Tag: post surgery rules

Soup

Tonight my dinner was the universally accepted dinner for people with a bad cold. Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. It was lovely, though it did bring up a question for me.

I am less than two months away from the two year anniversary of my gastric bypass surgery. Things are going well. I haven’t had dumping syndrome once and I have lost over 200 pounds. Huzzah, babie. Life is good.

There are rules that those of us who have gone through the full gastric bypass have to follow. Two in particular. First, if you have something to drink you need to wait 15 minutes before you can have something to eat. Second, similarly, if you have something to eat you have to wait a whole hour before you have something to drink.

Easy peezy, lemon squeezy.

What about soup though? I had a great big bowl of soup tonight and it was delicious and it cleared my stuffy head a little. As I was lapping up the broth I had a moment where I questioned everything. I just ate the chicken and the noodles, should I wait an hour before I drink the broth? I had a spoonful of broth as my first taste of dinner, should I have waited 15 minutes before I ate the chicken and the noodles? Putting it simply, does soup count as a food or a drink? I was lead to believe that one meal could not count as both, so which is it? Should soup be off limits? I chose to count it as food but is that an incorrect choice?

One other, unrelated, rule that I have to follow in this post surgery world is no alcohol. Does that mean I cannot have a dose of NyQuil to help combat my cold symptoms and to help me sleep at night? I am pretty sure NyQuil lives on the no fly list for that reason. I was going to have some tonight but I have decided to error on the side of caution and skip it.

Oh, what a fascinating new world is this post surgery life. Fascinating indeed.

This One is Going to be Gross

Spoiler alert, this post is going to be T.M.I. and it’s going to be really gross. You have been warned.

***RED ALERT***
***RED ALERT***
***RED ALERT***

Okay, so in the post Gastric Bypass Surgery world there are rules for how you eat. The big one is you eat your protein sources first, then when that’s all gone you eat everything else on your plate. Protein first, non-protein second.

Tonight I made tacos for me and Harry. Even before having my guts hacked to pieces, a taco for me consisted of taco meat and a taco shell and that’s it. Beef with some seasoning (sometimes chicken or turkey, but generally beef) and a taco shell. I used to put the beef into the shell and have a… ya know… taco-ish thing. Now I eat them separately. Beef first, then a shell. Tonight I had 3.2 ounces of beef and half a shell.

The 3.2 ounces of beef went down without issue. The half a shell did too, at first. I was going to have the other half of the shell too but my stomach started feeling a little off so I stopped.

15 minutes later the shit hit the fan. My stomach turned upside down and I had to make the mad dash to the bathroom before it all came up. Fucking taco shell.

My question then… I tracked how much protein was in the beef. How then do account for the small amount of beef that… came along for the ride when the taco shell came back for a second visit?

See? Told you it was going to be gross. I tried to be polite though and never used the word puke once. You’re welcome.