of yogurt. This was inedible. After looking forward to eating for so long what was on my plate was as appealing as whatever you'd find in the corner of a dormitory elevator on Sunday morning. I got half in me, left the rest on the counter and left the building so I would not have to think about it anymore. Did you ever read a novel in which some limpid, winsome petunia was trying to "choke down her food" because her fragile nerves were on edge? I'd think, how feminine, I never had to choke down anything in my whole life, I learned how to eat when I was three months old and I have never had one single problem with the whole procedure. So that was breakfast. Then I tried another experiment -- yogurt with my favorite supercharged nutriion shake, which would make it thicker and more foodlike. No luck. chocolate glue. I ate barely a quarter and left it on the bedroom dresser and again left the building. Palak Paneer for dinner was easier and I got down a whole serving, but slowly. And then I got it into my head try mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes, forbidden pommes, I hadn[t had any probably since Star Trek Voyager was on TV. But t was on the list of allowed foods and while this statement in most contexts is an exaggeration, I had not eaten in three weeks. I made a whole pot of the Betty Crocker kind out of the box and served myself 2/3s of a cup. Now this was the worst part. I'm wired for dumplings. I've got peirogi running through my veins. I wanted that Betty Crocker starchbomb BAD. I took one bite and it was already too much. I made it through half of that until I was, alas, defeated. They didn't even taste that great, anyway. I think I ate no more than six hundred calories and even with the potatoes maybe 35 carbs. And I felt so stuffed after dinner I was quite sure I was doing something wrong and had somehow concealed an extra three thousand calories from myself. So that was food, on my first day of food. I can see now why people forget to eat after the sleeve. It's kind of...well, a drag. I can't imagine trying to put away a cheeseburger. I am getting the feeling that one day I'll be amazed I ever could. My incision looks okay so I swam for an hour, just paddled around and did ten laps or so. In the locker room is the all-weights, all-ages, wheelchair-friendly scale I got on a month ago when it told me I weighed 289 pounds. Not today. 260. Wow.

Yup! But it was actually this stuff: http://mybrands.com/product/Kitchens_of_India,Palak_Paneer-Spinach_w/Cottage_Cheese,10oz They have it at the grocery store and it's 170 calories per serving and nine carbs. There's not much food in the box really but it's nice and light.

If it's really killing you and you can't function, take two tylenol. Has just a touch of caffeine in it.

. Oh listen, chiquita, it's all jake. We'reall just a bunch of carb deprived maniacs without stomachs. Yike. That sounds a bit ghoulish don't it? As far as having a life, Meggie was most excellently wrong on that count. First couple weeks afer surgery as far as I can tell what you do is sit around thinking about what you can't eat. can't do and should not buy just because you're bored and cranky and also newly broke. Thanks for sticking up for fair play and justice everywhere though. You may just be our ten thousandth maniac

Thanks all and YOU GO Virginia S! You know, every time I post I keep wanting to mention that I think eventually this surgery is going to be as common, affordable and undramatic as a blepharoplasty. However brave and lucky we all feel, I betcha anything ten years from now people will just shrug and nod when they hear yet another person has divorced her stomach. People aren't getting any thinner, diabetes is not going away, and if some yahoo from nebraska can hop a plane and get this done over a weekend without a hitch for less than ten thousand bucks AND financing...Jenny Craig is freakin doomed.