Protein Here, Protein There

Protein Everywhere!?!?

I finally found a protein supplement that doesn't make me hurl or give me anaphylaxis!  The funny part being that I am supposed to be weaning myself off protein supplements and getting my protein from normal food.  But I figure, for posterity and for any others who are having trouble with protein milkshakes -- that I'd include it here.

They're called Protein Bullets, and I found out about them from someone on my Weight Loss Surgery LJ Community -- I buy the lemon-lime flavor and I mix it with Diet Lemon Snapple Iced Tea.  About half a bullet (21g of protein) mixes in really well and is barely detectable.  While I can put a whole bullet in, the flavor is pretty questionable.  But overall, something I can drink, that tastes good, and that doesn't make me feel like I'm suffering.  Honestly, nothing is worse than being forced to drink something that is yucky.

But yes, I reached my 4 week mark this past Monday, April 26th and I told the NP about my vomiting, but she didn't seem too concerned.  The nutritionist that was supposed to call me to schedule allergy tests after my anaphylaxis and didn't didn't seem very sorry or worried either, instead chiding me for my one-time consumption of turkey bacon.  You know what?  When I'm dying for protein, my body is craving it and I can keep it down, sometimes you just gotta do what you've gotta do.

They did advance me to Stage III diet, wherein I'm supposed to start incorporating more solid foods into my diet, and some carbs.  Thus far I've had 1.5 saltines and a piece of wheat toast.  Not stellar progress, but I am having a love affair with cheese.

Cheese is the perfect food.  I loved cheesed before the surgery, and it continues to taste and smell and BE spectacular.   Per ounce, it has comparable protein to meat or chicken or fish (about 6-7 grams) yet it is smooth and creamy and actually stays in my belly without wanting to escape 5-10 minutes after consumption.

Yes, I know it's high in fat, but I can't eat cheese all the time, can I?

In all seriousness, stage III is an attempt to start introducing post-WLS people to "real" food -- real living, actually creating a feasible working and eating lifestyle that they can consume, manage, and stay healthy on. And I continue to document everything I eat, so I'm not too worried about going cheese-crazy.

And yes, I am documenting my foods very closely.  On a good day, I consume about 500 calories a day.  I'm supposed to get up to 1000 but I'm not very sure how likely that will be.  I focus much more heavily on getting my requisite protein in, because being sick and going bald are really not my ideas of a good time.

I am also still throwing up, though I guess I can say that it's to a lesser extent since I haven't thrown up every day of the last 7.  I've eaten at a few restaurants -- I usually order a soup and then steal a piece of chicken off of Adam's plate.

Successes: Tom Yum soup at a Vietnamese place
                  Tawa Chicken at an Indian place


Failures:    Chicken Kebob at a "natural"place






Thus far, the vomiting isn't consistent enough for me to chart a pattern, but I could certainly live without the fear of public vomiting.  Meats are tough.

Flavor has become KEY.  The Tom Yum soup was like HEAVEN, mostly because it was spicy, but not too spicy, and was savory, and had a multitude of flavors to delight me as I sipped it slowly.  I got down HALF a bowl and was tickled the whole time.  My tastebuds have definitely changed. 

As one might see from the Ticker on the right, I am also now down 26 pounds.  I know that for 30 days, it's amazing, but I had really really wanted to be below 250 pounds since the last time I remember feeling thin I was under 250.  My thinnest in the last 10 years is 220 (after living in Uganda and swimming every day) and I'm excited but part of me is also worried that I'm doing something wrong and should be losing more.

What's more, not any of my friends have commented on my looking thinner.  I know I already carried my weight well.  No one knew how fat I really was.  Sometimes I'd gain weight and people would tell me I looked thinner.

But now that I'm suffering, I want that validation of feeling and looking thinner.  I vacillate daily on whether or not I feel thinner. Adam tells me I look thinner.  But he's obviously biased.   He took photos of me the day before my surgery, but wouldn't let me look at them until now.  Then we did photos today to show some progress.  I fear posting them to the internet, but here they are.

               Before                                                                        One Month After

Even now, looking at them, I don't feel like I can see much of a difference.  If anything, in the side shots I'm almost positive I'm sucking in the first photos but I've been sucking in in photos for so many years that it's a hard habit to break. I guess my legs look a little less cottage cheesy, but that could also just be the lighting. Maybe in my face. But even then, questionable. To be fair, 26 pounds is less than 10% of my total body weight (well, not anymore) so it's unfair for me to expect HUGE progress to be so easily visible. 

There is also the issue of hibernation and working out, and now that I am not feeling like death warmed up on most occasions it is really necessary for me to start working out.  I've got my little apartment trampoline, but my Wii Fit board is having left-side issues that I think herald its imminent replacement.

Either way, I will continue to plod ahead.

A Hell of a Weekend

Last weekend of week three -- and all I'm getting is WEAK^3! 

A bunch of the ladies on my WLS community suggested that I was eating food a little too advanced for my stage II diet, so I've scaled back today and yesterday to mostly cottage cheese and tunafish again.  I did find an AWESOME site to replace Fitday.com, which doesn't seem to have upgraded at all since I first started using it in the 90s.  Plus, no iPhone app?  Boo! Remembering everything you eat later in the evening is noooo fun. 

It's called The Daily Burn, and not only does it know 99% of foods out there (as opposed to FitDay where every other thing you consume ends up having to be a Custom Food) but it has TWO bitchin' iPhone apps, one that scans barcodes and adds food automatically, and another that just gives you the skinny on your progress to date. 

These are the good things.


THIS is the bad thing

 
Now that I know how little protein I was getting, I've been resolving to take the bull by the horns and get up to that 70g a day if it kills me.  And it nearly did!

At our last trip to GNC, Adam and I bought this stuff called Liquid Morph that has 45g of protein in just about 3 ounces.  Considering that that's more than half of my daily requirement, it seemed like a good call.   Of course it's sold at GNC and it shaped like a penis.  The whole thing is ridiculous.

I'd had it twice before -- and while it tasted like crap, I had no adverse reactions. This last time, however, was a different story.

After drinking an ounce, I felt this weird cold tingling in my stomach.  I had resolved to keep it down, and just drink the remaining ounce slowly, but I started to feel flushed.  My face started to redden, like... actually redden (as opposed to the Standard Ginger Pink) and the EMS guys later told me it was basically the color of the cap of the Liquid Morph.  My heart rate was elevated, I started to sweat, feel woozy, and my hands and arms and legs, also red, started to tingle and jitter. 

Adam had been at the bodega getting a sandwich, and I realized after 5 minutes of difficulty breathing, as my face and body kept getting redder, tinglier and hotter, that something was really wrong.  Bless the cellphone: I called him and he canceled his sandwich and came running home. 

When he got here, I was in a bad way and we decided that I should go to the hospital.  When I went into the bathroom to put in clothes, however, I nearly passed out, so Adam lay me on the floor and called 911.  It was horribly scary -- I was heaving for breath, things were swimming in front of my eyes and I just felt like I was getting hotter and hotter.

I resisted having an ambulance come at first, trying to insist on taking a taxi but by the time I was able to pull myself off the bathroom floor the ambulance was already here. 

In fact, TWO ambulances were here, because only one kind of paramedic team is allowed to deal with anaphylaxis and they were running behind the first team.

They gave me oxygen and "tried" to take my blood (and exploded my vein in the process) and injected me with Benadryl, but decided that I still really needed to go into the hospital.  It had taken a good five minutes on the oxygen to even be able to take good, solid breaths and I was still extremely red and tingly.

We brought in the Liquid Morph for testing, and they put it at the bottom of my stretcher.  Terrible, considering its shape -- I got weird looks from almost everyone I was wheeled by, all of whom were probably convinced that I'd had some sort of dildo-related accident. 

The hours at the hospital just go by in a blur on Benadryl.  I fell asleep on the stretcher, of course woken a million times for various tests, but they're still not sure what sparked the reaction. 

I will obviously not be taking any more Liquid Morph, but it is scary to not know what caused my near-anaphylaxis so that I can avoid it in the future.


Worse, my feelings of weakness post-surgery are compounding: I never used to get sick, I never had trouble with food, I never had the ambulance come to take me away.  This feeling of frail ineptitude -- "Hey, sorry I couldn't finish your paper -- I spent a day in the hospital!"

... NOT GOOD.

I can only hope week 4 brings improvement.

End of Week Three

I certainly feel perkier than I did last week -- but the resounding feeling is still how difficult day-to-day going is.  I'm so tired of thinking about it, because every meal is a struggle.  Last night I ate edamame for dinner -- about 25 of them -- and however good they tasted they still came up.  I tried to relax in the bathtub, and Adam had to bring the trashcan over for me.

How... humiliating.

Throwing up seems to be my theme for this week.  Since Tuesday, a day hasn't gone by where I've been able to keep everything down.  I'm really struggling to keep on schedule with my vitamins and my protein shakes and everything else -- yesterday was a total wash.  Once I have other things "to do" in my mind the likelihood that I'll remember to drink every hour goes down pretty steeply.

I've developed this paranoia about throwing up in public, so sometimes, if I'm on campus and it's 5 hours since my last meal, I just won't eat just in case.  That's probably not very good.

While in week 1 the relief of regurgitating was the biggest feeling after I did it, not being able to hold down food this week feels a lot more discouraging.  I'm more than halfway through week three, and I should be on more "solid" ground.

Even worse, I question my priorities in the healing process when, after throwing up dinner on Wednesday night (swordfish), I had to pick myself up off the bathroom floor and go to class. 

I still managed to get a lot done yesterday, but overall, I feel like, since the surgery, that I have twice as much on my plate (haha, I may not be full of food but I am full of bad puns). 

And it's exhausting.  I can only hope that week 4 will be better.  Plus, I need to start exercising!

Post-Surgery, Week Two Overview

I'm almost incredulous that tomorrow begins my third week -- and slowly but surely, I'm getting back on my feet.

Despite time having flown by, I'm still wobbly and don't handle eating very well.  When I eat, getting food down is so difficult.  I'm always thirsty, but I'm still limited to 4 ounces every hour.  Protein shakes are probably my biggest issue; I don't know if milk is the problem, or whether it's the sugar content in Skim Milk Plus, but while I've finally found a protein shake that doesn't taste awful, I've yet to consume it without feeling sick and dizzy afterward.

What I find amazing is that I'm still not hungry, nor do I feel deprived, but my "good hours" each day are still a lot fewer than I need.  I'm behind in my schoolwork, and I'm worried about its impact on my graduation.

A lot of people I've talked to tell me to be easier on myself, since I just had major surgery, but it's hard to even realize that I've had "major surgery"

My incisions are nearly gone entirely -- they could be mistaken for cat scratches!

More photos from  pre & post-surgery

These are supposed to be the "most serious" incisions, yet really, they are like pimples! It makes me realize how quickly time is passing!

Post-Surgery, Weeks 1-2

Who decides what kind of body type you get?  All my life I've been pretending like I'm one of those girls who can eat whatever she wants and still be fit, though I've never been and never will be.  The math isn't as simple as they make it out to be.  Even when I ate what I wanted, I never ate as much as I was fat. 


All of these ideas rush through my head as I begin "solid" foods this week -- moving on from an all-liquid diet to soft or pureed foods. No one looking at me would know that I'm ingesting probably a max of 200 calories a day -- but slowly and surely, it is taking its effect.

When I went to the doctor this past Monday, I had lost nearly 17 pounds.  In 7 days.  It is a bit mind-boggling, but what's funny is that it has no longer become my ultimate focus.  At this same doctor's appointment, I got flushed, sweaty, and nearly passed out.

As I lay on an examination table in an adjoining room, in front of the air conditioner and limp against the papered table, tears rolled down my face.  I was filled with doubt -- who ever said that this was going to be so hard?


The traditional ideals of "hard" when one thinks of this surgery have to do with the food restriction.  Yesterday, I ate 3 tbs of cottage cheese, a quarter of a cup of turkey ragu and 2 oz of cod ... for the whole day.  But I didn't feel hungry, or deprived, or starved.  In fact, it felt like a lot of food.

What's more difficult is the increasing distance from myself.  I have always been a hearty, robust, girl. Never weak, rarely sick, always independent.

Looking at this girl now -- crying, dizzy, barely able to make it through a class for 1.5 hours -- I can't imagine what went wrong.  The automatic assumption is that something DID go wrong - but no, my surgery went fine, and apparently, my symptoms are "normal."  I have to make sure to get out a little bit every day, work my muscles, and avoid Hibernation Syndrome.   But however normal these feelings are, they are still so difficult to combat when you've got stuff to do! I'm trying to finish my thesis, get my other homework finished, make sure I'm getting enough ounces in everyday, writing everything down, getting out of bed -- god, it's fucking EXHAUSTING.

Add in some discomfort and constipation, and it feels like a clusterfuck.  I spent at least four hours on the toilet yesterday, and when I finally succeeded, after much screaming and pain, I had this feeling like I'd been given a preview of childbirth.

There is also this feeling like, despite having read tons of literature ahead of time, there are certain things I feel like should have been outlined more clearly.  Constipation and coagulated blood down there, for one.  But really, telling people that they "might be depressed" after surgery does not encompass the PERVASIVE NATURE of hibernation.  Everything is not roses, or puppies, or sunshine.

It is cottage cheese, and reflux, and straining, and sweatiness, and discomfort.  I'm only hoping it will get better, or that the amassed weightloss at week 2 or 3 or 4 will feel like a balance to my stress and pain.

But until then, more sleep, as I creep forward, slowly, slowly.

Home again, home again, jiggity jig

I had this whole entry in my head that I meant to write -- all about the surreality of lying in the hospital bed, and feeling like yourself, and yet being different on the inside.  Or how being home makes you wonder if it all ever happened ... that is, until you wake up in the morning and poop blood!

I do have lots of things to say, but I just took a Vicodin because I am in a lot of pain! In the interim, enjoy some photos: