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.