One Week Surgiversary!

Aug 03, 2011

Today's the day!  My very first one week anniversary!  One week ago today I was crazy enough to let Dr. Kelly make five small incisions in my belly, stick a camera inside, cut open my stomach and rearrange my insides all so I could have a better chance of beating my obesity.  It all seems a little surreal! 

The top six highlights and lowlights of the last week are as follows:

LOWLIGHTS
- Miralax bowel prep which causes you to pee out of your butt every 15 minutes for 3+ hours until you have nothing left to give
- IV HELL!  It took the nurses 5, yes FIVE tries before they were able to get the IV into my arm.  Likely a result of the Miralax
- Hospital Bed:  It's a cross between sleeping on a friends floor and sleeping in a recliner, neither of which work for me
- Gas:  This was by far the most traumatic part of my experience.  I was in TEARS from the horrible gas pains and just wanted to die.  Thankfully a few heating packs and 5 miles of walking later and I was out of the woods. 
- Head Cravings:  Oh how I long for a Big Mac, french fry, ice cream cone, popcorn...anything of substance!  But alas- I'm not "actually" hungry...


HIGHLIGHTS
- Pain Pump:  Who wouldn't love the ability to press a magic button and rapidly shoot a dose of morphine through their veins...ah, how I miss you pain pump!
- Sleeping in my own bed:  Oh how I missed her!
- Fantastic surgeon and nursing staff:  I don't know how I would have made it out of there without them! 
- Obesityhelp.com message boards:  As my body has started the process, I have had so many questions answered on here!
- No dumping or nausea!  I'm one of the lucky ones and haven't had more than a gas bubble since leaving the hospital.
- And of course...WEIGHT LOSS!  I have lost 14.2 pounds my first week alone!  That's almost 10% of what I need to lose!  I can only hope the rest of my weeks go an eighth as well!


One week out I am finally starting to see some patterns in how my new stomach.  It's like on one of the Disney movies when all the animals start singing and dancing.  The animals sing a song with a real message to the audience...just like my stomach!   Gurgle, gurgle, pop, groan actually means something!  Now I'm certainly not an expert at this yet...I have merely figured out that there really IS a message in the song.  But I'm looking forward to the next few weeks and months of learning "name that tune"! 

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