POD#5

Post op day 5 is almost in the bag...my sleeve and I are getting to know each other. I stuck to my full liquids as directed and got in more fluids by sticking to herbal tea. The warm tea goes down easier, even if it takes an hour to drink half a cup. I spent some time feeling hungry, and some time feeling very full. And I had several hours feeling just fine, although the head hunger still toyed with me.

I had my first regurgitation episode. Forgive me for going into this a bit. First, I heard about this with the band all the time. This is really what the band is most famous for. This afternoon I was hungry and got out some pudding. I ate a bite, put it aside for a while until I felt like another bite, etc. I did this for a while, and then I ate a little when I felt full already. After a few minutes it just slowly came back...not forcefully, just slowly. That was my limit. About 1 ounce. I put everything away and was thankful to know what happens when I don't pay attention.

This never happened to me with the band! I can see how if it happens when you've done something wrong, it can be a good thing...and if it happens all the time, especially when you are making "good" food choices, it would be an absolute no-go.

Tonight I decided to make the split pea soup I was saving the hambone from Christmas dinner for. I've never made split pea soup before, and my mom always made it vegetarian. She is a good cook, but there really is no substitute for ham in split pea soup. I googled some recipes and found that most of them were almost identical. I made it and it is awesome.

Why did I cook just 5 days after VSG surgery? Well, it's soup, for one thing. I can have soup, puréed and thinned. For another, most of the stuff on the menu suggestion for the full liquid diet is "fat-free, sugar-free" which means, if you follow that entirely, that you are eating entirely processed foods. I can deal with some of that for the short term, but I really wanted some of my diet to be real food with actual nutritional value. Especially since I have eaten a sum total of 5 ounces of liquid "food" today, it meant something to have some food that was real. I use SF jello, but regular pudding. I opt to leave sweetener out of tea entirely rather than use Splenda because that stuff just isn't any better for you than sugar. I hope that one day my tastes might change enough that I don't need sweetener in almost anything, but I'm not really holding out hope for that.

I puréed some of the soup, put it aside for me (my family gets the glorious chunky version) and spooned out 2 oz for dinner. I slowly ate 1 oz and put the rest back. Then I realized I probably should have had a little less. Then I remembered that I still had to take my evening pills. Lesson learned, I should probably do that part first. Now I'm sitting up with heartburn.

I am learning. It won't always be this unforgiving, for better or worse. But I'm doing fine, and excited that this seems to work way better that the band already.