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.
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