Weight Loss Goals

It occurred to me that I never had any weight goals in mind. I had no idea what my weight was supposed to be...so I looked up "ideal body weight calculator" on Google.

From what I can find, I should be near 190 pounds or so.

Yowza.

Weight loss surgery doesn't get rid of all the weight. It gets rid (in general, if things go well) a percentage of your excess weight. I thought I remembered reading and hearing it was about 70 percent of your excess weight, which was close to this source's estimate on how much patients have on average have lost.

So I'm thinking my weight goal should be...three hundred? That sound good? That may be a feasible number in a few months...I really have no idea.

Life Is Good

While this is the name of another blog on Blogspot with a similar name to mine, this is more a reference to the fact that I am totally psyched about this weekend. I've had good news regarding my wound healing, my pain is far more managed and tolerable, I'm getting up and around more with less pain, and this Saturday is Free Comic Book Day and an arts festival!

I was in such a good mood after the evaluation of the CAT scan that I stopped at my wife's favorite mealspot, Panera Bread, and picked up a to-go meal for her lunch (the aroma of the dressing on the asian sesame salad is divine).

I told her recently how much I was looking forward to the weekend. She replied with something to the effect of, "...as long as we do what you want to do, everything great..."

Well, that was kind of a killjoy. I asked what she wanted to do, and she said, "Nothing."

I know I've been difficult with the recovery and surgery and the ensuing issues, and I thought she'd be relieved that I was finally having a good week, being positive about something going on. Instead, I was being self-centered.

sigh

I am hoping it's just the fact that I've been so negative for so long that when my mood finally swings the other way her mood lags behind.

But no matter; I'm still psyched for the weekend, and feeling better about the promise the doctor made about having the "fullness feeling" after switching to solid foods and that the wound is indeed healing...slowly...but getting there.

Here, Kitty Kitty...

Finished my CT (CAT) scan this morning. The good news was that the clot in my stomach, for the most part, is limited to the part you can see. It's not a glacier, there's not a giant bit hanging around under the skin, it's apparently limited to the portion of the skin where I'm healing. "All's good! Stop worrying!," she said.

Added bonus, she talked to the surgeon who then wrote me another prescription for Percocet. Half as many tablets, but I was surprised they dispensed more at all. Thank you! It's the only drug I've been given where I take it and it makes everyone else seem nicer.

I had to drink a small container of banana smoothie barium, then when I arrived at the hospital I went from the radiology desk to the registration desk to registration desk 3 to radiology to waiting room to CT waiting room to CT, where I was placed on a table and had an IV stuck into my arm. Then as I had that warm, think-I-peed-myself feeling spread through my body thanks to the IV drip the table kept feeding and pulling me back through a giant spinning donut while the voice of god told me "Don't Breathe!...okay, you can breathe now."

I was sent back to the outer waiting room until a nurse came out and said I could go to the doctor's office about ten minutes away; there, the receptionist told my doctor I was there, she came out, gave me a happy pill prescription and said again that I had nothing to worry about.

So...yay me!

Another Milestone and a Half-Step Back

Had my doctor's appointment yesterday; she removed the last two staples. I was kind of excited at this since the one that ripped out was no longer dangling half out of the wound site; the staple had re-embedded itself in my incision site.

*shiver*

Yeah. That stuff bugs me.

She also looked at the wound a little, made a passing statement that it wasn't really healing quite as quickly as they'd like, so here I am waiting for a ride to the hospital to get a CAT scan this morning.

She reiterated that there was nothing to worry about, she sees nothing wrong, they just want to get a better picture of what's under the surface.

Oh, and I have tape burn.

I haven't stared much at the new look of the wound, staple-free yet. I just quickly changed the dressing this morning and went about the routine they directed of drinking my "Banana Smoothie" (I'm not an idiot. I know what the Barium Sulfate on the label meant. As a side note, dose one didn't taste half bad.)

She did confirm that yes, the hole is healing (just slowly), it will seal up just fine. You know in movies when the mutant or alien has a hole blown in them and it heals superfast, pulling the edges together like it's pulled by an invisible zipper? Well, that's what happens here, only it happens in super slow-mo.

My other question had her confirm that the lack of feeling full after eating my purees is normal too...liquids tend to swoosh right through the pouch. Which also confirms that is how people cheat the pouch. "It'll all change when you have solid foods. Don't worry!!"

My ride's here. Time for me to head to the hospital for my tummy scan...

A Thank-You

I've focused quite a bit here about the problems I've been having and not enough on the good things. While I'll still put in the bad...this is supposed to be a record of the bad as well...I realize I need to focus a little more on the positive aspects of the operation.

I'll start out with this post where I thank a couple people. Lee is a follower of the blog who started emailing me. He has difficulties in his life adapting to some of the post-op lifestyle changes, but he sent me a number of emails where he focused on getting me to look at the positives. He is many more months into this life change than I am, so he has some perspective on what he's talking about.

Second was an email from an online acquaintance I hadn't emailed in a month. He is a frequenter on a mail list for Ubuntu-users help; knowledgeable and ever helpful, he's one of the common names on the list for people seeing assistance. I had stopped following activity on the mailing list after my surgery. It's a place of much drama, I had enough drama in my own life to deal with, and more important I was getting short tempered and easily frustrated and having to slog through a hundred or more messages a day with the same issues over an over again with the same answers and same requests not to top post or not hijack topics was starting to get to me.

So like I said...I stopped following.

Imagine my surprise when I was gone nearly a month and then I found an email from NoOp, one of the closest things the list has to a wizard on the list, waiting for me. He was asking how my surgery had gone because he hadn't heard anything lately. I was shocked. To be honest I didn't think anyone on the list would notice or care that I had disappeared.

Between Lee and NoOp I was put into an emotional place where I needed to reevaluate my situation and see that yes, I have problems, but I also have been making progress. I can move more easily. The quarter-sized hole in my gut is closer to a nickel-sized hole now. I managed to stick to roughly forty to sixty ounces of milk and three 4 ounce pureed servings of food per day. I can get up more easily and slowly, very slowly, I'm increasing my ability to move and adapt to my healing and sore muscles. I can get through most of a day of work without falling asleep at the keyboard or curling over in pain or suffering outbursts of pure honesty of what is on my mind when I find yet another person making one and a half to two times my income is not able to follow simple directions nor use complicated adjectives to describe what is actually happening to their computer.

So thank you Lee and thank you NoOp. I don't know if you guys will see this note or not, but thank you for your help in seeing that my life is more than a faux bullet wound in the tummy and that there is progress being made in my healing process.

Your Medical Care and How IT May Kill You

I just finished reading a very interesting article on how electronic records...mandated for hospitals by the federal government in coming years...nearly killed the author of the article.

I added this blurb for a couple reasons. First, I just spent about four days in the hospital having RNY surgery and I spent nearly a month in a hospital suffering from pancreatitis and gallstones. In both cases, at two different hospitals, I had a consistent experience; I typically saw doctors once or twice a day, and nurses (and their assistants) were on a rotating schedule to check on me and in both cases it was the nurses that made me feel the most comfortable and seemed to be working, from my point of view, as advocates for my care. The author attributed his saving grace to be a nurse who worked on his behalf to correct errors and try getting medication to help him (and his wife sneaking his medications to him).

Second, while his article is a scathing review of the current generation of IT technologies for turning patient healthcare into electronic records, even he acknowledged that the shortcoming isn't necessarily with the IT as much as it is IT vendors not creating systems that fulfill the needs of the doctors. He lays the blame at the feet of the IT departments, vendors, and ISV's who make the varioius software packages.

I would argue that it is not just the vendors, but the users. I don't think they know what they really need or want. Most people, asked to specify what they want in a car, will not know truly all the things they want in the car. I can barely remember all the things I need to take with me on a trip for the weekend. How can most people remember or know all the things they'd need with a system as complex and encompassing as medical software that is supposed to meed the needs of everyone working in the hospital?

Third, in reading his account of what happened to him it seemed as if the doctors "fighting the system"...the poor data model...were still kind of stupid in their actions, computerized list or not. He had several alarms go off that no one replied to. That's not a computer problem. He had people ignoring what he already knew...such as the effectiveness of the Albuterol in alleviating pain...and doctors that simply were not listening. The people "fighting the system" to help the guy were nuts for not listening to the patient in the first place and not exercising good common sense!

Read the article. What do you think?

A Business that Just Won't Go Away

I've griped before about our local Burger King. My son had decided he'd like a cheeseburger from there recently; my wife had also picked up something from McDonald's not more than a day before that; I noticed something about the way they conduct business a little differently.

There's the obvious; BK usually got our orders wrong. I'm wary of them because once I would order something simple, they'd get it right, and just as I got confidence in them they'd end up screwing up the order again.

But I noticed something else. The people seemed different; they carried themselves differently, had a different attitude. One that seemed to say, "I can't wait to go home."

There seemed to be more tattoos at the BK. Does that sound biased? I think it sounds biased. But I thought it was unusual that proportionately there were more people with tattoos working at the BK than at the local McD's...I'm simply stating an observation.

The voicebox where you can place an order starts greeting us with a cheerful, pleasant woman's voice...then abruptly turned into a man's voice asking for the order. Huh? My wife said that it's an automatic pre-recorded voice, one that's supposed to greet you right away then the employees are supposed to stop whatever they're doing and take your order.

"You mean, they're supposed to be distracted while trying to fill an order, and probably increase the chances they're going to screw up my order rather than have a car wait an extra fifteen seconds?"

"Yup."

Then they take some extra seconds at the drive through asking if I'm paying cash or credit. Why do you need to ask me that there? I just want to place my order and pull up to pay.

These in my opinion are bad practices for business. They have a sloppy track record for getting my order accurately filled, they have an image of employees that look like they're about as happy to be there as they would be at the proctologist's office (Hey, the McD's employees aren't exactly skipping around behind the counter, but at least they usually don't let on that they hate the customer...), and they annoy me with cheap gimmicks to make me think service is better than it really is while at the same time it's probably increasing the odds they're screwing up my order again.

Barring something else coming up of great significance, this will probably be the last time I rant on about this, so for those few people reading this blog that may be a source of relief. I know it is for me to get this off my chest. Drives me nuts that businesses run in such a sloppy manner manage to apparently still turn a profit...makes me wonder what's wrong with people. I know I avoid this business when I have a choice.

Yo Ho Ho Back To Work I Go

I returned to work for my first day since my surgery. My wife tells me that several coworkers think I am insane for returning after a such a short period out...I'm returning wearing stretch pants instead of dockers.

My wife dropped me off and headed to work, then came to pick me up after work. I survived my first day back....that's a good thing, right?

I was pretty tired. Didn't fall asleep or anything like that, but there were times where I felt kind of out of it. My shorter temper is something I need to keep in check, especially when some of the requests came in that were...shall I say, challenging, in that people were describing that XYZ wasn't working when it clearly was. My first impulse was to ask said people if they were dropped on their heads as infants.

But I didn't.

My wife and I had a few errands to run tonight; after a somewhat long day we went home and changed and I pureed some Split Pea and Ham soup from Progresso, packing one of the four ounce containers in a bag with some milk and my multivitamin before we headed out again. She enjoyed some Panera food after heating my soup puree for me; then off to pick up a couple supplies, then probably head home. If we avoid arguments for the rest of the night, I guess I'd have to say it's been a nice day overall. I even managed to take only a grand total of two painkillers to get through the day's challenges.

Tomorrow I have an afternoon appointment to get a tooth filled and the day after that I have an appointment with my bariatric doctor, hopefully to get this hole in my gut re-examined and get rid of the remaining staples (especially the one that is dangling out of me...ohmygodohmygodohmygod this thing freaks me the F@# out).

Can You Understand It If You Can't Live It?

I feel certain changes after the surgery. I don't know if everyone has them, and I don't know if they're permanent (or if they're permanent I may just adapt to them until they're unnoticed anymore). But I know something is different.

Somehow divorcing the urge for physical hunger from the eating experience, coupled with the facts that I can't eat a lot in once sitting (lest I damage the pouch, since I so far haven't felt full or sick from overeating) and that I'm deathly afraid of experiencing the dumping syndrome or vomiting that comes from the surgery's negative reinforcement aspect while my abdomen still has a weeping wound on it, has changed how I view foods. I have become far more obsessed with watching food shows, watching the nuances of how to properly prepare and serve interesting meals. I daydream of what a restaurant would be like to run sometimes. I notice things I didn't notice before...things like the sausage, egg, and cheese Croissanwich from Burger King, which I used to love and could eat (at one time...look in the archives to see some gripes with our BK, and I may whine more about them in the future) two at a time easily, smells like it is using a very cheap sausage; the spice or...something...just smells off to me. Greasy. Yeah, I know, fast food is greasy? But something just is worse with them to me now, something I don't smell with a sausage, egg, and cheese McMuffin.

In other words, I've become obsessed with the technical effects of the food instead of just how much they can satisfy some other urge in my appetite. I love smelling foods and appreciating that aspect instead of just eating it.

But I think I annoy my wife because I'll ask to see her sandwiches when she orders something, or start asking questions about what I smell from her plate or from the kitchen as she's preparing something.

These things have had me try my hand with making a couple things in the kitchen. I don't often try cooking. Before I was married I used to enjoy making cakes. Nothing professional, nothing too elaborate...mainly novelty cakes and experimenting with some variations in recipes (try adding tomato soup to cake batter, or pumpkin? Pudding instead of icing? Not bad!). But in our living situation it would go to waste.

In considering making meals what normally happens is that the daughter makes whatever she wants because she wouldn't like what was made, the youngest wouldn't eat much whether he liked it or not, and so basically it didn't seem to be quite so economical for making meals for two compared to the time and effort in just spending ten bucks at the fast-food joints.

Plus I, like my wife, prefer not doing dishes. We're just lazy that way, I suppose. I would get a little resentful when the situation was such that if she cooked dinner, I'd clean up; if I cooked dinner, I'd clean up. It's one of my house chores so that's all and good, but still if I were to be honest I still would feel pangs of resentment for it. I'm human.

So I normally didn't make things.

But after the surgery I tried making a simple polenta and chicken meal to welcome my wife home from her weeklong trip away. I was proud of how it seemed to turn out, and I felt good that she seemed to enjoy it. I was even surprised that the daughter had some and liked it. She took it to work to finish up for lunches.

I tried making a second dish, a pumpkin-cornmeal dish, to use up some of the pumpkin in the pantry and leftover cornmeal from the previous meal. It didn't get the same reception as the previous dish...sure, it's a side dish, and the spicing was a little off. I don't think it was bad, just not the kind of thing that would get a second trip to the buffet for. Which is also evident because it's been in the fridge since the first taste and will probably be thrown out mostly intact.

I picked up some recipes ideas for a Reuben Pizza. With the right ingredients it should be quite aromatic and flavorful, and I asked the wife if she'd like to go to the supermarket and we'd get some of the things needed to prepare that for her dinner if she'd like me to make it for her. She replied asking me if I was trying to fatten her up and why I was trying to feed her all the time.

I hadn't really thought of it this way...I never consciously was trying to thwart her efforts to lose weight. I was trying to make something good, see if I was capable of making something that would make people say, "Wow! that was great!" I know I'd fail more often than hit a single or a double in the game, but still...I enjoyed it. It smells great. And once in awhile I might do something well.

I got to wondering if part of it is simply the fact that if you've not had this disconnect in your hunger and appetite then you may not be able to truly understand what it's like to experience such a change. It's a classic excuse, but there is a truth to statement, a truth no less valid than the feeling that normals can't know what it's like after twenty years to even have the option of riding on a roller coaster open to you, experiences normals take for granted so they can't feel that extra dimension of giddiness of at having new options open to you.

This means that despite having someone around trying to support me during these changes, I still experiences times of profound loneliness and alienation. I suppose I just have to adapt and deal with it, but it's still not simple, and can lead to a greater emotional strain; while I wasn't a patient person before the surgery by any measure, I find now that I'm on an even shorter fuse, snapping at people for minor infringements on my nerves.

And worse yet I have no idea how to convey what I'm thinking or feeling to others in a way that they can understand, and seeing as for some reason the world still doesn't revolve around me yet my own self-absorbed journey means less understanding of what it's like for them or what is going on in their life, making me wonder just how suitable a person I am to be around at all, that maybe it would be better if I were a hermit in the woods.

Simply put, it's a wonderful downward spiral that despite my outbursts I still try to keep the darkest parts leashed up because, really, what are the people around me going to do about these feelings? If they can't understand the urge to try cooking an interesting meal, how are they going to understand these things in my head, things I can barely understand or keep controlled?

I'm hoping this is primarily just part of the "hardest month" I was warned about, and after awhile these issues will go away or I'll adapt. But right now I'm still trying to just hold on in the ride and try not falling out of the car along the way.

Yet Another Quick Update...YAQU

Seeing as my friend had asked about measuring out progress on Sundays...and I normally do this on Fridays...I'm posting a quick update on how the numbers are going this morning.

Weight this morning...348.5
Overall loss since January...109.5
Loss since friend's proposed challenge...14.5
Pounds to go to meet my challenge goal...45.5
Percent of challenge goal met...%24

I haven't heard from him since he asked about starting the weight loss challenge. I should see if he's willing to start a blog to keep track of his numbers where it can be checked...

If you're reading this and think there was an error somewhere, let me know dude. According to the info I recorded we talked about doing this one week ago, the 19th, and I have been using the numbers from that day on.

Trying Something Different

There are a few foods out there that make health-conscious people cringe yet are very popular on the market. Not surprisingly I happen to like some of those foods.

I spent part of the early afternoon thinking about what I might try for dinner. The baby food...I've so far only really taken a liking to the Macaroni and Cheese and Macaroni and Cheese With Vegetables. Even then they're kind of...bland. The cream of wheat is also kind of flavorless but the addition this morning of some vanilla whey protein actually helped spice it up a little. The best I had so far was vanilla sugar free pudding.

I then started thinking of what small foods I might be able to try in a few weeks, like Chicken McNuggets. One or two McNuggets as a meal? There's something about the smell of those fake meat-and-corn-byproducts that holds a fond place in my memory!

What if I could puree them? Would the aroma trigger the same memories? Would it make me content to have a McNugget puree?

Hmm...the diet class said that we could have pureed items, usually soups, nothing with a lot of fiber. What if...

Then I remembered something else we had picked up awhile ago, something I was taking for a dinner or lunch a month or two before the surgery.

Chef Boy-R-Dee. Ravioli with meat sauce, to be specific. I love the smell of the sauce in that pasta and meat byproduct in a can! Plus it has protein in it. I was told to try being careful to up my protein intake. So I took a can of it and with the help of my wife pureed it then carefully spooned the resulting pasta and sauce mud into two baby jars, a four ounce tupperware-like container, and a second four-ounce container (they're convenient as serving sizes). I refrigerated three of them and heated the fourth one in the nuke box for thirty seconds.

I know it's not supposed to taste good...but WOW. I don't care how many people turn up their nose at this. I think the aroma was MARVELOUS. The flavor wasn't half bad either. The texture was...well,...thin mud. But compared to the baby foods? It was like injecting a rainbow straight into my gullet. And I have three more containers of rainbow in the fridge.

I found something I can look forward to. Side benefit...one can of the stuff is supposed to be about two servings (as I recall...who has only half a can of Boy-R-Dee when they open it up? One freakin' can should be a serving) and I'm doling it into four servings.

The habit-eater and food-loving-eater part of me could probably sit and scoop it into my throat until the whole thing is gone. Physically I'm still not hungry. I just enjoyed the experience of my little four ounce cup of ravioli and wished it didn't end. But I'm sure I can have some tomorrow for a meal or two.

Food processor...another item you'll want if you go through with this surgery. Add it to your must-haves list.

Status Report

It's Friday, so I figure it would be a good time to give an update on how things are coming along.

Weight...today, I thought I weighed initially at 352. After the little guy went to his grandparents house I decided I felt well enough to have a shower, so I got on the scale and checked sans baggy sweatpants and shoes, and weighed in at 350.5. Amazing how much weight your clothes can add.

So, that means I'm down since January 107.5 pounds.
Since my friend's challenge last Sunday I'm down 12.5 pounds.

Food-wise, I've liked the pudding. Chocolate, vanilla, who cares. It's good. I tried making some cream of wheat, which was more difficult than it should have been just because I was making it with milk to add more nutrition and didn't realize that while I was getting the Cream of Wheat ready to add in and putting utensils away, the milk, which I was keeping an eye on, had some kind of a skin over it that prevented me from seeing that it was bubbling. The moment I touched it with a whisk, FWOOM...it bubbled then foamed over, and I discovered what burned milk on the bottom of the sauce pan looks like.

I cleaned the pan out and tried again, being far more careful to constantly stir it. I added the CoW and stirred on low heat waiting, as the instructions said, for it to thicken. It was supposed to take a minute or two. I stirred and stirred and stirred....nothing. I had what looked like milk. I added more CoW. Stirred and stirred. Still wasn't thickening, although the color changed a little. I kept adding a touch more and stirring until finally I had something that looked like a thinned soup.

CoW is decent, a little bland, but edible. I think I'll add some cinnamon and see what that does for flavor. I'd like to add honey, but I have no idea if a touch of it will cause dumping.

Then there's baby food. I have level 1 and 2, a small variety of different flavors. So far what I've discovered:

The macaroni and cheese? Not bad. Weird thing was the first ingredient is carrot.
The pasta puree sucks.
The chicken and sweet potato? Sucks.
The vanilla custard and banana? Edible.
The corn and sweet potatoes is edible, but the corn flavor comes out more than the sweet potato. It's tolerable but not great.

It's amazing how utterly bland, if not bad, most of these baby foods taste. I was so excited to try something new, some new flavors, and what I get is bleh.

Hungerwise, I'm still not feeling physical hunger (that I can tell), but I think I have a head hunger. Here's what I've identified so far...

Physical hunger: appetite. So far that's pretty much gone still. If I'm not paying attention to the time I don't necessarily know when it's time to eat.

Impulse eating: I still fight the impulse to try some peanut butter or lick a spoon when making something like pumpkinlenta (it smells good...). It's habit. I liked cheese, so I'd grab a slice or three and eat it...I still have the impulse but I make sure to stifle it down.

Emotional eating: food is a comfort. Stressed? Sad? Angry? Food fills that hole in my heart that makes things feel better.

Habit and enjoyment eating: I think this may be tied into emotional eating to some degree. I liked to eat. If a backrub feels good, why stop after only five minutes? So too with food portions. I like eating that ham steak, so why stop at a bite or three or a quarter of the steak? Have two steaks! It's good, I enjoy it, so keep going so you can continue enjoying it! Eat until the stomach can't take any more!

That's part of the goal of this operation. From what I can figure out, my stomach was stretched out and could accomodate a lot more food than most "normals". It doesn't signal that it's full because it took so long to become full. With the new pouch, I am supposed to be able to feel full far sooner. In theory I should be punished for eating more than a moderate portion for a meal because I'll throw the food back up, and eating certain kinds of food can trigger dumping syndrome.

At least, that's what I can figure out.

Personal observations: I met one other barry patient; he was a gentleman that had laparoscopic surgery the day I went in for open RnY. He was in better health in terms of physical recovery...he was driving around and wante dot see if he could drive a mower around, for example, while I was just getting out of my shuffling around with a robe on stage. And, of course, I have this gaping hole in my midsection.

BUT...

He sounded like he was having more trouble with the liquid diet. He didn't have the diarrhea I had; something about the painkillers? But whereas I can drink nearly 20 oz of milk over the course of half an hour, he sounded like he had to take it much more slowly or he had very bad pain which he described as "swallowing a burp". He was even having to ground up pills to a powder before taking them while I'm just splitting or quartering pills and taking them all at one sitting.

Is my pouch faulty? Did something go wrong?

The lady that led the dietary class didn't seem too surprised, saying that it differs by individual how they react to the operation and how things work; some people experience dumping, some don't, some have a "fullness" or get it more slowly than others do, or have different tolerances for different foods. Worse, people can "cheat" the pouch and end up gaining back the weight. But in the previous cases people aren't punished for "breaking the rules" so they don't have the negative reinforcement to help in training new habits.

I've always thought my stomach was iron. I could eat tons of food in a sitting; no negative effects. I was rarely ever bothered by something I've eaten. If it was upset it was because I was usually about to get sicker than a dog.

I'll have to ask next time I go to the hospital what the chances are that I did something wrong or something isn't right with the pouch, I suppose. Maybe I still fall outside the norms.

Until then, though, I'm trying to make sure I stick to 4 oz. servings of food...a pudding cup, or a baby jar filled with cream of wheat or grits, unless I have to actually eat the baby food (or I get the macaroni and cheese again...that wasn't half bad).

Something Arrived!

It's always fun to get deliveries. Unless it's something like a summons or a bill collector. But this wasn't anything like that.

Several people gave me get-well wishes and cards and I've appreciated all of them; I hung up all the cards on a wall while I'm at home recovering. One of my friends sent me a gift certificate to ThinkGeek, an online store geared primarily at selling unusual and geeky toys for scifi and fantasy cubicle dwellers.


I spent a lot of time deliberating on what to get. I wanted to get the Jedi deluxe robe and a ForceFX lightsaber, but the robe and saber were too expensive. Plus the ForceFX doesn't have a detachable blade. What fun is that to walk around a Renaissance Fair in if you can't have just the hilt? I found another blade/hilt combination available but they were going to take time to get in stock and you lost the fun sound effects. Bleh.

There were other fun toys I considered there but decided I wanted something that would be useful, utilitarian, that I would get use out of after the novelty wore off.

And they arrived today.

One neat thing...the packaging is whimsical. Here's a picture of the inflatable cushions put into the box to protect the product...can you read what was used to inflate the pillows?
It's a play on the thing about having your order packed by trained monkeybots. It's fun!

Anyway...here's what I ordered...
Whenever we have family dinners, sometimes we have to take our own silverware. Or if we're going on a picnic, or most common I have to take silverware in to work with me if I pre-made something for lunch. These are "light my fire" sporks, one large utensil and one four-piece multicolor set. It has a fork, spoon, and knife edge all built in!

I know, I know...I'm odd that way. This is the perfect combination of fun and whimsy and utility combined with the irony of the fact that I can't eat "real food" for another week and a half. I loved it! These were also the only things that in my deliberation I consistently returned to while considering the wifi shirt and various games and cube toys I could get. Almost got the keychain multitool but...just not enough need for it...

The big one is a little bigger than I thought it would be, but I don't care.

Speaking of which...I didn't realize the time. I need to get my scheduled lunch in now...I think I'll try one of these babies out!

What Do Yo Do?

What do you do when you realize your mood is just swinging the wrong way?

Last night I was fixing the dressing over my gunshot wound of a clot and I felt as if I was about to panic. I called for my wife to come in...she was busy in the other room...and apparently she didn't hear me despite calling three times. I just sat at the edge of the bed, staring down at this small silver staple and gory dark red opening on my midsection, listening to a rational voice and irrational panic in my head fight for control of the driver's seat.

I wanted someone to come in and see this, to tell me if it was really as bad as I thought it was, tell me that it wasn't taking on a life of its own. I wanted reassurance that this is okay. That I did the right thing. One of the last things I did before being wheeled into the operating room was ask my wife if I was doing the right thing in having this surgery, a change from which there was no going back.

I needed to know that this would be over. Not in years or months. But soon.

I needed to know that I didn't screw up in doing this. So often it's hard to see the points in our lives where we made the right choices and easier to see where we screwed up...worse, there are plenty of times where we made wrong choices and don't understand why we are in the situations we're in.

But staring at that wound last night and fighting the urge to just cry, I began to question myself and my choices.

In the end the more rational side won out. Score another point for my mild Asperger's tipping the scale on the side of rationality. I simply don't have a choice at this point. The surgery can't be reversed. My last moment where I could have opted out of the surgery, to waddle as fast as my pudgy feet could carry me while my bare behind was wagging in the wind (stupid hospital gowns) was in the moments before they gave me the anaesthesia in the operating room, when they asked me to get up from the gurney and hop onto the surgical table.

This wound, according to my doctor, will heal. She does this for a living. She should know, and really, what choice do I have but to trust her? I trusted the doctor that referred me to surgery to start down this path. I trusted the surgeon with playing with my stomach and intestines. I trusted nurses with seeing all my private nubbins while recovering for several days in the hospital, barely able to move.

I made a choice to put my health into the hands of others, and for that there is a tradeoff where I stepped on to the train and can't stop until we reach the next station.

That still scares the bejeesus out of me at times.

I try to be decisive. My wife would laugh at this idea no doubt, but I do try. It's my own small contribution towards building a leadership quality of some kind into my son. I weigh the pros and cons and then make the choice, or make the declaration of what will be done when others abdicate by bickering constantly. I rarely tolerate a group of people hemming and hawing over something as silly as where to go for dinner or what they are going to do next, especially if it affects me; they waste more time going in circles than just making a choice and following through. But that doesn't mean that I don't second-guess myself.

There are times in this recovery where I repeatedly end up questioning myself. I supposed this is all part of the whole "emotional rollercoaster" doctors tried warning me about ahead of time. Just as no one can truly understand what this is like without going through it, no one can be fully prepared for what non-physical effects (or physical effects, really) this may have on the patient that decides to go through with this operation.

So how does one go about dealing with this, especially if food is no longer a comfort that it once was?

Moods and Patience

I have to say that even though I try to keep busy I end up feeling down at times here. Part of my problem, no doubt, is that I dwell on things that I either can't help or am having problems wrapping my head around.

For one, I have a staple sticking out of me. I tried for a few minutes to pull it free, but I'm not sure how it's bent under the skin and it ends up catching as I maneuver it around; it doesn't help that I'm squeamish with the idea of doing this so close to a giant exposed clot. I got frustrated and just re-covered everything with dressings. I didn't sit down specifically to pull the staple out. I sat down to change the dressing because it looked a little bloodier than the past ones were, so I may end up changing dressings three or four times instead of the usual two times. I have a staple sticking out of me and my dressings are bleeding a bit more. I can't help but sigh at the situation. Or cry. I'm trying to choose sigh.

Second, I am planning on returning to work Monday. I will be on light desk duty so there's not much moving around involved and I warned my boss (who seemed to be agreeable to the idea) that I can't come in wearing clothes that I probably should be wearing since I am still kind of "leaking" from my wound so I'm avoiding constricting the site with a belt and dockers. But it marks a return to the grind. I won't even be having solid foods yet so my stamina is on the low side. The very thought of it is stressful. But I don't have infinite sick days, I still have more appointments to go to and will need hours off, and I can't put off going back forever. This job and the environment stresses me out so much...

Third, I tried a programming project, but I'm as green as grass at getting things to work properly or even map out what I'm trying to do. I eventually became frustrated with trying to figure out how to do one seemingly simple function and because this is a niche language, I could not find much in terms of reference material to help in finding a solution. I posted the question to the mailing list specific to that language and closed the development environment. Part of the problem is probably that I'm not a programmer by trade. I really wish I had moved more into that track than system administration sometimes. So now I get ideas, I start working on them, I get frustrated and close the IDE out intending to come back later and finish it, but find excuses not to. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just too stupid to figure these things out.

Fourth...I keep thinking I should try writing a story. I start mapping out a storyline in my head, but then I stall. Should I just try writing and see what happens? Should I wait until I can come up with a complete outline to follow? Mur Lafferty from I Should Be Writing fame often advises new writers to "Write, just write. You can't be a writer if you don't write," as well as, "You're allowed to suck." Okay, those are paraphrases. But basically I think there's a fear in me that if I tried and failed miserably I'll have wasted so much time and effort. Or worse, I'll discover something else I suck at. I'll validate my fear.

So two things I think I'd like to try moving into as a possible career moves...programming and writing...I'll confirm I suck at. On the other hand if I sit here and continue not to do anything I'll end up sitting in my coffin having achieved nothing more than sitting in the rut I'm currently riding along in.

And whenever I start to feel bad about these things, I look down and see that dark red wound in my stomach, or sometimes I catch a whiff of dried blood on my bandages reminding me why I'm sitting home alone with a neurotic dog and growing more frustrated that I'm so obese that my loose skin won't even keep the bandages where I originally placed them; I bandage the area with the blood clot while sitting on the edge of the bed, they're covered. I stand up, and suddenly the wound is half-exposed.

Which, of course, makes me more depressed.

I need to achieve something. I need a feeling of accomplishment. As it stands, I'm sitting here with partial projects that lose their way, alone most of the day with my thoughts. I don't know what kick in the pants I need but I need to find it.

Called the Doctor

I talked to the doctor and she said to just keep changing the dressing and not worry about it. There was just too much tension on the staple.

She'll pull it out next week unless I'm in the area and want it removed sooner.

She didn't sound worried, so I'm just going to do my best to accept the weird gunshot wound in my stomach and hope it'll continue healing. Maybe I'll learn something about how the body heals by watching it. Right now it's just...freaky.

This Could be Bad...

So I wake up and after finally managing to drag myself out of bed I get to work on my morning ritual of changing the bandage on my incision. I remove the bandage and notice what looks like a gunshot wound.

My wife looked at it and said, "I think your staple ripped."

Holy shnikes.

I try not to panic, but when we're talking about holes in my body, I get a little bit antsy. I put another bandage and dressing over the wound and call the doctor's office; their answering service said they're usually available at around a quarter after eight.

I take a deep breath and focus on passing time reading some news stories and, well, writing this.

Soon I'll call back and see if they want me to come up today to check my incision site. I don't know what is going to happen, but when I know more, I'll post an update. I've never really had a surgery like this before so I know nothing about whether this is a serious thing or not...it's not actively squirting blood but it still doesn't look very good.

I'm going back to not panicking now...

Another Surgery Followup

Another milestone reached! I had my two-week dietary followup today.

What does that mean?

It means I am on a "full liquid" diet.

The name is misleading, though. Really it's more like "full slurry diet" or "if it slides easily with little resistance off a spoon you can try putting it down your gullet diet".

I can have creamed or pureed soups without lumps or chunks, smooth yogurts, very very thin hot cereals like cream of wheat and grits, sugar free pudding and sugar free hot cocoa with skim milk, and sugar-free protein powder. I'm supposed to try having things with protein in it as it's important to prevent muscle loss at this point. She also suggested baby food in small jars since it's a good portion size and has good flavor to it. This may be very convenient for meals on the go.

I'm also supposed to have my chewable vitamins now. Two a day. One in the morning, one at night.

A serving size right now is recommended to be 1/4th to 1/3rd of a cup per meal, and she said not to exceed 1/2 a cup. My first "meal" in my newly graduated diet level? A pudding cup! Chocolate pudding! It tastes pretty good so far. I've been picking at it for 26 minutes now (I'm in the middle of doing this entry and a couple other tasks at the desk at the moment too) and it's not even halfway gone. Turns out these snack cups are about 3.5 ounces, which comes to a little over four-tenths of a cup of snack. So one snack pack, if I tolerate it, is a good meal size. Unfortunately the pudding has no protein (well, the chocolate has less than 1 gram). This does have some added energy from carbohydrates and fats, so I'll be a little more energetic. My first meal is an indulgence. Can you blame me?

The person heading the dietary class said there were people in another gathering of people recently who were arguing and complaining about, "Why can't I eat XYZ?" and "I had ABC and it was fine..." and...I'm wondering if this was an exaggeration or example...had someone say they had watermelon in the car they were eating. Are you kidding me?

It floors me to think that this early on people would go through all the hassle I've been going through only to intentionally break the diet guidelines. Maybe doing the surgery laproscopically is really much easier on your system than open RNY...maybe the person or persons doing that had lap-banding instead of RNY, and perhaps that is even kinder on the system than what's happening to me. But still. You go through something rather radical to correct your obesity and at this stage of the game it should be the simplest time to be able to stick to the eating rules. You're healing. You're hopefully not hungry, physically. You just paid (or cost your insurance company) thousands of dollars and probably feel like crap over the first two weeks. Already you're breaking the rules? WHY?!

I kind of wish I had a larger group of people so I could ask them what they are thinking when they do this. I won't even chance a stolen teaspoon of cake or icing for fear of dumping syndrome. Quite frankly I'm not that hungry anyway so it's not too hard to resist, even though I do sometimes miss the flavor and texture. The closest I see myself coming to breaking the rules right now is drinking too soon with the meal.

Not all is totally rainbows and gummy bears. After my dietary class I met with the physician's assistant that in our previous adventures had removed the grenade tube from my gut (don't get me wrong; I stifled a number of not so nice expletives at the time but I really do like her. She's a nice and knowledgable young woman and has treated me wonderfully in spite of the Tube of Death pulling some of my innards out). She removed some more staples but left two in, saying that I'm healing well but it's just not quite ready. I still have two staples in my skin.

She also couldn't get more of the clot out. The result? I go back next week for her to followup on the clot and staples, and the following week I have to have another dietary followup to see if I'm ready to graduate to regular food!

These are my new milestones. Next week I'm returning to work...desk-bound...and in the middle of the week trying to get my staples out. The following week I'm trying to graduate to full food. When I get a chance to go to the supermarket I'll be getting some protein powder to add to my foods and I'll also try getting some of the baby food purees.

Aside from coming home to the dog having chewed up more things she's not supposed to be chewing on, today has been a good day. Yay!

On Verbal Tics

Ever encounter just "one of those things" that once you're aware of it, you can't help but notice it and be perpetually bugged by whatever it is you're now aware of? For example, I have a theater minor from my college days and so I notice certain mistakes whenever I go to a play performed by small theater groups or school ensembles. Things the audience may not see I always end up picking out and being irritated at them for it.

One performance-related peeve is when people use the verbal tic "um" to fill dead air in a speech or conversation. If I had to grade a person giving a speech I'd fail them for doing this. Drives me insane. I'd rather listen to nothing than an "um". I've even deleted podcasts because the guests would keep using "um" every three words. I simply...can't...stop...hearing...it.

Well now there's a new one that seems to be growing in popularity. The "Or whatever".

"He said he'd like to go to the mall or whatever."

"We can take him to the playground and then pick up some dinner or whatever."

...or whatever or whatever or whatever NO NOT OR WHATEVER. Are you stoned?

For the love of $DEITY stop saying "or whatever."

You want me to decide or whatever? You really have absolutely no opinion or preference? Fine. I'll decide. Starting with leaving you behind. Obviously you have no preference since, as you said, "...whatever."

Stop being so sloppy with speech! I hear it on TV, I hear it from some podcasters, I hear it from friends and relatives and family. And now that I noticed it I can't NOT NOTICE it.

I want to dash my brains on rocks after the umpteenth time hearing that verbal crutch. If you don't have any opinions or preferences, don't say a @#$ thing. If you have a suggestion, say it. Break the habit of filling space or backpeddling with sloppy regurgitation of a stock phrase!

Whatever you do don't use "um" and "or whatever" when I'm in a bad mood and have tools in my hands. You may not like the reaction.

...deep breath...deep breath...

The $15 Dinner

Good Morning America (the same one that had the Perez Hilton's non-story) is having a celebrity chef challenge where the hosts are buying groceries in New York for fifteen dollars and then giving what they purchase to a chef to prepare a meal for four. Every day another chef tries their hand at preparing the meal with whatever the host-of-the-day had purchased.

To be clear, the primary reason they're doing this is to bring attention to the needs of food banks around the country. Every day they're making a large donation to a food bank to help those in need. This is a stunt to get people to donate to the food banks.

I found this interesting because I was thinking of doing a posting on poverty and obesity; there are numerous stories out there asking why the poor tend to be so overweight. I touched on this previously but never focused on the cost of nutritional foods versus fatty, not-as-healthy foods, which is pointed to as part of the reason for the disproportionate obesity in lower-income Americans versus higher-income Americans. How timely!

So today Sam Champion gave Emeril Legasse a bag with spinach, red tomatoes from the vine, yellow onions, empire apples, dry black beans, dry pinto beans, and creme fraiche.

I saw the results after an hour of cooking and three notes stuck out in my mind. One, Sam said he didn't get meat (Emeril joked several times about asking fellow GMA guest Jack Hanna if he could borrow some of the furry friends Jack brought to the show that day for protein) because he went to an organic street market for the vegetables and because the cost of the meat would limit how much he could get. This tells me that meat, healthy cuts of meat, can be expensive...although I'm sure in the right place you can get inexpensive packages of hot dogs or some other prepared meat in pound increments.

Second, he went to a street market and haggled for the food. When I wrote about the cost of eating out versus cooking at home, I didn't even mention the possibility of going to a farmer's market environment where you might be able to haggle with the vendors to bring down the price. I concede this is a point in the favor of cooking at home; if you have the skill and time to do this, more power to you. I would also contend that this is an expense of time and effort. These are two of the reasons that Americans don't want to do this. Our society favors the selfish motivation and the quick fix. We don't like sacrificing our time for things we don't like to do. We are a society where people who say they can't afford to pay for their own kids somehow have money for cell phones with GPS tracking, implying they travel enough to justify the added cost of these features and where people with six-figure incomes are "just scraping by," meaning they can't keep up their pre-economic-slump lifestyle so they cry poverty.

Third, the challenge was not fifteen dollars. I don't remember the specifics and the recipes aren't posted to the GMA site yet, but I do know that Emeril used spices from the pantry in making some of the dishes, chicken stock in a soup, and one of his dishes was a corn bread and another had cereal crumbled on it (again from the pantry). It was more like the primary ingredients were fifteen dollars with some stuff "you should already have around the house".

So what does this mean? It means to me that while inexpensive meals are possible, I can get a double cheeseburger off the dollar menu at McD's and a drink for around a buck. I can get their salads for a couple bucks. I can get plenty of calories to survive...unhealthy, yes, but if you're poor, you can survive for the calories count...using their value meals. I can also get canned Chef Boy-R-Dee (or the knockoffs) for a couple bucks a can in bulk; if you were truly in need, that bulk can of canned pasta can last you a day, and it may last longer stored in the fridge than the fresh foods he had made.

But that's not the point they were trying to drive home. They are drawing attention to needs at your local food bank. So for that their little demonstration was nice. I just wish they could have been more realistic in what they used and did.

I did think it was amusing that one of the comments in the feedback section of the website was from someone shaming the hosts and Emeril for mocking the nearly vegetarian composition of the meal. I have been obsessed with cooking shows since the surgery (weird!), and one thing I've found in common with most of the celebrity chefs is that they advocate a meat protein in dishes they prepare. Gordan Ramsay is outrightly hostile towards vegetarians on his shows.

There are plenty of good vegetarian dishes out there and no doubt good chefs who specialized in vegetarian cuisine. But I find it hard to take it seriously when someone is criticising a chef who is NOT known for vegetarian dishes for his good natured ribbing at not purchasing the best source of protein...a meat or fish, instead of beans.

It's good for the commenter that they're in a position to not have to compromise their dietary lifestyle choices in the name of having to buy what is necessary to feed the family.

Progress So Far

A friend of mine, finding a little information about the surgery, said he wanted to lose 30 pounds and wanted incentive. He proposed a competition to lose weight. Whoever loses the weight first gets a $50 gift certificate to Amazon.com.

I told him, "Dude, you really don't want to do that." I explained to him what I was eating and asked him if he thought he could do that.

"No, I guess not...what about I lose 30 pounds, you lose 60?"

I said if he wanted to do that it was up to him, but it still wasn't fair, really. I really don't know what my weight loss will be over time. But if he'd really like to do that I'm not going to turn down a gift certificate to the largest virtual mall in the world (Nor will I fail to pay up if he manages to lose his goal first, of course).

My dietitian appointment is tomorrow and I thought I'd take a quick stock in my progress today.

My weight on January 5th was recorded at 458 (I think that was actually closer to Christmas time, though, but this is when I "officially" began my dieting). I had decided to try in earnest to lose weight by tracking my calories and keeping them closer to 1,500 per day.

My weight just before the surgery on the 7th of April was 376, losing 82 pounds.

Today is April 21st, 14 days post-surgery, and I'm at 356 pounds. This means 20 pounds in 14 days, or overall a loss of 102 pounds.

As I recall he proposed this challenge on Sunday the 19th, when I was 363 pounds according to my handy dandy spreadsheet, meaning from Sunday to today I have lost 7 pounds...still want to wager that $50 gift cert?

Same-Sex Marriage and Pretty People

My wife was getting ready for work this morning and turned on the living room TV. I was awake in bed, fortifying myself to pull myself upright, when I heard a quick snippet about a beauty pageant contestant causing a stir because she was asked about whether she thought states should allow same-sex marriage by one of the judges.

My first thought...a beauty pageant contestant is considered an authority on constitutional law and ethics? It's a stereotype, I know, but I still question why a beauty contestant's opinion is something to cause a stir.

So I went through my morning rituals and took a seat at the console to Google for the story in hopes of finding more information to justify what a beauty pageant contestant could have done to become a figurehead for the anti-same-sex-marriage movement. I found it.

Perez Hilton was the judge of the contest that asked the question. He's a self-styled celebrity gossip blogger and gay-rights advocate with a huge following of celebrity stalkers. The story is in the news apparently because he criticized the pageant contestant with rather harsh vulgarity because she disagreed with what he thought was the right answer.

In other words, she was asked her opinion about something that really has nothing to do with standing on a stage and looking pretty, she gave her opinion, and despite the fact that she wasn't auditioning to join MENSA or answering to Congress as a possible Supreme Court candidate, was used as a platform for Perez to further his own attention-whoring agenda.

Really the only interesting part of the story for me was that the contest was taking place at the Planet Hollywood casino and hotel in Vegas, which used to be the Aladdin, where my wife and I honeymooned so many years ago.

I didn't give my own opinion on gay marriage here. You might try to draw a conclusion based on my negative tone towards the event here...I'd warn you that would probably be a mistake. My criticism here is that an attention whore used something as superficial and shallow as a beauty pageant to make an issue of something that has nothing to do with parading around in a bathing suit. I'd be just as disappointed in people if a fashion model in a bikini, whose primary skillset is focused on fashion and beauty, said the space shuttle program isn't worth investing millions of dollars and having it cause a stir. My second criticism is the fact that the media gave said attention whore the attention that he wanted from such a transparent attempt to play on a fickle public's attention span.

Blood Tests Can Be Fun

I just got back from a visit to my primary care physician. It's getting harder and harder to keep track of all the medical-related things I have to keep track of now...my pills, my appointments, who is in charge of what...I mention this because I've had to explain about five times to people what this appointment was checking me for.

I had to have my parents drive me to this one; my wife was is at work and had missed many days already taking care of me right after the surgery. They would ask if this was when the staples were coming out, or if my incision was being looked at, etc...

No, I said, this one is my doctor telling me that my blood pressure is too high, my cholesterol levels suck, and my diabetes is going to end up blinding me. "Oh," they said.

My father should have known this already since he took me to the lab Friday for drawing the bloodwork and samples to be ready for this appointment. But that's okay. I'm slowly starting to believe that no one listens to what I say anyway at this point. I don't know if I'm becoming paranoid or if I really am disappearing.

At any rate the lab results were, surprisingly, much improved across the board. Even my "good cholesterol" was flagged as too low ("Probably because of your post-surgery diet right now.") My cholesterol, kidney function, liver...some of the numbers aren't "out of the woods" entirely, but everything had made shifts into either the safe zone or close to the safe levels. Even my blood glucose level was near 95 at the time of the blood draw.

I still get to keep my current roster of medications but I'm supposed to have another appointment in two months to follow up. Maybe they'll remove some of the medications at that point; the numbers in my labs today are, despite being better, are still influenced by the medications.

For once I went to the doctor and had good news.

I also had my doctor take a look at the incision. This morning I woke up and had my dressing a big more bloodied than usual. Not soaked, but still higher than I had come to expect.

The doctors weren't concerned. They explained that I had a blood clot under there and that the body will reabsorb the clot as things healed; the bleeding isn't how it's supposed to go away and it isn't a good thing, per se, but as long as the clot didn't become infected, the best thing to do was continue keeping it clean and change the dressing as necessary.

Clots can become infected?

Turns out that yes, they can. The doctors (and I'm using the plural because my doctor is a nice woman whom I've been going to for several years and for the past year or so I've been seen by her resident then the appointment is wrapped up by her so I kind of have two doctors) explained that blood is a great medium for bacteria to grow in and the hematoma (clot) is just blood outside the blood vessels that help protect the wound as it heals. If it starts smelling odd or having a color other than the dark red I currently have on the dressings then I need to get to the hospital. I shouldn't have a problem right now because I'm taking a horsepill antibiotic for the incision site.

The doctors were happy with my progress and congratulated me on my surgery. My next round is Wednesday at which point another doctor is hopefully going to remove the last of the staples and the dietitian is going to graduate me to a "full liquid" diet, where I'll be able to add thinned cream of wheat, pureed soups and thinned sugar free pudding are going to be added to my list of allowed foods.

I'm not chomping at the bit to try them but it will be nice to have some variety. I'm also going to find out if my diet is going to have to start shift from the current "whenever I can remember to have something" schedule to one where I can have just a certain amount at a set schedule so I don't overeat. I know that soon I'll be having to work on techniques to re-learn how to properly eat instead of just having milk and Jell-O when I remember to have it.

Makin' Dinner

My wife finally came home. She had many interesting stories to share, many of which probably aren't appropriate for this forum...but you have no idea how much I'd like to rant about some of it.

What I did want to share was what I did for her. Apparently the bus group stopped for a brunch at 9:00 and continued on the road around 10:45, and didn't stop again for a lunch or dinner. To welcome her home, when my daughter and son went to pick Mom up I went to work shuffling into the kitchen to make some dinner for her. I found a simple recipe, which was good because at this point I wanted something that I would show effort in preparing but I didn't want her to find me laying on the floor in a daze from exertion.

Let me make it clear that I don't want this to turn into a cooking blog; I am sharing what I did to welcome my wife home after being gone nearly a week. I'm not a chef. I'm not even a cook. I'm just obsessed with cooking shows (especially since my operation) and wanted to do something to welcome her back, and since I'm not a culinary genius this was really kind of an effort for me stretching beyond my comfort zone.

I took 2 cups of chicken broth and 2 cups of skim milk and once it was nearing a boil whisked in a cup of yellow cornmeal. I took two cans of Hormel white chicken breast, 97% fat free, and added that chicken into the mix, removing from heat and stirring with a wooden spoon until it had thickened (which didn't take long at all; in my inexperience I found it surprising how fast it thickened up on me).

Once removed from heat I added a cup and a half (it was a plastic pouch bag) of shredded Parmesan cheese. I stirred that until it was all melted; I now had a cheesy polenta with chicken mix.

I took that mix and put it into a pan that was approximately nine inches squared, pre-rubbed with a stick of butter and smart choice butter substitute to "grease" it. Then I put on a little over two cups of Ragu' chunky mushroom and pepper spaghetti sauce and sprinkled some four-cheese mix on the top; I placed the whole thing on top of a cookie sheet with some aluminum foil to make it easier to handle and shoved it into a pre-heated oven set to 350 degrees for about fifteen to twenty minutes.

I helped complement the meal with some garlic breadballs and rolls from Easter dinner, gently reheated to add their aromas to the kitchen (especially the garlic knots!).

I was very apprehensive about how it would be received; I had a base recipe to work from, but I added the chicken and cheese blend and had used more cheese than the recipe called for; I worried about how watery the Ragu' would be as well as whether the polenta would "set" properly.

Both my wife and daughter (I figured she wouldn't eat it since there were MUSHROOMS in the sauce, but I was wrong!) said they liked it. My wife actually had two servings! Because I bought the disposable dishes for this purpose, there was an easy-fit lid ready to be used for saving the leftovers. I figure she can take it in to work tomorrow. I was so glad they liked it! The prep was fast, cleanup was relatively simple, and the short prep time meant I wasn't completely wiped out by the time I was done. The hardest part was the temptation to taste a bit of it as I was prepping it, because I was extremely afraid that it would end up being bland or needed some seasoning. Apparently the sauce and cheese took care of that. I thought that by adding chicken as a protein that this would be less a side dish and more an entree.

Wonderful, simple, and she seemed to appreciate it. I know I didn't have a vegetable for the meal, so for my efforts I still overlooked something that a seasoned cook would regard as a rookie mistake. I don't have an excuse for it, I simply focused on that dish and that's it. I was a little sad that I couldn't really smell it cooking; my daughter said she could smell it when she came in, so I guess maybe it's because I was in there prepping it so I didn't consciously smell it so much.

Welcome home!

Economics of Eating Out

My in-laws are big believers in the economical benefits of preparing meals at home versus eating out while we, like a growing number of Americans, are living la vida fast food. Until recently we routinely would go out to McDonald's for a Sunday breakfast and on Monday night my wife and I would go out for a date to Red Lobster. It wasn't uncommon for us to grab a meal from some restaurant or fast food joint during the week, depending on our schedules and where we were around mealtimes. Her father is in charge of a kitchen at a retirement facility and can cook a fabulous meal for four people or four hundred; leftovers are frozen, and the family uses them up over the course of the week.

Is this just us spending too much for too little? When this topic comes up, I say that there are other things to consider when arguing over cost of foods prepared at home versus the unhealthier choices at your local Denny's, Red Lobster or McD's. People looking to maximize the most food for the buck can beat the cost of eating at resaurants thanks to careful shopping at supermarkets and bulk retailers, I have little doubt of that. What we found for our family, though, was that we had other factors to consider when making bulk purchases to save money.

What does this boil down to? If you want to combine value with cost to compare the expense of cooking at home vs. eating out, you need to compare out-of-pocket monetary cost and time you lose plus storage/waste cost.

Some of these are soft costs. How much do you value your time? You'll be hard pressed to argue that eating out is less expensive in time. Fast food is usually five minutes to get your food. You have no prep, you have no cleanup, you have no storage costs for leftovers unless you ordered extra or take some home with you. I suppose you can argue that the time invested in preparing and cleaning up is family time if you get the family involved, but how many families make this a routine event?

Out of pocket, as I said, I bet that a buying in bulk can make the raw material cost of food lower. What we experienced, though, was spoilage. Not for everything, of course. I'm a cheese fiend. It was hard to have cheese go bad. Canned goods. Things like that. But for breads and fruits, other perishables, we couldn't do a straightforward formula for price per pound of goods since we ended up throwing out some of it and so we didn't save as much there.

Storage costs means money and space. Freezers use electricity. The more you store and the longer you store it the more it costs.

Time is used in searching for best deals. Can you save more getting those franks from BJ's or is Wegman's having a sale on them this weekend?

There is cost in maintenance. Bet that's hardly thought about, but it's true; you have to drive to the super Walmart or bulk food distributor, you have to pay for gas for that larger vehicle, you have to pay for a freezer unit, and you have to pay to repair when that freezer dies on you (and the occasional spoilage of food resulting from said freezer dying).

Then there's lifestyle. This is probably the biggest reason behind our behavior; neither of us likes doing dishes, and while I don't mind leftovers, we definitely seem to have a problem with going back and finishing last night's meals. The kids complain most bitterly about having the same thing they just had for a meal (ironically they have no trouble getting "the usual" from McD's, though). We're also busy and both have full time jobs and one kid in school and another at daycare; it's a familiar refrain, but true enough. We don't prioritize making meals so it's not something we do as often as grabbing from the drive-through.

Which brings up the biggest piece of the puzzle. We can either spend an hour or two planning, prepping, eating, and cleaning for a meal, or we can stop at the drive-through for five minutes, eat, and throw away the papers (or wait to pay the waitress after she takes the dishes away). My wife and I typically spend thirty to forty dollars for a big meal at Red Lobster. Is it worth forty dollars focused on my wife with a nice, stress-free meal versus two hours of time in our own kitchen? I can take my family of four out to breakfast at McDonalds for a little over twenty dollars, maybe thirty. It takes five minutes to get the meal. Spend half an hour eating. Is it worth that much to me to save the effort for my own cooking? This is a question of paying for convenience.

We do this all the time. We could save money by changing our own oil; I pay a guy fifteen bucks to change it for me, and I don't have to dispose of the waste oil. It really doesn't take much to maintain a computer and use it properly to prevent adware and a lot of malware from infecting it; the average home use doesn't invest the time in learning how to "properly" use it, and end up periodically having to pay someone to fix it for them. Americans have mastered the art of offering services to do what we just don't want to spare the time to do and in the process spend a little extra on a convenience tax.

A quick survey of American eating habits today shows that we're not all that unusual. There seems to be a downturn in the number of times people are eating out now due to the currently popular excuse of "the economy sucks", but people are still eating out several times a week.

I suppose the conclusion is that if we wanted to prioritize food preparation and money savings, then yes, eating at home is cheaper. If we factor in our own lifestyles and the fact that we really don't want to invest the extra time to the extra work this can entail then our eating out habits just offer more convenience for the dollar. Until it is no longer more convenient to do this then I will continue to argue that, for us, eating out periodically is worth what we're spending on it.

Corn, the Other Other White Meat

My Mac runs a "movie trailers" widget that pulls up new up-and-coming movies from the Apple trailers website. A new one caught my eye; Food, Inc.

I took a few minutes to check out the movie. The label says that Food, Inc is due in theaters June 12th and from what I can glean from the trailer it's a documentary highlighting how food corporations are secretly poisoning us with genetically modified animals and plants as well as using derivatives of certain items to create additives used in food that we wouldn't suspect have those items in it.

If that last bit is confusing, let me clarify by saying that the movie reminded me of a series of stories that I had read in the near-past about the corn content of fast food, probably sparked by Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma. A quick Google jogged my memory; an entry on Al Nye the Lawyer Guy's website described, from that book, that a McDonald's McNugget was %56 corn. Of the 38 listed ingredients in a McNugget, 13 were corn-derived. After running through the list of items that are corn-derivatives, it then mentions some non-food-derived additives, including a form of butane.

I also found another link on diet-blog.com that stated the corn additive issue in a very simple manner; when you eat a McMeal of a Big Mac, Fries and a Coke, the bun, Coke, fries, and ketchup, the Big Mac sauce, and the cheese all have corn-derived additives in them, not counting the meat patty made from cows that were fed corn in the first place.

There are numerous sites that highlight the state of frankenfoods and have taken up the crusade to fight the american diet of pseudofood, blaming it for everything from cancers to obesity. Does genetically modified, additive-laden, and petroleum-derived ingredients actually contribute to our health problems? I don't really know.

What I do know is that Joe Average probably doesn't want these ingredients to be removed.

Everything done to create "frankenfoods" is done to increase the product's "quality" while making it affordable. The additives make increase durability of food, decrease the time to have a slaughterable animal, increase yield, and generally make it cheaper to get a couple cheeseburgers for the price you'd pay to get some decent fresh vegetables at the grocery store. And when this is coupled with the government subsidies awarded to those growing feed corn and other filler ingredients you generally help create the great American diet that keeps poor people eating a fatty but cheap diet of bologna and fast food and keeping healthy foods out of their range.

I can get a double cheeseburger from McD's for a buck. My local supermarket is currently selling a pound of broccoli crowns for a buck-fifty. A gallon of 2% milk is two bucks. Greenhouse on-vine grown tomatoes are three bucks a pound. A pound of 97% fat-free ham is five bucks.

Some would argue that while the cost is higher, the value is still enough to justify that cost. This is a topic for another time but at the moment suffice it to say that for many people that impulse dollar purchase getting an entire meal in five minutes is obviously the choice a huge number of Americans opt for.

I think the documentary looked interesting but I don't know if I'll get it or not. I did find in researching the topic a movie called King Corn which I added to my Amazon wishlist. I'm interested in the topic, I really am. But I'm also a bit of a realist.

The foods are modified today to make them cheaper and thus more affordable and easier to store. No direct causation has been established saying that eating a twinkie is going to poison you and liquify your kidneys, and at the same time a lot of these efforts to increase yields for less money have helped in fighting starvation and food shortages.

At the same time the people proclaiming "organic this, no additive that" are so caught up in their own cause that they can't bring themselves to acknowledge the fact that once in awhile these modified foods aren't quite as harmful as they'd like us to think, and I really think that if they had their way we'd see prices for food rise across the board making it even harder for people trying to save money to continue to do so. And the effects of what they're calling for arean't limited just to fast food; it's hard to find foods in the supermarket that aren't affected by the things they're arguing needs to be eliminated. Unless you grow all your own foods yourself, you may be hard pressed to completely eliminate the additives and influences that this movement claims is poisoning you.

Maybe sometime I'll read The Omnivore's Dilemma, but I have a mental stumbling block if I start reading a book that is too far into preaching a case without a good, logical basis on which to argue their point as well as addressing the facts as they stand; namely, we have had a building crisis of health and obesity in America that so far seems very well explained by our obsession with huge portions and overindulging in unhealthy habits in general, not because our McNuggets are more corn than chicken. Maybe I just don't want to hear what they want to say. Maybe I actually have a valid point, that Americans have other issues contributing to problems more than some tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of butane being in food; we probably have more contamination from the preparer's hands than is in the food in that case.

This may be an issue worth exploring. I'm just saying that it would be nice to keep things in perspective.

Someday I'm going to eat a McNugget again. Butane and corn and all. Because they taste good.

Things They Don't Tell You Enough

Nearly eleven days after the surgery; what do I notice at this point?

I was worried about the bleeding into the gauze covering the incision site. The doctor allayed those fears; she said this was normal, because the hematoma (she said that was another term for the clot) is breaking down and as it does I'll find the blood oozing out. So be prepared. Open R-N-Y surgery means you're going to be doing a lot of leaking for awhile. It's not pleasant. The doctor talked about picking out pieces of the clot if necessary...this freaks me out a little to think about.

Another thing they barely mention is...well, to put it the way one of my nurses confided in me, if it goes in liquid, it comes out liquid. For about a month. This has been happening for a little over a week now and believe me, it wears on your patience.

Mentally I already knew that there were emotional swings as you adjust to things. And I do feel them at times. Many of the "little things" that can wear on my patience have been shifted off of me so I don't need to worry about them as much; my daughter has had to shoulder quite a bit of the "pick this up" and "clean that up" burdens, along with her little brother asking for her attention and for her to read stories to him. My parents have stepped in to help with making sure the little guy has a good dinner and gets dressed for bed.

Things still get to me periodically; I'm changing my own dressings on the wounds for awhile, and here's another tidbit for you that you may not be told beforehand; the heavier you are, the harder the incision is going to be on you. I had one of the post-operative patients tell me that she never felt anything after open R-N-Y surgery in her abdomen; I felt a constant pull from the incision site whenever I stood upright. Every day the pain and feeling of tension eased a bit but even now I feel the tugging. Why? Because the person who didn't feel anything wasn't anywhere near as fat as I am. Once you've stretched flesh until the connective tissue is damaged beyond bouncing back you basically have a lot of weight constantly being pulled down, hanging, swinging, by gravity. Which means it's a lot of excess stress on the gaping wound in your gut.

Seeing this every day and trying to get the gauze and tape to appropriately protect the cut is an emotional blow for me. Every day I'm hoping things are a little bit better and every day I see the dark crusty fault line of blood. It's depressing.

There is a definite emotional toll taken by doing this surgery. I lose track of time because mealtimes pass by unnoticed and before they were daily milestones marking the passage of the day. I see a wound on me that looks like something from a horror movie. I accidentally ripped open one of the holes from which a drain had passed through the abdominal wall; the tape for the gauze pad over the incision area was over too far, I didn't realize it because I couldn't see very well over my mountainous gut, and while changing the gauze I suddenly realized what I had done. I just wanted to cry. I've been working hard to get healed up and this is what I ended up doing. I felt like such an idiot.

Another item if you don't have it emphasized enough: you can't heal alone. Don't think you can. Don't try it. You'll need help. I'm getting around pretty well now, but there's always a chance between the medications and sudden bouts of weariness that can lead to trouble. For example, washing is a problem. I make it a rule to never shower alone in the house when I'm like this. I'm on painkillers right now plus, while I'm getting around better right now, I'm not at one hundred percent. The act of stepping in and out of the shower could easily lead to a fall that can incapacitate, or worse, leave you both incapacitated and bleeding from a ripped incision. Someone else must be in the house while I'm taking a shower in case there's a problem.

So those are the things that even if you heard it mentioned, you need to make sure you take them to heart. Remember:

• Open R-N-Y means you're going to be bleeding for awhile. The staples won't completely stop it. If you're like me, you're going to ruin some clothes. Make sure you have enough stretchy-band pants/shorts to get you through the month.
  
• Don't heal alone. They say you need a support person, they mean a set of support people, and maybe a saint or two. If you have pets, young kids, etc. etc...that warning goes double. I don't know how I could have made it through this if it weren't for the people who have helped me through the healing process so far.
• You're going to have emotional moments. I don't know if it's the lack of food, or the pills taken for painkillers, or adjusting to life as you're healing or whatever the new circumstances are throwing at you; you're going to have moments where you feel like a useless, worthless lump and it'll make you depressed.
• Your liquid diet means you're going to...um...liquid goes in, liquid goes out. This gets on my nerves. I don't recall this being mentioned in the brochure.
• One more note: ever see those extender claw toys for kids, you squeeze a handle and the claw gripper closes on things? My son has one. We call it "Pinchy", and it is by far one of the most useful things from the surgery time. I use it to get things that are just out of reach...clothes, my pill bag, ice from the drawer of the freezer on the bottom of our fridge so I can refill my water bottle. Get one of these things.
  

Food and Energy

Food is fuel.

This is supposed the be the mantra of people who had bariatric surgery. Food is fuel, not my friend.

Or was that from Finding Nemo?

At any rate, people usually think of a separation between food being fuel and food being...food. As if somehow it's special when in fact food, like people, are complex chemical reactions. Calories (technically, kilocalories) in food are a measurement of stored energy, and this energy is unlocked by reactions within our bodies for use in things like moving and breathing and keeping us warm. Even gasoline can have an estimated calorie count to measure the energy it stores (a gallon of gas has about 31,000,000 calories, by the way).

One quick way to show energy is to light a material on fire and watch the energy be released as heat, and under the right conditions an amazing amount of energy can be released when fat ignites. This is the theory behind spontaneous human combustion...that the fat in the body is lit up and burns at such an amazingly high temperature that literally all that's left are the person's shoes. There have been experiments done on pig carcasses that demonstrate that this amount of heat can indeed be produced (pigs are very similar in composition to humans for the purposes of simulating bodies; they're used in forensics research quite a bit because of this).

What am I getting at?

Just the coolest use of bacon ever.

A journalist at Popsci.com managed to use bacon, regarded by many to be the meat of the gods, as a thermal lance. Yes. He used bacon to cut iron.

I thought this was cool as all heck, but it was also a good demonstration of what can be done with the energy stored in food and how it demonstrates the chemical nature of what we're putting into our bodies to live. Unfortunately a lot of people with large sticks in their posteriors appear to be quick to nitpick the article...the author made a crack about prosciutto being Italian for "expensive bacon" and the comments seem to fill up with people correcting him. As if people reading the site will actually think there's an Italian word for that...smart people can be really dumb sometimes.

For a quick chemistry lesson and demonstration of something food can do that is really cool, check out the site. And if you want another demonstration of what stored energy can do when suddenly released from a body, try Googling "spontaneous human combustion" and "wick effect". And yes, I'm aware the wick effect (essentially the fat in your body acts like an inside-out candle) isn't an explanation for all spontaneous human combustion events, but work with me here...this was supposed to be an entry about bacon burning iron. That's pretty darn neat.

Insurance Companies and Hospitals

I got a bill from the hospital today. This was interesting primarily because I shouldn't owe anything. I already paid the hospital the copay on the operation...a couple grand we've been saving up specifically for the procedure. So you can imagine my surprise when I got a mailing telling me that I owed nearly one thousand dollars that I don't have for "outpatient services".

I called them up and the lady on the other end of the line didn't hesitate one moment before saying, "Yeah, there's a problem with your ID number for insurance." I dug out my ID card, gave them the number, and she typed quickly on a keyboard and asked for my employer and name of insured. Gave that information as well, and she just thanked me.

"So...I shouldn't owe anything?"
"We won't know until insurance gets back to us."
"Okay...I won't have this bill then?"
"I don't know. We'll know when insurance gets back to us."
"Well, do you have an idea how long that will be?"
"No, we don't know when another party will get around to processing the information"

Am I the only one so fed up with bullshit from these companies? I mean, there are people that can get information on my current purchases listed on my credit card, my employment history, what cars I drive...all of this can get pulled up from databases. Yet these gooftards can't seem to keep my insurance information straight, and when trying to get things sorted out, the insurance company takes weeks to figure out how to pull their craniums from their rectums.

Worse I have to wait a few weeks to figure out if I have some kind of thousand-dollar bill outstanding despite the fact I'm not supposed to have any more out-of-pocket. That gives the hospital time to screw up the bill that I didn't pay because I called in the day I got it to be told I have to wait and find out what's legitimate or not for billing, then I'll get a notice saying that I owe the bill plus interest when really I shouldn't have owed anything in the first place!

The whole system is screwed up and the most frustrating part is there's just not much we can do about it. Makes one want to scream. But that still hurts my incision...

Counting Calories?

Before the surgery I lost a grand total of 82 pounds. I did it through calorie restriction; I watched and recorded everything I ate. The traits I've come to call my Aspergian self required me to do things by servings; I had to eat the serving entirely so the calories would come out correctly in tracking. I obsess over the calorie counts and at the end of the day I'd have a tally from the fitness website of how many calories I've had. I couldn't eat anything unless I had what I thought was an accurate count of calories per serving for items I was putting into my mouth and because of this I couldn't just eat baked foods or most homemade food; it had to be packaged because of the nutrition labels.

Since the surgery, though, I've not tracked a calorie. I don't go by servings or anything else mainly because it seems that I'm not taking in enough for it to "count". I won't be able to have solid foods for another couple weeks; I'm still on a "clear liquids" schedule until Wednesday. After Wednesday I'm hoping to move to a simple liquids diet; I'm looking forward to being able to try taking some Progresso split pea soup and strain it through a coffee filter to have the remaining broth. I sometimes wonder if it's sad that this is the type of thing I look forward to. I look forward to the broth of split pea soup and the first time I can sit down and eat even one scallop at Red Lobster. Is that really weird?

Right now I'm eating mostly juice popsicles, jello, milk and water. I can have broth but I just haven't taken the time to pour it and microwave it. I suppose I'm just not hungry enough to take the time to do that.

But this has me thinking; once I'm on solid foods again, will I be tracking calories? How would I? If I'm not hungry for a full serving, how would I eat everything without getting sick?

Or would I try doing what normals do...just eat until I feel full? I mean, will my new stomach work that way?

One of the biggest fears I have is that my lack of hunger right now is a side effect of the healing, that my stomach is puffed up right now like most injuries are just as they begin healing wounds (ever see how puffy plastic surgery patients look post-op?), so maybe it gets full more quickly. Thing is, I haven't felt full. I also don't feel hungry.

I guess right now I'm eating out of a conscious sense of needing material to repair my wounds (milk does a body good, right?) and for the feel, the texture, of the food. But not so far I'm not eating because my stomach is gurgling or because I just can't resist a bite.

So what am I going to do? Hope that the mechanism that tells me, "Dude, you're full!" is now reset to an appropriate level? Hope that the stomach will give me that uncomfortable, eat-one-more-ounce-and-you'll-vomit feeling after a few ounces of food? Or keep track again of every serving that goes into my mouth and set a calorie target for eat day? Or maybe I'll have to come up with a "rule of thumb" where I can't eat any more than a certain amount at one sitting and have that amount three times a day, hoping that the food I fit into that quantity will always be so low in calories that I'd lose weight to a level close to what the normals typically are?

I have no idea. Right now I'm just suckin' down juice popsicles and milk for most of my calories (milk is fat-free, so it's about 80 calories a serving...8 ounces?...and the popsicles are 15 calories each). I don't want to subsist off that forever, though. I find myself sometimes wondering what that strained split pea soup would be like...and that scares me too, because what if something in the surgery didn't work?

Maybe time will tell, or the dietician next week will have some answers or insights. Right now I am just kind of living in fear of what the next hurdle to come my way will be.

All By Myself

My wife is gone on a trip. She won't be back until Sunday.

She left early this morning; it was a long bus trip on which she's a chaperone so she had to get to the loading area early enough for their "bag check" and load things on to the bus. It kind of sucks that her ex-husband, mental issues and all, is one of the bus drivers for the trip. I didn't like it too much but there wasn't really all that much that we could do other than my wife requesting that she's not assigned to ride the bus that the buffoon was driving lest he decide to make a big show of driving off into a field to show how her presence affects him somehow.

After she left the daughter got out of bed and got around then got the little guy dressed for his trip to the babysitter's. While my wife was getting around this morning he decided he wanted to come into the bedroom and lay down with Daddy for a few minutes; that seemed like there was no harm in that so my wife rearranged some things and made room for him to lay down to catch another hour of snooze.

The daughter got him up, managed to convince him to try going potty, then got him all dressed up. Somewhere in there I'm assuming she found her birthday card (making her officially 17) but she never said anything to me. Her boyfriend arrived to take them to daycare, the little guy said goodbye to Daddy and daughter let the dog back in and they left. They soon reappeared in the driveway at 7:36 because she had forgotten to take her homework. Then they left and I began my own day.

By starting my own day, I mean I realized the pillows and blankets normally on my right side in the bed that I used to help support and prop myself upright to get out of the bed since my abdominal muscles aren't working properly weren't there any more; my wife moved them when she made room for Lil' Dude to lay down. I had a few moments of panic set in, alone in the house, little mental alarm blaring that I myself had to use the potty, staring at the ceiling, a dull aching throb reminding me that the painkillers had long ago run out of my system and wondering how I was going to get up now.

The realization of how ridiculous it would look to be found eight hours later laying in bed unable to get up prompted me to redouble my efforts and push through the ache to get my body upright. I'm glad to say that seeing as I'm typing this at the computer, I made it.

I came out to the living room, managed to chop up my horsepills and have some milk and Jell-O and such for food. My father came up for a few minutes to tell me that the tire he took for repair can't be repaired. Apparently the layers of the tire were separating; that made it leak air, and fortunately for my wife the air just hissed out instead of the tire disintegrating at highway speed. I told him the best thing to do would be to take one of the winter-treads we were going to use in the fall, mount that, and we'd get that swapped on to the family vehicle later.

Of course since someone had come up to visit, the dog thought there was an invisible canine-edible monster lurking outside the house and got worked up. My father was already gone and she continued to run from one end of the house to the other, peering out windows and yapping at invisible pixies. Then she ran up and jumped on me. Her 80 pound frame hit me just off-center in the stomach as I sat on the couch and I could only thank the invisible friends in the air that she hit me with two paws and off center.

The pain was immediate and paralyzed me for a few brief seconds, then the scream came. It poured out of me. Unintelligible, dripping with venom, and loud, the scream apparently spooked the dog, sending her backwards as if physically pushed. When my lungs refilled with air I managed an actual non-reflexive yell that had actual dictionary-residing words in it; the selection included terms of what I'd like to do to her neck and then to the necks of her parents and their parents followed by a command that translated to, "Get out of my sight forever".

The dog calmed down a bit and I was tenderly poking my side and checking my incision for any additional bleeding. Finding none I finally started to relax and take comfort in the fact that my own painkillers were starting to finally take hold.

I stared into the empty house now very much aware that if something bad happened I'd be at least 20 minutes from getting help; I was very much on my own here. Scary.

Right now I think of this as a day where everyone is at work. It hasn't quite sunk in yet that my wife is gone. My stepdaughter, and eventually my son, will return tonight but it won't be the same. I'm consoled by the thought that at least she's having fun out there but I still miss her presence here.

I'm adapting to these changes that have come my way and continuing to heal. My daughter is really good about helping with her younger brother and while she didn't acknowledge her birthday card this morning at all she did manage to get her brother to daycare in one piece and she'll have a plate full getting some chores done.

Life happens. Whether you want it to or not, whether you like what is happening or not, life will continue to happen and you just have to weather it. And watch out for 80 pound dogs trying to eviscerate you when she knows everyone else in the household is gone.