SciFiGuy

Getting my sleeve surgery on Wednesday. My Dr. never mentioned anything about the two weeks beforehand diet, and I didn't really start researching this stuff until this weekend (I know, careless) but I don't really eat sweets or a lot of carbs anyway. I'm writing this late Monday night, and I just finished my first day of clear liquids, and my head is killing me. Really, really looking forward to some chicken and gravy baby food as soon as I'm allowed. My wife gave birth to our first child over the summer, and he and I will probably be starting on baby food within a couple weeks of each other! Anyone else getting their surgery this week? Enjoy Thanksgiving as a kind of last hurrah before the big day?

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.

So, I'm curious about some of the more minor complications people have experienced. I'm lying in my hospital bed now, and they're holding off on starting my phase I diet because they think they might need to do a contrast swallow test later-- everything looks fine, except that my pulse and blood pressure have been elevated since the surgery and they can't figure out why. It's not high enough to indicate internal bleeding, and a CT scan didn't show any pulmonary embolisms, and my pain is actually pretty mild now. (It was a 9/10 when I first came out of anesthesia, but by the late evening it was more like a 3-4, and I barely used my morphine pump over night) Did anyone else encounter this, and what happened?

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).

This probably isn't an original answer, but I was pushed to get my sleeve procedure because I was becoming a dad. I was fat my whole childhood, starting from around age 6. In highschool it distributed a little better, but there was no mistaking the fact that I was a fat kid. In college I went on a low-carb diet for the first time, and lost about thirty pounds. I was the most fit I had ever been. But the weight inched back on gradually so that I had gained back 20 pounds of it by the time I graduated. the summer after college I had surgery to get rid of my man-boobs, which had stayed with me even as I had lost weight from the rest of me. And I felt great again! But happiness is closely associated with relaxation in my book, and I just stopped being careful. I ended up gaining back all my weight and then some, and I was big and fat by the end of my first year of law school. So I did low carb again. I lost the weight. I looked good, felt good. Started dating a girl I liked. I relaxed. I gained the weight back. Years later, I was single. I was leaving my job as a lawyer to go to business school. Went low carb. Lost twenty pounds. Went to business school. Drank heavily, because that's a thing you do in business school. Gained back the weight, plus another twenty pounds. Thankfully, I met the woman who would become my wife that year, before I gained the weight back. But of course, it started the same chain of events-- get happy, relax, gain the weight back. But she loved me and it didn't matter. We got married a couple of years later (and, for the wedding, I lost thirty pounds, and then, after the wedding, gained back 35...) and she got pregnant soon after, and that's when I decided, this pattern isn't healthy, and I want to be around for a long time to see my son grow up. The thing that really got me wasn't even that I couldn't keep the weight off, it's that every time I yo-yo'd, my weight would end up higher than it was before. When I was in my 20s I could go on a low carb diet and lose the weight quickly, but I'm not in my 20s anymore, and it's harder to get the weight off. It's time for a permanent solution, and some help with enforcing the discipline that I need to keep my weight under control.

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"

Got back from the hospital today, and I'm so glad to be home. Loving the pampering from my wife and my parents Hospital was interesting, it was annoying not really being able to sleep, but great to have a staff dedicated to taking care of every little thing for you. One thing I'm surprised by is how mobile I am at home-- the hospital bed was such an ideal to get out of, I barely walked around. But without all the wires and compression boots and bed guards, I'm walking around the house plenty, with very little pain. One thing I will say is that the gas pain is pretty bad... but once the anesthesia-related constipation goes away, that should be gone. Keep sipping your water! Also, low calorie Gatorade is disgusting and made me throw up. You're eating 800 calories/day now. Splurge on a less disgusting drink.

Getting the full amount of fluid is probably the thing I'm most worried about. This was reassuring to read! To the person who drinks 10 oz of tea at bedtime, how long do you take to drink that much?

So I got to go home today! I was keeping down Water and pain pills, so they moved me on to phase II, and that went fine too. Wound pain is being well managed, although I have a lot of gas pain and I'm having trouble with the bathroom. Haven't thrown up any more, and now I'm working on making sure I drink enough water, since I don't have the IV fluids helping me out anymore. My pulse and blood pressure did stabilize, still higher than normal, but good enough that it could be chalked up to trauma of surgery and not any complications. Another thing I thought was interesting is how hard they make it to sleep in the hospital. Between monitor alarms (mine and the others in the room) and blood pressure/temperature checks and drawing blood, I don't think I slept more than 45 minutes at a time. When I got home today I had some water, waited my 15 minutes, had some yogurt, and passed out for two and a half hours. For other people who needed laxative/stool softener: how gross is colace?! Yuck.

Well, they think my high pulse was from dehydration, so I've been getting a lot of IV fluids today. They did the contrast test, and it showed no leaks, so they moved me on to phase I. But I've been having some trouble keeping down the low calorie Gatorade-- at first, I drank one ounce every ten minutes, and the first for ounces were fine, but the fifth ounce came back up (I guess my stomach is 4oz now!). Yep hours later, they moved me from IV morphine to oral painkillers, and after taking my two pills with an ounce of the Gatorade, I felt okay, if a little queasy, but fifteen minutes later I took a sip of Gatorade that was less than a quarter of an ounce, and threw up so much more than I had drunk--it was a lot of bile. So now I'm back on IV fluid, and I just took a mouthful of water that seems to be staying down without a problem. The resident is on the way to talk about what to do about the pain pill.

Congrats, steadfast! I'm staying a second night b/c they want to watch over some high pulse/blood pressure stuff, although the pulse has already come back down. Do you have someone at home helping you?