At my check in at the weight loss clinic I asked about my low blood sugar episodes.
Apparently the question is common enough that they had a handout already printed and ready to be handed out.
Huh. Apparently we can chalk it up to crackers. I’ve been eating crackers a lot and lo and behold, eating crackers leads to blood sugar dive bombs in people with little butchered stomach pouches like mine.
Crud. I like crackers and I have a cabinet full of them. Crud.
As weird, crazy, wacky days go… that was one.
My stomach was in and out of gastric bypass weirdness all day, including a legitimate yacking during dinner. Fun.
As mentioned in a prior post, I was also exhausted all day. I had six uninterrupted hours of sleep last night, but the way I felt through the day you’d think I was awake the whole night. Of course it’s 10:00pm now and I’m not tired at all. I’m just sitting up in bed watching Deep Space Nine ( my binge watch reached season five today) and wondering if I’ll be tired enough to sleep sometime soon.
Tomorrow is this week’s in-the-office day. The company is giving out the annual holiday gift. This year I passed on the turkey and went with the ham. When will we eat it? No clue. I offered it up to my sister and her husband for Xmas dinner but I think they are passing on it.
I have a doctor’s appointment on Thursday morning. It’s my 1.5 year check in with my gastric bypass surgeon. I’m compiling a list of questions. Today’s wacky-weirdness will lead to a few, I’m sure.
Until then… get some sleep, Trekkie-nerd-boy.
Do you live in the U.S.A.? If you do then Happy Thanksgiving!
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday but it’s been pretty screwed this year. The kids are at their father’s house for the day. He just moved into a new house so this is the first holiday, so it makes sense to spend the day there. We will do our family Thanksgiving on Saturday. We’re actually boycotting the Macy’s parade as I type this (it started 10 minutes ago) in the hopes that we’ll watch it Saturday. Jen and I were supposed to go to my sister’s house but they have a real estate issue going on and they had to cancel. Now we’re mostly staying home. I want to go visit my dad (he was supposed to go to my sister’s too) but I haven’t figured out the timing yet. Mostly because of my stomach fun from yesterday.
I woke up a little after 6:00am today and felt pretty nauseous. I moved from the bed to the couch along with a big bucket to puke in if needed and slept a couple more hours. Vomit-free. Thankfully. Now I am feeling okay. I just drank 12 ounces of water over a span of about half an hour. I had my morning vitamins too. So far so good, but I think I said that yesterday too, didn’t I? In about 10 minutes I will be clear to eat something. I’ll have a protein bar and see how it goes. Fingers crossed my stomach is done with whatever hell it tortured me with yesterday. I don’t want to be sick on Thanksgiving, you know? I don’t want to be sick when I visit my father.
So again, to all of my American friends out there, Happy Thanksgiving! And may your gastric-bypass-rewired stomach not give you any shit today! HoHoHo and all that stuff!
Despite the fact that I’ve spent the last 10 hours feeling seriously sick with stomach pain and gas and all sorts of badness, I still managed to hit my daily water goal (64 ounces) and my daily protein goal (80 grams) as well as closing all three activity rings (calories, exercise, and standing) on my AppleWatch.
I just hit the water goal a minute ago. I’m going to wait 30 minutes and see how I feel. There is a little part of me that wants to try to eat a little something before I sleep. I probably won’t, but let’s see how I feel in half an hour, yeah?
My stomach is still a mess. Is it better than it was when I last posted? Maybe a little bit. I had a very small protein snack an hour ago and while it initially made me feel worse, maybe it opened the door to some minor improvement. Who knows.
Again, if the occasional day like this is the price I have to pay for the weight loss success that gastric bypass surgery gave me, then I absolutely will pay it. No hesitation.
That doesn’t mean today hasn’t sucked though. Oh, it has.
Whatever was going on with my stomach as lunch time approached, it was definitely not pain caused by emptiness. I had lunch and the pain never went away. It’s been about four hours and it’s just as bad now as it was at its worst.
I knew something was wrong when I first woke up this morning, but it went really wrong about 12:30pm and it’s just hanging on for dear stomach-achy life. It’s made this afternoon very difficult. I can’t concentrate, I can’t focus. All I can think about is how my stomach hurts. What did I do wrong? Am I going to end up laying on the floor in a fetal position? That’s happened twice over the last 18 months and both times it was the middle of the night. I don’t think this is as bad as those times, but it sucks quite a lot.
As always though… if this is related to the gastric bypass that allowed me to lose over 200 pounds then it is totally and completely worth it. I will take this every once in a while over how I felt before the surgery every single day. I am definitely having a bad go of it right now, but it is still better than how it used to be. Amen and Huzzah and all that.
Now that I have made that clear… my effin’ stomach can go ahead and stop hurting now, thank you. Amen and Huzzah and all that.
I have made it to lunch time and nothing disastrous has happened yet. My feeling that today is going to be a bad day has not yet come true, but I still have half the work day to go. Fingers crossed that everything stays quiet.
I have been having a couple of issues. My stomach is not having a good day. The frequency of gastric bypass side effects does seem to be getting smaller with time, but today has been noteworthy. I was feeling a little off this morning while drinking water and doing my exercise. By the time I had my protein bar breakfast in the car on the way to work I was okay. Three hours later though I started having that empty-stomach-ache feeling. I had a small snack and felt better, but it only alleviated things for about an hour. Now the stomach ache is back, but I just started eating lunch so hopefully that will put an end to it.
The other issue I am having today is one that I hinted at in a post last night. I am completely exhausted. I got about 6.5 hours of sleep last night, which is a little less than I was hoping for. I still wear my Apple Watch to sleep to keep track of various sleep related data. One data point that seems really important to how rested I feel is called Sleeping Heart Rate Dip. The SleepWatch app says that a dip between 10% and 20% is average. Over 20% is excellent. Under 10% is not good. The last two nights I have been under 10%. I don’t know why. The app recommends exercise as a way to encourage your heart rate to dip more while you sleep, and I have exercised a lot the last couple of days. I’m not sure what to do about this, but I am so tired today that hopefully my body won’t have a choice but to have a good night’s sleep tonight. I guess we’ll see how things look in the morning.
Until then… fingers crossed that my sense of impending doom is not warranted. Here’s hoping!
My company gives us all 16 hours of personal time each year. They also give us weeks upon weeks of vacation time. The difference is that the personal time is meant to be used in small chunks at short notice, while the vacation time, which they don’t actually call vacation time, can only be used in four or eight hour chunks per day and is supposed to be booked in advance. The other difference is that vacation time can be carried over from this year to next year if needed while the personal time disappears on January 1st.
What does all of this mean? I had five hours of personal time left in the bank and I used it all up today. Robbie will not be having any time vanish on January 1st this year. I started my weekend five hours early, babie!
How did I celebrate this happy surprise of a half day? I ate my lunch too fast and made myself gastric bypass sick, that’s how! Yes! Well played, Robert the putz! I had a hamburger again to have another test of the sugar free ketchup. Yes, it does taste like ketchup and no, it is not disgusting! What a treat! It was such a treat that I ate way too much per bite and plowed through it all way too fast and got something stuck in my stomach tract and had a full on case of the foamies.
I am better now that a couple of hours have gone past. I’m okay!
Happy weekend plus five hours of personal time, everyone! WOOHOO!
It’s lunch time. I am running two culinary experiments today.
One: I cooked a hamburger in the air fryer.
Two: Sugar free ketchup. Yeah, you read that right.
Short term results. First, the hamburger is SUPER greasy. That’s a surprise. Second, the sugar free ketchup sort of tastes like ketchup. Again, surprise. It’s only been a couple of bites but so far it’s not disgusting. Shocking.
Today is the 1.5 year anniversary of my gastric bypass surgery. In celebration I stepped on the scale and I surely wish I had given it a miss this month.
My exercise routine has been greatly reduced over the last couple of months, partly thanks to Covid, partly thanks to travel, and partly thanks to hurting my back. There have been a lot of days where I should have exercised but did not. The result? I went up 10.8 pounds since last month’s weigh in. Yikes! I am at 215.8, which is still miraculous. I am not complaining here, not even a little bit. I just want to get back onto the exercise track and get back down to around 210 or maybe a little less.
Better luck next month, right? See you again on December 4th! I’m going to a hockey game in Vermont on Sunday December 3rd and I took Monday the 4th off of work. I can celebrate my 19th monthiversary with a day off! Sweet!
Inside the Red Head's Head 