kahlana

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Wow the time has flown! It really does seem like only a few days ago I was nervously/excitedly preparing for the surgery and all of a sudden its been a year already. A lot has happened in the last year so I will try to update a little bit.

First, let me say that I have not had any complications from the surgery. I burp if I eat too fast and throw up only if I eat a little too much. In the past year that event has only happened maybe 4 times because I really do try to be good and not over eat my sleeve. The last time it happened I ate one piece of halibut too much from my celebration dinner. Note to self: stop at 4 pieces of halibut cheeks and save the rest for the next day lol. I was fine after but I really do hate throwing up. Other than that I have felt amazing.

I came up to Alaska last June to work in a fish processing plant. The hours were crazy long, the food not so great, the work exhaustingly mind-numbing, and sleep practically nonexistent until about September. but I managed to make it through very well and in fact had plenty of energy for going on hikes and playing tourista around the towns I worked in. I ended up moving to Sitka in November  and lived on a WWII tugboat when I came back. That was such an adventure and I was inspired to start writing poetry again. I was really fortunate to have one of my poems read out on air at the local radio station. That kind of things makes you feel really good you know? So I am working on getting to know people in the community here and making new friends in the town here. My current plan is to be here for the next 5 years at least and perhaps buy a live aboard boat. I made some truly wonderful friends while living on the tug and found that lifestyle very appealing.

I broke up with the boyfriend back in Wisconsin due to some issues that had nothing to do with the surgery and everything to do with his growing anger issues. I am in general a really positive person and that kind of negativity was very draining on me and I couldn't be around that much anger all the time, so while he is a really terrific person on the whole I felt it necessary to remove myself from that situation. I think that can be one thing about having weight loss surgery that a lot of people don't maybe realise at first. But when you make a move to take care of you such as having this surgery, you also start looking at taking care of the rest of you too. You begin to look at taking care of your mental, spiritual and emotional well being not just the physical aspect. I am working to take care of and balance all aspects of my life now.

Still havent been able to quit smoking but i know I will find the one thing that will get me to quit one of these days. I really want to quit since it's a spendy habit and not a very comfortable one either since I have to go outside to smoke practically everywhere these days. And let me tell you, smoking outside in Alaska this time of the year is a cold prospect and quite a hassle, what with having to get on warm clothes, a heavy coat, good warm boots, a hat, gloves, and all for 5 minutes of standing outside in the snow and/or rain and cold. I can say it's helped me cut back a LOT though and I definitely don't smoke as much as I used to.

So I think that's pretty much all my news for now. Please feel free to message me if you have any questions about my recovery from the surgery or anything else I can help you with.

So I actually had the sleeve done on the 26th of January instead of on the first of February thanks to losing my insurance coverage on the first of Feb. Bummer! But my surgeon was awesome and got me in early so we could get it done before the coverage ended. YAY! If you are in the Stevens Point Wisconsin area and want a really fabulous surgeon I have to recommend mine, Calvin Selwyn at Ministry Medical Group! he has been terrific and I personally I think he saved my life.

When the surgery was performed my fundus was sent off to pathology for analysis and a tumor was found. It's the kind apparently that can become cancerous but he got it all and I can look forward to not having to deal with something like this again. YAY! And that was pretty much the excitement for my surgery. No complications, the surgery was textbook perfect and so far I seem to be having a textbook recovery.

Since the surgery I have lost steadily about 2 to 3 pounds a day. I live on protein shakes first and foremost so that my body can get all the healing nutrition it needs and I think it's paying off as my incisions are healing beautifully. I feel pretty darn great most of the time with only a little bit of discomfort as far as pain goes. I am not taking anymore pain killers just children's liquid acetominaphen for now if needed. And believe me it has to be really needed because that stuff is nasty! I do get tired really easily though and if I tried to go back to work now I wouldn't make it. I'm just too tired. My "short nap" lasts about 4 hours. lol. But, I have a hard time slowing down and a harder time remembering that I am trying to function on 400 to 600 calories a day. My body just isn't use to it.

I did buy a wrist cuff blood pressure monitor as one of my comorbids is high blood pressure and I am supposed to monitor my BP 2 times a day. I do great at remembering that some days and not so great at others but so far it's looking pretty good. I am looking forward to being able to get off the BP meds and the cholesterol meds as well. I do suggest gettting as many of your meds in liquid or chewable form as possible before your surgery because you will not be able to take pills for a bit after the surgery.

My vitamin regimine is 3 chewable multi-vitamins and 3 chewable calcium per day and a B-12 once a week. It will be like this until we get my first post-op labs back and see what's what but for now I feel like I'm getting all I need as far as my nutrition goes.

I am very glad I had this surgery and while I do wish ocassionally I could have gotten it done when I was younger, I know that having it done now means that I will be able to do more and enjoy more stuff at an age when I really appreciate it than maybe I would have when I was younger.
So that's me for now... i am off to take another nap.

February 1st I will be getting a vertical sleeve gastrectomy. Not the DS I orignally wanted but since I am having some issues with dehydration and I haven't even had surgery yet neither Dr. Selwyn or I are comfortable with me getting the malabsorption part of the DS. So I start with the sleeve and see if I need to have the switch part later on down the line. Hoepfully, I will not, since avoiding having to have 2 surgeries was one of the reasons I wanted the DS to start with. But, if I'm already having issues before the surgery I can only imagine the problems I could face with a surgery as drastic as the DS. So the smart thing to do is have the sleeve and see how well I do with it and if I dont ever need the malabsorption from the DS then cool beans. Also, Dr, Selwyn advised me that he is worried I don't have enough of a "cushion" for the DS and could get into trouble with malnutrition since I only have about 100 more pounds to lose.

I am happy to have a date and now just waiting to hear from my insurance whether or not they will approve it. I certainly hope so since I am now dealing with hypertension along with the high chloesterol, asthma, depression, blood sugar issues, and all the other medical stuff going on. Keeping my fingers crossed that I will only have vitamins to take after this. Right now I am of the mindset that I just want this done and over with so I can get back to being normal. Even though I realize that after this surgery normal will have a whole new meaning for me.

For now I am concentrating on quitting smoking. I am doing pretty well and have drastically cut back on my smoking. I can go an entire day with out a cigarette but still have a hare time when I am at home. If I could rent a hotel room for a month to avoid the temptations at home I would but since that is not practical I will deal as best as I can. I need to get back into therapy but am waiting until after the holiday season is over because I am taking on extra hours at work and 13 hour days make it hard to get time in for other appointments.

The last six months have been difficult to say the least. Trying to keep dietary goals in mind every day as well as trying to walk enough to satisfy the exercise requirements while dealing with my fibromyalgia has been hard. But i am muddling through best I can. I think if there is any advice I can give other pre-ops is that you shouldn't beat yourself up if you don't get it exactly right every day. Just be honest with yourself about why you weren't able to stay on point and start over the next day. It's when you give up completely that you lose out. Maybe that's why they say nothing worth fighting for is easy. If it were easy everyone would be doing it.

Anyway, I will keep on keeping on and keep reading all I can find about the surgery. Speaking of which, I wanted to recommend some books to help with that research. They aren't mentioned much but you can find a few here and there. I have picked up "Weight Loss Surgery for Dummies", "The Weight Loss Surgery Workbook" and "The Weight Loss Surgery Coping Companion." All three seem to be very helpful and I'm looking forward to getting into "The Weight Loss Surgery Coping Companion" as I haven't started it yet. I am doing the exercises in "The Weight Loss Suregy Workbook" and it is helping to clarify my reasons for doing this as well as bringing everything I have been learning more into focus.

So for now I am playing the hurry up and wait game and looking forward to the day it's done and over with and I can get back to living life.

I have moved my blog about my weight loss surgery journey to here.  Hope to see you there :)

So that went very well. I got there a little late and missed a bit of the introduction but what I did hear and asked about after the meeting gave me quite a bit of confidence that I have found the right surgeon. I like that he is up front about everything and is not afraid of questions.
Okay so here is what I found out. He has done 12 DS surgeries in Cincinnati and only 1 here in Stevens Point. HOWEVER...95% of practice is strictly bariatrics. So he doesn't dabble. He was a bariatrics instructor at University of Cincinnati and has taught other doctors how to do the robotic assisted laprascopic bariatric suregeries as well. So I am pretty sure it's safe to assume he knows his stuff. He also intends to play Devil's Advocate for ANY of the surgeries in that he plans to ask a lot of hard questions about why you want the suregery you think you want and how you plan to use your tool once you get it.
He is also very big on making sure that people understand this is not a quick fix. There is going to be a long hard work ahead for me both on the pre-op side as well as the post-op. I can also expect him to be there and available for me every step of the way. I found out that his DS patients, in gerneral spend 3 nights on average in the hospital and that he considers the DS the more "elegant" of the surgery options as well as the most complicated to perform. I believe his exact words were It is the most delicate of the surgery options." I have a folder full of information to go over as well as information to get to him. one of the things I liked that he said was that if "you are a 2 year degree person don't sign up for a 4 year degree at college and then expect to be successful at it."
Really looking forward to hearing from his patient coordinator tomorrow as she is already checking to make sure my insurance covers this surgery.
So everything is moving along now and it's gong to be an interesting ride.

So I just went in for a heptobiliary scan. Supposed to be an hour or two of imaging of my gall bladder and no big deal. Until they push the stuff through that makes the gall bladder go to work and do it's thing.  "Chuck" (nice radiology techie guy) tells me at the beginning that they would give me the contrast stuff through an I.V. I'm all "okay no biggie. Been there, done that, never bothered me before." Then he tells me that they will then push a medicine through my I.V. that will make my gallbladder do its job and that I might "feel some changes" when that happens. Okay I am thinking I can deal with "changes" and as I lay on the table watching my liver blink in and out getting brighter and brighter I concentrate on feeling my body and making sure I am all relaxed. I'm all into my meditation and telling myself how each muscle is relaxed and I am feeling peaceful and all is well... blah blah blah. My gall bladder comes into focus and looks like a bright little moon in a starless sky. "It's kind of pretty," I am thinking. Chuck comes back after a while and says that they are going to start the medicine and that it should be about half an hour and I will be all done. "Cool beans cuz I'm dying for a cup of coffee hahah," I joke. He starts the push and goes out of the room leaving me and a girl I cant see off to my right alone in the room. I'm still lying there thinking about how maybe I should have had them give me an extra blanket because my toes are a little chilly when suddenly out of nowhere a huge wave of nausea hits. I ask out loud if I am supposed to feel like I am going to throw up while trying to remind myself that I am laying on my back and puking at this point would not be a good thing because I am going to end up with it in my hair. (yeah I know the things we think of in moments like these right?) The girl comes over to talk to me about what I am feeling when all of a sudden a pain I can only describe as giving birth to conjoined triplets while suffering from E.coli rolls through my stomach. I started crying. I admit it. I cried like a baby. It just wouldn't stop. And I cant roll over and curl up in a ball because for one thing there is a gigantic machine hovering 2 inches over my stomach and for the other I am trying to make sure they can still get the damn pictures they need. So Chuck stops the push and goes to talk to the radiologist who says they will not be able to give me definitive answers because we have to stop the scan because I am in pain. Chuck tells me this and then says the ball is in my court. I have finally gotten to where I can breathe through the pain by this point. "Shit!" I tell him, "Just do it Chuck. I will live and deal with it." So here we go for round two. More of the gut twisting, mind-blowing pain while trying not to throw up because quite frankly there is nothing in there to throw up. I am trying to breathe. I am trying to not claw my own guts out. And again I am bawling like a baby and probably making poor Chuck feel like a real jerk for putting me through this. I hope like hell they got what they needed to figure out what is causing the pain in my stomach because I am NEVER doing that again. I will live on ibuprofen and excedrin for the rest of my life rather than go through that again.
Oh and apparently my reaction DOES NOT happen to everyone. So if you are reading this and you have to have a heptobiliary scarn please don't take my reaction to it as normal. At this point in my life I am finding out that I do not do ANYTHING normal. But more about that later.  My life is somewhat surreal sometimes.

Seriously..... I want to be skinny again! I think I posted here that I feel like I'm living in a body owned by somebody else. My brain thinks I'm still this sexy lil thing that can hike and hunt and ride my bike all over the place and then strut down the sidewalk in 6inch heels and look like I have the right to be  doing it. Right now... I just look painful. I want to feel good in my skin again. I want to have a smokin' body to go along with the self-confident woman who lives in my brain.
And before anyone gets their panties in a bunch... No I am not doing this just because I want to be sexy again. My hyperlipidemia (high cholesterol) and hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) mean I have to do this for my health too. The fact that I can not hike 1 mile twice a day to go to and from work  without an inhaler and several stops along the way mean I need this for my health. But I am also a woman and one in a relationship with a pretty sexy guy (see his pic in my albums) and quite frankly I REALLY want to look good for him as well. I liked the fact that when we met I was tiny and looked pretty darned awesome with him. Now I feel sometimes like people look at us together and wonder what the heck he is doing with the whale. I know rationally that that thought is probably the furthest thing from their minds but I still have that thought.
Anyway this is my rant for today. I am missing being able to wear tiny little nothings and that's it.

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May 1st and Sunday being the first day of my week I decided to start a food/activity log. I ate a LOT of veggies today. Almost 2 pounds. But I also walked all the way to work. Granted it was a really slow walk but I did it. Hey it's a mile and a quarter. And in the pain I am in these days thats a VERY long walk. I also went 10 hours without a cigarette and I must say it was nice. But I can see where I am going to have a problem when i get home. So far I have had 4 cigarettes and I have only been home for a little under an hour. Grrrr.... I am definitely going to have to find something else to do so I'm not constantly smoking.

Oh yeah and I will make a TMI note here: All these veggies are causing really bad gas and all the water I am drinking is making me have to pee constantly. This does not make for a very comfortable day at work :(. I am going to have figure out something else to eat at work because I can't sit for hours trying to hold back gas. Dang!

Went to my pcp today and took a list with me of all the things I wanted to discuss. This ended up being a good thing because I FINALLY remembered to discuss the hemmerhoid issue I have been dealing with the last few months. So, i have a consultation with Dr. Selwyn on Wednesday, not just about him possibly doing the DS on me but also about about this rather embarrassing little blip in my life.

Among other things I DID get a copy of the labs I had done earlier this month. I don't think it covers every thing that DS'ers need done but I think it might be a good starting point. I am not sure if I want to post them on the DS board right now though as I don't even have a surgery date yet. But perhaps I will to see if there is anything i can do now to start getting what I can up into the high end of normal so that "maybe" getting them to DS normal won't be quite so difficult. But i could be wrong about that.

The other thing we talked about in connection with weight loss surgery was the 6 month supervised nutrition and exercise plan. i will know more about what is going on with these stupid stomach cramps after Wednesday but in the meantime I will be recording everything that goes into my mouth on a daily basis. This includes food, drinks, vitamins, supplements, and medications. I would like to get a base line of how many calories I am consuming now so that I can at least go to my first meeting with whoever I need to do the supervised thing with I have a fairly good idea where my calories are coming from and what kinds of foods I am eating on a day to day basis.

Small victory for me was asking my sweet babboo to be my advocate. I explained to him that it meant he would have to come with me to appointments and the informational meeting later this month. He was pretty honest with me and told me it freaks him right out that they are going to cut me open again but that yes of course he would be my advocate. So yay there! Now to make a list of all the stuff I need him to know and get him to pay attention lol.

So among other things I picked up a script for Commit lozenges as I read on the boards somewhere that people had had great success with them. And since I have tried everything else except these and the gum we are going to give it a try. Let's keep our fingers crossed that between the lozenges and the Welbutrin I will be a non-smoker several months before my surgery date.

On the food and beverage side of things, I tried 2 of the VitaminWaters today, the Revive and the XXX. I like both but I think I could get addicted to the Revive really quick. Of course I haven't the 0 calorie ones just yet so I may not like them at all but won't know for sure until i taste test them as well. I figure a couple of different things each time I go shopping so I kind of have some idea of what this stuff will taste like. My idea is that if I really like something now there is a pretty good chance I will like it post-op too. I know that tastes may change post-op but I am fairly certain that if the food makes me gag now I won't be craving it after surgery.

The other thing I tried was a High Performance Protein bar. It was the double chocolate and it wasn't too bad. A little too sweet for me at this point since I have been limiting my sugar intake to just what I have in my coffee in the morning so that may be why it tasted so sweet to me. Oh and speaking of sugar... i am now making my favorite drink aside from coffee with a little less sugar each time as well. I love love love sweet tea but if white sugar is a no-no for DSr's  then I definitely need to get to work on cutting it out.

So there's the news from the pre-op side. Oh, yes and before I forget I made a list of all the tests I need to have run pre-op (maybe a few weeks out?) so I have an idea of what needs work before the surgery. Anywho, good news is my pcp is super supportive and is cool about authorizing the tests. Also said she would defnintely send a letter of support if needed for approval from insurance so yeee-haw!