My Gastric Sleeve

A (Relatively) Long, Hot Walk

The picture I'm using for my post today was taken about two weeks ago. It shows my mom standing beside a sign posted on Main Street of a small Kansas town. The sign reads: "Satan Called. He wants his weather back."

Ain't it the truth? For the last two weeks the temperature has registered 90 degrees or more by ten o'clock in the morning. We've had maybe three drops of rain during that time period, and all the local weather forecaster has to promise is more of the same.

This kind of summer heat wave is miserable for anybody, but when you're overweight, it's agony. Last summer when the weather heated up, I could only bear to walk about ten steps at a time before I had to pause and rest. Sweat soaked my clothes, ran down my face, and stung my eyes. By breath came in painful gasps, and my heart pounded so hard I actually worried it might just stop altogether.

Bits and Pieces of My Life

 
What a busy couple of weeks it has been. My non-fiction book, Hospice Tails: Animal Companions Who Journey with Hospice Patients and Their Families, was released June 1, 2011. It is currently available on Amazon, and should be showing up on Kindle in the next few weeks. You can also order it in print or as an e-book through Booklocker.com.

This book marks the end of a project that has been going on since I started working for hospice over five years ago. A lifelong animal lover, I began to collect stories of animals who played a special role in the lives and deaths of their humans. Naturally, I changed names and details to protect the identity of my clients, but I let the bond between human and animal speak for itself.

My goal with Hospice Tails is to make people smile and think about their own special animal friends. If the book brings a tear to the eye...well, that's okay, too.

Turkey Creek Festival in Merriam, Kansas

 
Every third Saturday in May, the city of Merriam, Kansas holds its Turkey Creek Festival at Antioch Park. The festival offers music, games and rides for kids, booths selling jewelry and other crafts, and refreshments. Now, I happen to live less than three blocks from Antioch Park, and I love events like this, but for the past three years, I haven't been able to go to the festival.

Why? Because I couldn't walk the two and a half blocks to the park, much less walk around the park to enjoy the events once I got there.

Today, with a fifty-pound weight loss under my belt, I decided to try to make it to this year's festival. The weather was beautiful, a little humid, perhaps, but certainly not too hot as it sometimes is in May in the Midwest. I paced myself and walked the two and a half blocks without breaking a sweat.

Phantom Fat: The Lie in the Mirror

 
I wrote last week about how a colleague of mine convinced me to weigh myself, but I didn't relate how that came about. She had come back to my office to talk to me about a patient issue and found me despondent at my desk.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"I don't think the surgery is working anymore," I told her. "I'm gaining weight again. I can tell."

Her eyebrows almost disappeared into her hair line. "Gaining weight? I don't think so. Your clothes look looser every day."

"They're not," I said. "I'm gaining. I can tell."

So she dragged me to a set of scales, where I learned that my subjective reality was not objective reality--in fact, I had lost seventeen pounds since my most recent visit with my bariatric surgeon.

Learning to Stay in Your Body

 
"Stay in your body." The first time a health care professional gave me this bit of advice, I have to admit I shook my head. Where the hell else had I been for 43 years if not in my body? It wasn't like I'd been renting out the space to anyone else so I could go on that long-awaited, body-free vacation.

As I began the process of recovering from gastric sleeve surgery, however, I began to realize that the doctors and nurses were right. I didn't fully inhabit my physical being. Instead, I lived mostly in my head. I've written before about how, once upon a time, I got very good about ignoring my body's hungry and full signals. I got away with that because my focus was always on thoughts-- planning, plotting, outlining strategizing, imagining.

Binge Eating and Weight Loss Surgery

 
Binge eating, or bingeing, is defined as an episode of uncontrollable eating. During a binge eating episode, a person consumes large amounts of food. During the time the person is eating, he or she "spaces out" and loses track of how much is being consumed, or he or she simply cannot stop eating.

That doesn't mean that everyone who pigs out sometimes has a problem with bingeing. A binge eating disorder is not diagnosed unless the person experiences frequent episodes of binge eating that lead to physical or mental health problems. During the binge, or immediately after, the person with a binge eating disorder often feels significant guilt or even self-hatred. Yet unlike people with bulimia, people who binge make no efforts to "purge" such as vomiting, misusing laxatives, or over-exercising.

5 Things I Wish I'd Known Before My Gastric Sleeve

 
First of all, if you're considering weight loss surgery, don't let this post discourage you. I don't for one moment regret having a gastric sleeve. I'm slimmer and healthier right now than I have been in more than a decade, and it's a great feeling.

I hope, however, that this post does inform you. In spite of my surgeon's best efforts, I was somewhat naive when I had my procedure. If I could go back and have a talk with my pre-surgery self, there are a few things I would like to tell her.

Clothes

 
I very nearly had an embarrassing moment on Saturday. I had just found out that my favorite bookstore (Borders, natch) was closing, and I wanted to take advantage of the discounts they were offering before the axe fell. I put on my usual pair of blue jeans. Now, I outgrew blue jeans with buttons and zippers years ago. These puppies were held up by a piece of elastic around my over-sized belly. I topped it all off with a Siegfried and Roy t-shirt, and I was ready to go shopping.

I got to the store early and started looking around. At first I was so focused on the books that I didn't notice anything unusual. Then I saw another patron giving me an odd look and realized that I was having a problem with...slippage. That reliable piece of elastic wasn't tight around my stomach...in fact, it was more than halfway down my abdomen, leaving my midriff bare. Even if I have lost weight, that is not a good look for a 40+ year old woman.

Oh, What a Wonderful Weekend!

 
What a great weekend! My parents (pictured here at the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska) drove into town on Saturday afternoon. We met at Denny's for lunch. My mom said that as soon as I got out of the car, she could tell I'd lost weight. Over lunch, she and my dad raised their eyebrows as I managed to put away about half of an egg.

"Is that really all you're hungry for?" she said.

I nodded. In fact, I'd eaten about a bite too much and was fighting that terrible too-full feeling.

"You don't feel deprived? You used to love the desserts in here...?"

"I don't feel deprived one bit," I said, and meant it.

A Week of "Firsts" after Gastric Sleeve

 
After the great start to my week, things just kept on getting better. For the first time since the surgery, I was actually able to stay at work the entire week. Okay, so I took an office day today instead of going out to see clients, but the point is that I put in a 40-hour work week and actually felt almost human afterwards.

It was also a week of "firsts" teaching my body how to tolerate solid food again. On Monday, our hospice administrator took all of the social workers out to celebrate social work month. I ordered a plain hamburger without the bun, and was able to eat about half of it. God, it was good to taste hamburger again. Later this week, I tried a grilled chicken patty, and that went down okay, too.