Thursday, May 7, 2009

Does This Thing Work?

I sometimes ask my wife if she's sure the surgeon actually did anything to me other than cut my abdomen open.

Another patient at the nutrition class/appointment said that he can barely drink anything without extreme caution and he's already had incidents of certain foods (or amounts at one bite) causing extreme discomfort.

I had a half-liter of water with a protein mix (I believe it was black-tea flavored). I was finished with it by the end of the meeting. The person to whom I was referring said it would have taken him hours to drink what I had just downed.

It worries me sometimes that I'm not really feeling an all-out discomfort or nausea or any other "reinforcing" side effects while experimenting with foods and portions. I just don't know if I'm doing something wrong, or if my stomach is as iron-clad as it was before the surgery. Then I begin to worry about whether or not I could be accidentally stretching the pouch out!

I mean...if I overdo it, is there a guarantee that I'll throw it up or feel as sick as a dog?

Please...I'm tired of not knowing, but I'm a bit too cowardly to sit down and snarf a giant brownie sunday with sugar sprinkles to find out what happens. I need to know how easy...or hard...it is to "accidentally" overdo it after Roux-En-Y surgery. The Physician's Assistant I normally see in followups tells me that I'm worrying too much. I take solace in that, but still the thought haunts me.

2 comments:

  1. You are very lucky to not know what dumping feels like.
    Overeating is another thing. You can stretch your pouch little by little over time, but right now, you don't have to worry too much. Just stick to your plan.
    If you have a day when you don't have anything else to do, try eating a little more than you normally would, and you will learn the hard way what it feels like. Not fun, believe me.
    The key is to stop worrying about what you think you should be worrying about, and start remembering that this is the best plan out there for you to change your life and feel better.
    There is no trick to this. It's not like a problem to be solved, or questioned. It is a game plan for the rest of your life.

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  2. It may be part of...as the therapist put it, the way I'm wired to think. He was referring to some of my more Aspergian tendencies, but it may apply here as well; I see most things like this as a problem to be solved.

    One of the best ways to describe dieting information to me came from a free online book called The Hacker's Diet. It was one that made the most sense to me in terms of dieting information...the author treated weight loss and management as an engineering problem. Check it out with Google!

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