SciFiGuy

Also, my wife has been making me scrambled eggs, and those are great, too. Just make sure they're really mushy.

I really liked tomato soup with a scoop of cottage cheese. Also, I've been eating plain ricotta cheese, and I love that too. Also, I saw this recipe for pureed chicken (I used turkey instead) that gave a great savory flavor. It's so simple: Take a pound of ground turkey/chicken Cook it plain. Bake, broil, whatever, just make sure there's no pink left. Put it in the blender (I love my vitamix) Add 8 tablespoons of chicken broth Add a bunch of salt and pepper Blend until pureed Divide into quarters Each quarter is a meal. Freeze the other three. It's ridiculous how satisfying this has been.

I'd like to know the answer to this question, too. The guidelines we got (my wife combed through them) said I should be drinking 4-6 oz of Water or other Fluid per hour. I can easily drink a pint (16 oz). Any thoughts? Also, I'm not sure how big my stomach actually is. I'm curious how I can figure it out. I ordered soup from takeout tonight, and it was pretty thin soup, but I definitely ate more than 4 oz of it in a half-hour... probably between 6-8 oz. So is that because it was such thin soup that it was going through me pretty quickly?

I'm a week out from surgery. No remaining surgical pain, gas pain is minimal and brief, still some cramping from cold Water or when eating, but it's much less, goes away faster, and doesn't happen as often. Scheduled my checkup for this coming Monday, I'm assuming it'll be routine stuff. I went to the gym two days ago and did a mile on the treadmill, weighed myself beforehand, and I've already started losing weight! I'll update my profile tonight after I go to the gym again. Easy to handle the vitamin/shake/meal routine, hard to make sure I get enough fluids. It was so much easier when I could just drink a pint of water without thinking about pacing...

Taking Colace to finally unstick all the gas that built up in me in the hospital made a huge difference. I'm three days post-op (though it's late, so technically, four) and I was miserable the first two days, but today everything, uh, came out in the bathroom, and it made a huge difference. I'm still cramping a bunch after meals, but otherwise things feel much more normal.

Reading through the rules that I got for my stage II diet, I get the distinct impression that a lot of these rules are guided by weight loss concerns, and not health concerns. That is, drinking something with some calories isn't going to threaten my wound, is it? Because apple juice is having a much easier time staying down than Water. What are some of the other rules you were given that seem like they're more of a weight loss concern than a surgery recovery concern?

But I'm three days post-op, and I'm eating for enjoyment TODAY. Talking with my wife, I said that things I'd been having were all on the sweeter side, and I wanted something really good and savory, and we have a carton of creamy tomato Soup, so my dinner just now was 3 oz of creamy tomato soup with a spoonful of cottage cheese, heated, and it was DELICIOUS. And I really enjoyed it. And now I'm full. And that's exactly what I wanted my life to be like. I'm so satisfied with my surgery, and I haven't even started to lose the weight yet!

It doesn't sound like much, but it was-- I was drunk in college at a chinese restaurant and I ordered an order of vegetable dumplings, and order of spinach wontons, and a large vegetable fried rice. The fried rice came out, and it was a mountain of fried rice-- easily a full meal for three people. I ate all of it.

It's gross to talk about, but I had the same thing, and then I got hit with a huge round of diarrhea, and that cleared it up for me. I'm three days post-op now, and the huge swollen belly only cleared up in the late morning today after some very noisy time in the bathroom.

I sympathize. The cramps are getting to me (I had mine the same day). But nausea is awful! You didn't get a Zofran prescription for the nausea before you left the hospital? Apple juice has been going down much more easily for me than water, maybe try that.

My doctor prescribed me Colace, and it's disgusting. But we'll see how well it works-- I did finally start passing gas, and that relieved some of the pain.

Well, I'm two days post-op, and so, so happy I did this. The hardest part of the surgery was not seeing my little champ for two days, because my wife was worried about him getting exposed to viruses/bacteria in the hospital. My belly is still distended from surgery-- I've got a lot of gas, and there's obviously swelling that'll take time to go down. My liquid diet for two and a half days pre-surgery was murder, but after the surgery I was on IV fluids with nutrition, so I actually felt better afterward. I was in so much pain right after the surgery, but morphine took off the edge, and by late night I wasn't even using the morphine that much. The way they constantly interrupt your sleep in the hospital left me majorly wiped out, but I was just so grateful to everyone who helped me, from my parents who sat with me until way past their bedtime Wednesday night to make sure I was getting all the tests I needed, to my wife who jumped through so many hoops making sure someone was taking care of our boy and she just came and sat with me. The thing I wanted most was to have her sitting there with me while I took a nap or two, and that would normally drive her nuts, but she just... did it. She just sat there and read while I dozed on and off. It was exactly what I needed. The hospital staff was mostly great. The nurses were all so patient with me, dealing with all my little requests, never getting tired of all the care I needed. I had one "Patient Care Associate" who was just awful, wouldn't help me walk around even when the doctor had ordered it, got short with me several times, etc., but the woman who relieved her at 7 AM more than made up for it with how willing to help she was. I made sure to let the supervisor for the floor know the names of everyone who had done such good work for me. And now my pain is pretty minimal. I get stomach cramps from eating/drinking, but they go away pretty quickly, and finally passing gas relieved the gas pain that was building up inside. I'm not hungry much, and the hunger is sated virtually immediately. A little puddle of butternut squash Soup was the sum total of my dinner. I'm not worrying about Protein, because I'm doing my shakes. My wife got some flavor essences to put in them, to change things up a bit so they don't get boring, and the thing that's most important after getting my fluids is getting my protein. I even started looking up some recipes, and I'm getting excited about cooking my bariatric-friendly foods. But I also know that I need to pull away from food as a central cultural force in my life, and one of my projects is going to be teaching myself to think about something else when my mind drifts to food. I anticipate reading a lot of comic books over the next few weeks of recovery. Also, after getting home from the hospital, showering was a revelation. That felt great after peeing into a bottle in my bed for the last two and a half days (I didn't get a catheter).

So, is it for sure this person got a sleeve? I could see this effect coming from a bypass where there's less opportunity for the intestine to absorb alcohol, in which case this makes more sense. This also sounds like a huge health hazard though, right? The no alcohol rule in the first month isn't a matter of calories, it's a matter of shock to your stomach, particularly along the suture line.

I really appreciated this post. I have cousins who own a major restaurant here in NYC, and it's always been a big part of our family life. My final full-sized meal was there, and the thought that I'll never have a whole pastrami sandwich or a bagel with lox was one of the hardest things to wrap my head around when I decided I wanted to go down this path. It helps to see someone else dealing with the question of real enjoyment or pride in eating big amounts, and still deciding it's all worth it.

"Ideal" should be "ordeal"