Tag: stomach pouch

Random Lunchtime Thoughts

Just some random things going through my tiny little brain right now.

I don’t get hungry anymore. In this post-gastric bypass universe I go from feeling comfortably satisfied, skip right past normal hungry feelings, and catapult straight to oh my god I am so hungry it hurts why does my stomach hurt so much?

Normally that isn’t a big deal. I have something to eat and I feel better. Some days though, like the last couple of days, it gets a bit annoying. Some days I just can’t get out in front of the problem. I eat something, then an hour or so later I feel the hunger pains coming back. Normally I can go about three hours without any issues. Sometimes, like when I was visiting my father in the hospital and had other things on my mind, I could go twice that without my stomach perking up at all.

Today I finished breakfast at around 8:00am. I started feeling it at a little before 11:00am. I was drinking water at the time and had to pause for 15 minutes before I could eat again so I didn’t get any food into my empty stomach until 11:20. I had a quick snack. I was done at 11:26. The hunger pains were back in full force by 12:11pm. What the hell, bro? I went on lunch at 1:00pm so I made myself wait to eat anything more. I didn’t want to fill my new little stomach pouch before lunch and then throw off my schedule even more. I was able to sneak in a little water which helped a little but come on, stomach… you have to do better than 45 minutes, right?

Change of subject. Television shows that are currently being worked through.

  • Mindhunter on Netflix. I’m about 3/4 of the way through the first of two seasons. It’s creeping me out. Good stuff.
  • Only Murders in the Building on Hulu. I think I am an episode behind. The new season is good. I was nervous when I heard it was moving to Los Angeles, but so far it’s firmly grounded in New York where it belongs. It is also nice to have Paul Rudd back again.
  • Agatha All Along on Disney+. Episode three is out today, I think. I’ll watch it tonight. I’m enjoying it so far.
  • Rings of Power on Amazon Prime. The last couple of episodes feel like a small step back in terms of quality. Word on the street is the next two (the last two episodes of season two) are going to be spectacular. I’m all in.
  • Dark on Netflix. I liked the first season. I’m halfway through the second season and it is struggling to hold my attention.
  • The Orville on Hulu. Season three is a bit of a slog. The episodes are WAY too long and not good enough to justify the time commitment. It’s not bad, it’s just not that good.
  • Futurama on Hulu. Gold. Absolute gold.
  • Exploding Kittens on Netflix. It’s not bad, but I’m having a hard time staying invested in it.
  • Coming Soon: Penguin on Max. The first couple of episodes are out but I haven’t watched them yet. I’ll get to them soon.
  • Coming Soon: Daryl Dixon season two on AMC. The new season kicks off this coming Sunday. I’ll be there.

Dude… that’s a shit load of TV. I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten a couple of shows too.

I have some linens that I took from my father’s apartment. The plan is to donate them somewhere. My sister suggested the MSPCA at Nevins Farm in Methuen. It’s right around the corner from my house. I wasn’t sure if that was something they’d take so I Googled it today. Sure enough, they take bedding. They don’t take pillows or knitted blankets though. If I have any of those I’ll have to bring them somewhere else.

I also took a combination turn table, AM/FM radio, CD player, cassette player from his apartment. I haven’t found a home for it yet. I am thinking that tomorrow I’ll plug it in next to my desk and listen to old Rush records on vinyl while I work. That sounds like a good plan to me.

Okay then. Here’s hoping the hunger pains are taken care of for a few hours at least. I’m crossing my fingers… and symbolically crossing my bypassed digestive system too… whatever that means.

Two Thoughts

Two brief topics for this more-or-less lunch time post.

First:

I screwed up. As often happens, three hours after I finished breakfast my stomach was starting to ache because it was too empty to deal with itself. I had a snack. Peanuts. Lovely. I then… had another snack. Some sugar free cookies. That was a mistake. Not because I had a bad reaction, but because I was stuffed and only about 90 minutes away from lunch time. Now here we are, 10 minutes into my planned lunch break, and I am still stuffed and can’t see myself having a real lunch. Dumb ass. You’d think after a year and seven months I would know what I can and cannot handle in terms of between meal snacks. Nope. I screwed up. 

Maybe I’ll try to eat a lunch-esque something or other about an hour from now. I don’t have any meetings so I won’t have any problems with work scheduling, but I also don’t want to ruin dinner. We’re planning on having some gnocchi tonight and I want that to go really well. I wonder… do we have any meatballs in the freezer? Hmmmm… we’ll see.

Second:

Social media. Shit. Why can’t I just stop with the social media stuff? I mean, I post to this blog 123612764 times a day, why can’t that be enough? What the hell is wrong with me?

I need a twitter alternative. There are a lot of decent platforms, but none of them are quite good enough. I should just back one of them and post there 2496723457 times a day and fool myself into thinking I’m having fun with it. It will be a bald faced lie, but I don’t mind.

So which should I go with? There are three that I am kind of using a little bit. 

  • Mastodon
  • Threads (which makes me sick because it’s a facebook product and facebook is just as slimy as twitter)
  • BlueSky

Mastodon is good because this blog cross posts there. Threads is good (even though zuck is fucking evil) because there are a lot of people that I followed on other platforms that I am following there. BlueSky is good but… I really don’t know why. Probably just because I sort of use it, I guess. 

Stomach Fun

It’s been an eventful day in terms of gastric bypass life today. My stomach has not really been a team player. I think if I am being honest with myself I cannot blame today’s fun on my stomach. I have to put all of the blame on myself. Which is really the same thing, isn’t it?

Twice today I have had stomach pain caused by my poor little redesigned stomach pouch being too empty. Three hours after breakfast and three hours after lunch I had stomach pain bad enough that I had to eat something to make it go away. As my doctor said when I told her about the occasional hour-three-pains, duh you’re hungry. I thought about adding something to my lunch in the hopes that it would keep me full for longer, but I felt pretty stuffed when I finished lunch and I didn’t want to risk overdoing it. Looking back, I wonder if I should have pushed things a little more. Probably not.

The next fun came during dinner. I had a couple of ounces of chicken on my plate along with a scoop of instant mashed potatoes. I had finished the chicken without issue but I really wanted to get into those potatoes, babie. Just call me a red haired Irish stereotype. I had what I thought were a couple of small bites but either they were bigger than they should have been or I just ate too fast because my stomach felt a little blocked. Something was keeping the last bite or so from getting into the tiny little redesigned stomach pouch and that leads to some real discomfort. Worse than that, it lead to those few bites of instant mashed potatoes coming back up for an encore. Yikes! Sorry about the gross TMI here folks, but I need to document this stuff for posterity… or something like that. It wasn’t bad, just a couple of blasts and it was over. This happens with mashed potatoes once in a while (not very often, but enough to spot patterns) and as usual I felt better almost immediately. I still paused on eating for about half an hour and then I finished my dinner without further issue.

The last bit of stomach excitement is happening as I type this and it really is a non-issue. I don’t like going to bed without having eaten something. It probably makes my sleep less than ideal, but it is WAY better than waking up in the middle of the night with those empty stomach pains. I try to be full when I turn in for the night and tonight I think I may have over done it a little. I was a little behind on the old protein goal so I had a small protein bar to get over the hump. Then 20 minutes later I had some crackers. The two things combined were a little too much and now I feel SUPER full. Not painfully full but a little uncomfortable. I am going to try and stay awake for another hour or so to make sure I feel better before I lay down, but hindsight tells me I should have skipped the crackers. Oh well. It’s hard to gauge what my stomach will need at night so I may actually have to eat something else before I sleep, but I doubt it. I think food and I are done with each other for the night.

So four instances of stomach issues over the course of a single day. That is a lot more than usual for difficult days and given that most days are issue free it’s WAY more than normal for the average day. None of it was really too bad. I mean the vomiting was unpleasant but only for a couple of minutes and as soon as it was over I felt fine. All in all it wasn’t bad. I’d rather a full on easy day, sans-problems, but as problematic days go this one was pretty good.

In closing, I will quote the band Traffic, whose legendary self-titled second album was released 55 years ago this month, and say who knows what tomorrow may bring?

Sleep and Stomach Stuff

I wanted to go to bed early last night but I ended up staying awake until almost midnight. Dumb ass. The numbers my Apple Watch collected were pretty weak. I didn’t have a lot of restful sleep and my heart rate didn’t drop very much. I managed to keep the CPAP mask on all night. That’s been a trial for me lately. I have to put it on super tight to keep the seal from letting go. I’ve had two days in a row without problems, but the previous four or five days all had me taking the mask off at some point in the night because the bad seal kept waking me up.

I woke up with some stomach fun this morning too. Yesterday I had a big lunch. It was way more food than I can handle post-bypass. Then at dinner I did it again. I had way more food than I could handle. It resulted in me feeling uncomfortably stuffed for hours last night. Eventually it passed and I was able to have some water and a snack before bed. It did result in me waking with a stomach ache. Not one of those really bad curled-up-in-a-ball-on-the-floor type stomach aches, just a normal bad stomach ache. I tried to work through it while exercising but I had to stop. I spent some time in the bathroom (TMI) and eventually it passed. I had some breakfast and it didn’t come back. I feel a little worn out this morning, but I don’t feel any pain now.

And that’s the health update for today. I’m going to have lunch about an hour from now. I don’t expect any problems, but I should probably make sure I don’t overdo it again, right?

Really Bad Lunch Experience

I don’t know what I did, but I sure did something wrong.

I put about four ounces of chicken onto a little plate and brought it to my desk for lunch. 0.9 ounces into it and I was done. Pain, babie. Real pain. Not nausea this time, just stomach pain. It’s almost like one of the bites I took failed to make it into my little redesigned stomach pouch and then the next bites backed up behind it. Usually when that happens I feel like I need to throw up, and once or twice I actually have a little. Not this time, just stomach pain.

It’s been about 90 minutes since this happened and I am feeling mostly okay again. I need to have some lunch though so I am trying a protein bar. One bite down and, while I am definitely not all better, it hasn’t gotten worse.

Fingers crossed, my friends. Fingers crossed.