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!