Hello from the other side of the hospital (and the operating room!) I seem to have come through the entire ordeal of the surgical process with nothing more than a few small bruised scars on my stomach and a healthy fear of the word "Foley" (that euphemistic alternative to the more direct term that basically means ‘tube put in the last possible place you’d ever imagine it going’).
The truth is that I feel like the whole thing went just about as well as it possible could have. The operation itself went without a hitch, and the expected post-op pain management drill seemed mostly unnecessary. It wasn’t that I tolerated the pain to avoid a possible morphine addiction from my PCA (Patient Controlled Analgesic)–I just didn’t seem to hurt that much. By early Tuesday, I was reporting "no pain" to the nurses’ constant queries, and my handy-dandy "pain button" was removed by noontime. Too bad–it was my one shot at being a completely legal opiate addict.
I was discharged on schedule Wednesday morning, grateful that I had escaped possibly one of the most uncomfortable beds I’ve ever had to pretend to sleep on. The hospital experience is an odd one–a large staff of people who seem genuinely devoted to helping you in any way they can–other than permitting you to actually sleep more than an hour or two at a time. I was treated pretty wonderfully though–mad props to the Upstate Medical Center nursing staff on 5A for making me feel just about as good as I was going to feel under the circumstances.
I’m at home with my recuperation/eating transition underway, a process that allows my digestive system to heal from all of the work done to it. That means spending the first 5 days consuming nothing but powdered whey protein mixed with milk to make a drink that is called a "shake" mostly because that’s what you do to mix it up. Actually they’re pretty tasty and an extremely healthy thing to consume–almost no fat, very little sugar, and lots of protein–what the body needs to heal and what muscles need to be muscles. I’m downing about 24 oz. of the shake-like beverage every day, along with as much water as I can get in. The goal is 64 oz., and I’ve been able to satisfy that–no small feat when you consider that due to the small size of my new stomach and the much smaller openings it has at either end, it would be unwise to take more than a moderate sip at a time. Any more and you’re likely to have it behave as if it just splashed against a wall (ewwwww!)
My next step is Monday, when I begin to introduce small amounts of more typical foods into the diet–in almost experimentally small amounts. The goal is to not give the newly-shrunk stomach neither too much, or something it can’t well tolerate. The foods for now will all be proteins, like yogurt, tuna, and chicken or turkey. An added challenge will require that I stop drinking fluids from a half-hour before each meal until about 45 minutes afterward. Drinking before, during and after meals adds too much volume to the stomach, making it difficult to digest the food you’re trying to cram in. I’ve developed a better tolerance to no-drink meals lately, so I don’t expect it to foul me up.
The most interesting part to this whole process thus far is how good I actually feel. I have my surgical scars (since it was done laproscopically, they consist of 7 small cuts) of which maybe two are a bit swollen and bruised, making them a bit tender. Other than that, I seem to be doing quite well–hunger is kind of an absent sensation now. I’ve been told it could easily be like this permanently, as long as I continue to be careful about not eating more than my freshly-shrunken stomach can comfortably hold. The only challenge is coping with others eating around me–the food seems to be appealing, but I know that having any of it, at least right now, puts me at risk of severely upsetting everything that was done Monday. That’s enough for me to happily refrain, longing only for a steak-flavored shake…
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Thanks for this. http://bigjim.com/ is now in my feed reader, I’ll keep and eye out for your next story. I like the layout of your site, nice and clean and easy to read. Thakns.
Hey Big Jim……ooh wait, are we going to be able to call you that anymore? Glad to hear you came through the surgery o.k. Hope it all works out for you. I also wanted to say how sorry I was to hear you lost your job with 93Q *hugs* That pretty much sucks, and, I know how you feel. I was one of the ones at Syracuse China, that was told the plant is closing in March. After working there for 31 years, it’s pretty devasting.
Wish you luck Big Guy…or little guy, whichever it may be.