Category: weight loss surgery

Always Learning New Things

It’s been almost a year and a month since my Gastric Bypass and I find I am still learning new things.

Yesterday I learned that melted-to-the-point-of-liquified protein bars are icky-gross. Today I learned that Atkins brand, keto-friendly BBQ fake potato chips are super duper spicy, and not being able to take a drink of water for an hour after you finish eating makes eating super duper spicy fake potato chips rather uncomfortable.

18 minutes to go before I can wash the spicy down. Hang in there, bypass boy.

12 < 15

Idiot.

I took a swig of lemonade at 11:42am, just as my last meeting in Foxborough was wrapping up. I left the building, went to the car, and started driving to my next meeting in Westwood. I took a little protein snack out of the package and took a bite at 11:54am.

What’s wrong with this picture?

I am supposed to wait 15 minutes after drinking something before eating something. 11:54 – 11:42 = 12 minutes. 12 is less than 15. Like our elementary school teachers taught us, 12<15.

Idiot. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t wait the full 15 minutes. Stupid. I won’t have anything more until after 1:00pm, so my stomach should be good and empty by then. Still… it’s called a clock, moron. Use it.

Courteous Bad Stomach Fun

I’m having another unhappy stomach day today. It’s not bad. I won’t have any problem working or anything like that. The stomach pain feels like bad gas so far so maybe I will try to take a Gas-X pill and see if it clears it up.

The pain is nothing but courteous this time as it waited until morning to start bothering me. I didn’t wake up with it at 1:30am or anything like that. I woke up with it at 5:30am, which was when my alarm went off. Nice of my stomach, eh?

Change of subject, I think I just did something I’ve never been able to pull off before. I think I just saved an external hard drive. Sort of, at least. The drive I had been using for my Time Machine backups corrupted itself somehow recently and went into read only mode. I tried fixing it with Mac Disk Utility but didn’t have any luck.

I replaced the drive with a new 2tb drive over the weekend and yesterday I had my first successful backups. This morning, in between powerful burps and even more powerful farts (sorry) I tried fixing the first drive again but it wasn’t happening. I reformatted the drive instead and remounted it and whatdayaknow, I can write to it again. It’s now my music files backup disc and maybe it might be my Flickr backup disc too if I ever get the energy to back up the zillion photos I have stored there. Yeah, I should do that soon. There’s so much to lose on that account. Now is the time.

My stomach has made me late to get started for work. It’s 8:21 now and I still need to take a shower and get dressed and all, so I will do that now. Happy burping, everyone.

Not Bad, Just Weird

So last night. It wasn’t bad, it was just weird. Weird in that I haven’t experienced anything quite like it before, but also in the way that it mirrored the bad time from the night before without actually being all that bad.

I went to bed at around 10:30 and dropped off to sleep pretty much instantly. After the mess that was Wednesday night, that was all I had hoped for. I woke up around 1:00am feeling a bit nauseous. I actually spit up into my CPAP mask, just a little bit. I guess my fears about wearing it the night before we justified? I got to the bathroom, spit up a little more, and felt better. I never vomited and the nausea passed quickly. In it’s wake was some gas pain. That scared me. Any pain in the stomach would, after all of the crap from Wednesday. Unlike Wednesday though I was able to lay back down without getting worse and I actually went back to sleep for half an hour or so.

I woke up again and the pain in my stomach was worse, but still not like the night before. It felt like gas still, but it also felt like hunger. I got up for a tiny little snack and brought it back to the bedroom and had it. When I did that on Wednesday I immediately knew that it wasn’t going to help. Last night I didn’t have that feeling. It may have helped a little, but really burping helped more.

I sat up in bed for a little while, then went back to the bathroom, which I also did on Wednesday night, but that didn’t help. The pain was there, but it was never even remotely as bad as the night before. Wednesday was probably a 6-7 on the pain scale from 1-10. Thursday was maybe a 3-4. I was still burping and farting a lot and I was afraid I was going to wake Jen with all the racket so, like Wednesday, I went out to the living room.

This was the point where things went out of control on Wednesday. I was a little afraid of a repeat, but pretty sure it wasn’t going to happen. I was able to lay down on the couch, which I couldn’t do the night before, and I actually fell asleep again. I didn’t have my CPAP machine so I would sleep for a little while then wake up then repeat. At 4:30 or so Jen came out looking for me and I reassured her that apart from some gas I was fine. She asked if I could go back to bed and I did. I changed my alarm from 5:00am (for yogging purposes) to 7:00am to help with the exhaustion a little. I didn’t put my CPAP machine on because of the drool factor. I need to clean that sucker tonight. I slept until about 6:00 and then just drifted between dozing and awake until 7:00.

So all in all it wasn’t a bad night, just weird. I could have stayed in bed the whole time but I was afraid I would make too much noise and wake up my dearest. I really wanted her to have a good night’s sleep. I messed her sleep up the night before and I absolutely did not want to do that again.

Tonight? I guess we’ll have to see. I am thinking about sunrise photos at Salisbury Beach tomorrow so hopefully I’ll get a good sleep before waking up stupidly early in the morning. We’ll see how it goes, I guess. I am sure it will be fine.

Train Wreck of a Night

I saw it coming this time but I still couldn’t get out of the way. For the second time in about three weeks I found myself fetal on the floor, moaning in stomach pain. Hooray.

I went to sleep last night at a little after 11:00pm, which was two hours later than I wanted to, but that’s my fault, not my stomach’s. I could have gone to sleep earlier, but I wanted to play a little Jedi Survivor, and then I had to wait a whole hour for it to install. Not a big deal.

I had a snack just before turning in for the night. My theory was the first fetal on the floor experience was down to an empty stomach. I now know it wasn’t, but that was the theory at least. A few minutes after I finished the snack I started feeling some stomach discomfort. Not outright pain, just enough of something to know that something was wrong. Like I said, I saw this train coming miles away. I got into bed and went to sleep though.

About 12:30am I woke up. Just like last time, it was my bladder that woke me up, not my stomach. By the time I was done in the bathroom though, my stomach was a thing. I went out to the living room to eat the smallest protein snack I have. I took one bite and knew that this time it wasn’t hunger. It just kept getting worse. The pain was bad, but it wasn’t the end of the world. Maybe a six on the pain scale from one to 10. Enough to suck, but not debilitating. No, the worst part was the inability to get any relief from it. Sitting down made it worse. Laying down made it worse. Standing up made it worse. Walking around made it worse. I ended up doubled over no matter what I was doing.

The first time I went through something like this I ended up getting a tiny bit of relief from curling up in a ball on the living room floor and moaning a lot. This time I was in the cellar because last time I woke Jen up with all the moaning and a groaning and I was hoping to not do that again. So I curled up in a ball on the cold cellar floor and it helped a tiny bit. I also found myself moaning again. I don’t think it was a conscious choice, you know? It just sort of happened. That helped a tiny bit too. Something about the way I was pushing air out? Like a good woodwind player I was pushing the air out from my diaphragm and clenching up my stomach a bit and yeah, it helped. The two things together lowered the pain by maybe 0.1% or so. Barely noticeable, but still kinda helpful.

In the end I failed to keep Jen asleep. She woke up and wanted to call an ambulance to take me to the ER. I protested mightily. I feel like I know what was happening and I just needed to ride it out. She was getting frustrated with me and I don’t blame her. She kept telling me that I would be dragging her to the ER if our roles were reversed and, as always, she was 100% right. I would have done exactly that. I guess I am just a really bad patient. I apologized profusely for being so stubborn and tried to express just how thankful I was for her concern and how much it meant to me. It really did. I love her so much, I am sorry I was such a tool.

The funny thing was, we were yelling back and forth through the cellar door (cats are not allowed in the cellar, ever since I caught them clawing at the central air ducts) and our inability to communicate effectively resulted in me coming up stairs. Wouldn’t you know it, as soon as we were in the room together I started to feel better. I was sitting on the couch talking to her and the pain was suddenly very tolerable and manageable. We talked through the situation together for a little while and then she went back to bed and I was able to lay down on the couch and sleep. I didn’t get up early for my morning yogging and I slept as late as I could. I’ll have to fill in the exercise in spurts throughout the work day. That’s not a big deal.

I have had eight ounces of lemonade and my morning vitamins. My stomach has played along nicely so far, but I am super seriously gun shy this morning. I’m afraid to eat something, though I am going to try in about 15 minutes. We’ll see how it goes, but I am behind schedule on my food and drink goals and I would not be surprised if I miss them both today. I will be okay with that if I can avoid any further pain and suffering.

As with the first time, I assume something I ate last night caused all of this. We had Chinese take out for dinner. I only ate a couple of boneless chicken fingers (my favorite) and I wonder if there was something in the batter or the breading that set me off. It’s the only candidate that makes sense. I want to call the weight loss clinic and see if they have any advice on how to handle this if it happens again. I am going to bet that they will say to just ride it out. It was something like 2.5-3 hours last night and it sucked but I made it through okay. Here’s hoping it doesn’t happen again any time soon.

Survey

Not long ago I received a survey from my weight loss clinic and was encouraged to fill it out as the results might help someone else who was undecided about going through the process. I filled it out, happily.

Today I received a notification from my weight loss clinic that my survey was still outstanding. Ah, no it isn’t. It’s done and submitted. I was asked take it again, though they didn’t agree that I was taking it “again”, they just thought I was taking it for the first time.

I filled it out, but I was pissed off about it and I am guessing all of my responses were different, and significantly less cheery.

Come on, clinic. Don’t be that guy, m’kay?

Calcium Defeats Me

Those friggin’ Calcium Citrate pills. Why are they so the bane of my existence? I don’t get it? They are on the bigger side as far as my daily vitamin supplements go, but they aren’t exactly huge. Why do they so often trigger a negative response? Why do they so often lead to the dreaded foamies?

I don’t get it. It happened in a huge way yesterday before lunch, then happened again today before lunch. It’s just a little pill. Give me a break, ya creep.

What are you gonna do though, right?

On an unrelated note that won’t be interesting to anyone else on Earth but I found funny in an idiotic kinda way, At lunch time today I decided to give my usual routine of listening to podcasts while I work a break and I decided to listen to music instead. I ended up with Nirvana because I watched a huge interview with Butch Vig the other day, and then another huge interview with Krist Novoselic so my head is kind of in a Nirvana mood these days.

I listened to Nevermind, then In Utero, then I started on Bleach. Just as track #4, School, was kicking off my ear decided to start ringing a little. It was perfectly in tune with the riff. It almost sounded like a little harmonic feedback over the top of the doom that is the beginning of that song. It’s almost like my occasional snippets of tinnitus decided to declare itself a fan of that song and sing along a little. I find that thought absurdly amusing for some doofusy reason. Anyway, I finished Bleach and moved on to Incesticide which I really wish they had given a better name. Oh well. It has Sliver and Been a Son and Mexican Seafood so even though it’s just an outtakes record that was designed to buy time so they could deal with the pressure of following up the massiveness that was Nevermind (I assume, I mean it’s not like I was there talking it over with them or anything) it’s still a good record.

39 minutes until the end of the work day. I think the plan for this evening might include me going to Cambridge to run an errand for the love of my life. I don’t know if that’s actually happening or not, but it was mentioned earlier and I am more than happy to do whatever my love needs. I just need to make sure my evening Calcium pills don’t destroy me. I’m handling them okay right now. Keep your fingers crossed. Friggin’ Calcium pills.