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the hard part

dianeseattle

dianeseattle

Member
I'm snowed in and depressed. Got a call from the hospital last night, sharing test results from my Friday visit. Turns out I have e Coli in my bladder.

That's not as scary as it sounds, but they called in a scrip to my pharmacy to pick up today and it's not safe to drive to get there. It's so quiet here in seattle because no one is driving. Now, I understand people marveling at the fact that there have been more than 200 car crashes in the last 40 hours or so, because of the snow. And I understand people's awe at knowing schools are closed and people are working from home and no one is even walking, though we do see the occasional skier in the elevations.

But Seattle is a city of hills, seven hills, to be exact, just like Rome. And historically, racking up an annual snowfall of ZERO inches is the norm. And a lot of people who live here nowadays came from California or the East Coast, and for sure, the Californians don't have a clue how to drive in snow. They think with their all-wheel-drive cars and radial tires, they can take on these hills. But it's the elevation gain on each hill that has tires spinning and cars sliding back down. If I walk from my front door to the top of the first hill, I gain about 100 feet in elevation. And it's all uphill from there, to the highest point in Seattle, called (duh) High Point, where the elevation is about 522 feet.

We start at sea level, since we're on the Puget Sound, and downtown is a nightmare for people who cant drive a stick or generally don't drive all that well. So I stay off the streets when it snows. Even 2" of snow and this town grinds to a halt.

One of the accidents was a 30-car slip&pile-up on the 520 Bridge, Seattle's Floating Bridge that links the town to the Eastside, magic land, home of Microsoft & Nintendo and all that other stuff that brings people to live here. Downtown, Amazon s all over the place and there is endless construction going on everywhere.

So I can't go get my Rx because it's too risky. I was born here but lived in a snowy area for many years and learned to drive in the snow, though it took until summer for me to finish Driver's Ed and get my license. I'm not worried about me and my very good tires & AWD mini-SUV. It's the people who are going too fast around me and especially downhill who are going to smash into me. The photo here is last year, two different wrecks on my hill, 30 minutes apart, sliding off the street into a pit alongside my apartment building. The wall they landed against is my next-door neighbor.

2292


I wrote mostly because I learned that e-Coli is one of the most common bacteria that causes UTIs. I believe I most likely flared up with it here because of all the Romaine lettuce I've been buying lately and making all those pretty pictures of that I posted here.
2293


I usually buy mixed greens but lately have been wanting the hard bite of Romaine to contrast with the various ways I've been making chicken and using cucumbers.

Anyway, I'm in no danger of anything happening, since e-Coli lives in our bodies, so I'll wait for better weather & dryer streets before heading out. Luckily, I've got plenty of food... including Romaine lettuce.
 
Wow, I can't believe the TWO cars next to your apartment building! I live in upstate NY so we're expected to know how to drive in the snow. I forget that some area of the country don't face this often. I really hope that you can get out and get your Rx soon. Glad to hear that it shouldn't be a major thing to wait but I'm sure the sooner, the better.
 
It's nuts isn't it? The first car was occupied by my hiker neighbors, young man and young woman and his mother who they had just picked up at the airport. They walked away from it with no scratches. Then the second car was occupied by one of my neighbors in a separate building, and he also walked away but had injuries. I don't understand why people would ever want to go downhill, especially down a steep hill, when it is covered in snow.
 
dianeseattle said:
It's nuts isn't it? The first car was occupied by my hiker neighbors, young man and young woman and his mother who they had just picked up at the airport. They walked away from it with no scratches. Then the second car was occupied by one of my neighbors in a separate building, and he also walked away but had injuries. I don't understand why people would ever want to go downhill, especially down a steep hill, when it is covered in snow.
Click to expand...
Seriously! Damn!!!
 
dianeseattle said:
I'm snowed in.
Click to expand...

CHAPTER TWO

The E coli thing was important so I talked about it but that wasn't the real reason I started this post with this title, "the hard part."

Please bear with me because I'm going to write some stuff that assumes a lot of similar experience. And that's actually the opposite of what I should write about.

I spent a lot of time looking through our library of postings last night because hearing that I had detectable e-coli freaked me out. So I just read a lot of stuff and something really seemed to repeat itself. People were saying surgery was the easy part, the tool. It was the way you were going to live and eat afterward that would be the hard part.

I could not disagree more.

I had my surgery on August 20th, 2007. Believe it or not I had virtually no prep and no waiting time. The only thing that took time was my doctor's letter for approval reaching Medicare, explaining that I was a hundred pounds or more overweight and needed the surgery to prevent my inevitable diabetes, which had killed people in my family.

Other than one visit with a nutritionist to get a printout of my post-op diet, and a general meeting in my surgeon's office explaining how I would have to take two vitamins for the rest of my life, the only thing that was said was, "Try to lose a few pounds before the surgery."

A few weeks later I went under the knife.

In a way I think that having so few instructions is what really worked for me. And at the time that I did it, there wasn't an entire industry devoted to post-bariatric care, including protein concoctions of all kinds. I had RYGB and I had an open procedure which was a killer. I was in the hospital for I think three days, then sent home where I essentially took liquid pain meds and went to the bathroom and drank water and that was it. I had one extremely horrible episode of constipation that lasted for about 30 hours because I was taking opiates and not eating any greens that might help with digestion. I started my vitamins right away so I would not be malnourished. I had my 7 inch strip of staples taken out a week after my surgery which is really too soon, and I ended up having severe nerve damage in the left lower quadrant of my abdomen.

That lasted for several days, during which time I also force myself to get out of bed and drink broth and liquid Jell-O, which I highly recommend and then I was on to the Magic Milk phase. The recipe is in the postings here. Do a search for it.

Using magic milk I made

pudding of all flavors, Malt-O-Meal made with milk instead of water, cream soups and I don't know what else, but it was all delicious.

I ate soft foods for a long time, but that was my choice. I enjoyed the Comfort aspect of mashed potatoes and creamy soups and bowls of cereal.

I moved really really slowly, but I made sure that I kept moving. And as a result I lost 35 lbs the first month and 25 lbs the second. Then I lost 15 lbs here and 5 lbs there and then I hit the 6-month plateau. I went from 241 to 175 and stayed there.

I had started working out at the YMCA because I wanted to start hiking. And I wanted to learn how to swim. And I wanted to increase my weight loss, accelerated a long and I wanted my flabby skin to have some muscle under it so it didn't look so bad.

10 months later, I hiked a mountain to the elevation of 6600 ft. I had never done anything like that. It was the most amazing experience I ever had. And later that summer I went and hiked it again. Then I took a solo 7 Day canoe trip around Ross Lake in the North Cascades, camping out on little Islands, foraging for firewood, cooking over the fire and eating protein bars in order to make sure I was meeting my 50 to 70 grams of protein everyday.

My nutritionist gave me a formula which I followed strictly. She said for every 10 calories of anything that I ate, I needed to obtain one gram of protein out of it. So a 270 calorie MET-RX bar gave me 27 grams of protein. I had been using a different protein bar that tasted awful. But because I was on the move all the time oh, I did not have time to cook or to sit down. I was drinking a ton of water and along with the high calorie and protein count of the bars, I was getting a lot of nutrients. I also took a lot more supplements than most people do because I wanted total coverage of all my vitamins and minerals.

I had also been recruited to be part of a study of bariatric surgery outcomes all right. This was super awesome and conducted through the University of Washington. Once a year they put me through a battery of tests, weighed me, checked my fat percentage, and took several vials of blood to measure what kind of nutrition I was getting.

I saw my surgeon monthly and before I would meet with him I would always meet with his nurse who would examine me and make sure that I was complying with the post bariatric diet and supplements.

By the end of October, 14 months after surgery, I had lost 115 solid pounds and there was no drama to any of it. I ate everything that tasted good to me and made sure that it was served in a form that was easy for me to eat, and in an amount my pouch could handle.

Although it is true I'm a good cook and baker, my success in finding interesting meals to eat was really more a result of my inquisitiveness. I LOVE food and there was no way that I wasn't going to find a way to eat everything I wanted to eat, just like everybody else, but just eat way less of it.

What I learned and why post-op eating was not the hard part was that I could make food work for me and I could freely enjoy it in a way that I have never enjoyed it before. Here's the assumption. When you were fat and you were eating tons and tons of bad food oh, you were not enjoying food. You were not celebrating food. You were not even bothering to do anything more then tearing off the top of a bag of potato chips or opening up a can of chili or spooning large wads of ice cream into your mouth, all washed down with big gulps and super big gulps from the 7-Eleven store. The idea that you would not be able to eat like this again which spun you into a depression was upside down thinking on your part.

The fact of the matter is, you can eat delicious food every single day of your life after surgery. You do need to learn to cook. There's no way around that. But with a little research you can figure out how. So you can have a delicious but very small steak with a delicious baked potato alongside that you top with butter-flavored Pam and a lot of herbs like Dill. And you can have a giant salad to go with this and put things in your salad like little croutons and they will not make you fat.

For some reason even though I was raised by the biggest Hicks from the sticks, I was raised on Emily post, and my mother demanded that we write bread-and-butter letters and said please and thank you and sat quietly with our legs crossed at the ankles and did everything that the elite did in polite Society, even though we were just very poor kids living on a Hardscrabble Farm, wearing the same shoes for a year at a time, 1 nice dress that my mom would order from Montgomery Ward and that dress was reserved for Sunday, and one dress for the rest of the week that we wore everyday to school, and a few pair of pedal pushers and t-shirts for rolling around and working on the farm.

My mom really didn't want to be seen as inferior and I think that's why she was so strict and made us study manners. It was kind of brilliant actually. I knew where the fork and knife went on the side of your plates when I was 7 years old. We were required to set the table properly and if we failed, we did so at our peril.

So after losing all the weight I needed to lose, I worked on my table manners again. I stopped eating on my bed or in front of TV and sat down with a placemat and a lovely place setting and cut my meat the European way, setting down my utensils between small bites, and chewing until it was all liquefied and went down easily.

I embraced the Japanese philosophy that you eat with your eyes , so every time I dished up my plate it was a work of art.

I shopped at thrift stores to buy beautiful China and gravy boats and serving dishes and gorgeous silverware and stemware. If you think this sounds a little bit like a little kid having a tea party, you are right. It didn't matter if anything matched, even though I did buy a lot of Fiestaware. When I set the table I wanted it to look like I spilled a box of crayons on it.

I also splurged on flowers and plants for centerpieces on every table and occasionally I would have a candlelight dinner.

So I have to ask you, after reading this post , what do you think was the hard part? Was it the misery of my life, stuffing garbage down my pie hole and wearing clothes that were the size of camping tents? Or was it the genteel life I was able to adopt after I lost the weight that made me feel like I was living in a privileged class?

Girls and boys I am telling you, it is practically subterfuge to enter into this life of etiquettes and intelligence where food was something you dined on, not something you gorged on.

I am not dismissing your eating disorder, which is your constant enemy. That's between you and your therapist. And you have to make the decision to vaporize your eating disorder from your brain because that is the hard part. It's not the new way you get to eat. It's the old way you want to eat. That's the hard part.

I'm here to tell you to rejoice in food, because food is delicious and nutritious and there is no reason why you can't try every food on Earth and taste it and love it. But Cheetos? Come on. There are so many chemicals and nasty dead insect and fake cheese and addictive chemicals in a Cheeto that it is not a treat. It is poison.

The hard part is if you decide to stay fat and unhealthy and die a death that is most likely prolonged and painful because so many of your organs are going to fail. The hard part is clinging to your old life. The easy part is giving up your old life.

So if you are pre Surgical and you have doubts and fears, do what you're doing right now and ask for support. Then be present in the moment here and be future-oriented and think about what you are going to eat and how you are going to succeed and what a great life you are going to have. Anyone who calls that the hard part is ruled by an evil eating disorder that will do anything it can to make him fail.
 
Brenda2010 said:
I'm not a winter person, I can't wait to escape NY when I retire!!!
Click to expand...
I’ve been to New York twice ( just Times Square ) and I loved it once n the summer and once in the winter but I had fun . I know only Times Square . My wife and I did walk from Times Square to where 9-11 happened and we went to the Statue of Liberty. I guess if you live there long enough like every where else you get sick of living there
 
I love Seattle that’s my spot. I love the weather, but my body doesn’t. Your know Dianeseattle if sounds like you have lived a fabulous life. And its only starting to take off again. You do so many fun thinks. I can’t wait to get fully mobile again. I will have to meet you down on pier 69
 
Yes, sometimes I forget that I have lived Fabulous Life. Nicelady, you don't live in Seattle do you? I would love to meet you. And if you don't live here just make sure that you let me know anytime you going to be in town. I'll pick you up at the airport I'll meet you anywhere and we will have a blast!
 
Bill S. said:
I’ve been to New York twice ( just Times Square ) and I loved it once n the summer and once in the winter but I had fun . I know only Times Square . My wife and I did walk from Times Square to where 9-11 happened and we went to the Statue of Liberty. I guess if you live there long enough like every where else you get sick of living there
Click to expand...
I live 2 hours north of Manhattan, outside of Albany. It is fun driving down to be around the action but I don't do it often enough.
 
dianeseattle said:
CHAPTER TWO

The E coli thing was important so I talked about it but that wasn't the real reason I started this post with this title, "the hard part."

Please bear with me because I'm going to write some stuff that assumes a lot of similar experience. And that's actually the opposite of what I should write about.

I spent a lot of time looking through our library of postings last night because hearing that I had detectable e-coli freaked me out. So I just read a lot of stuff and something really seemed to repeat itself. People were saying surgery was the easy part, the tool. It was the way you were going to live and eat afterward that would be the hard part.

I could not disagree more.

I had my surgery on August 20th, 2007. Believe it or not I had virtually no prep and no waiting time. The only thing that took time was my doctor's letter for approval reaching Medicare, explaining that I was a hundred pounds or more overweight and needed the surgery to prevent my inevitable diabetes, which had killed people in my family.

Other than one visit with a nutritionist to get a printout of my post-op diet, and a general meeting in my surgeon's office explaining how I would have to take two vitamins for the rest of my life, the only thing that was said was, "Try to lose a few pounds before the surgery."

A few weeks later I went under the knife.

In a way I think that having so few instructions is what really worked for me. And at the time that I did it, there wasn't an entire industry devoted to post-bariatric care, including protein concoctions of all kinds. I had RYGB and I had an open procedure which was a killer. I was in the hospital for I think three days, then sent home where I essentially took liquid pain meds and went to the bathroom and drank water and that was it. I had one extremely horrible episode of constipation that lasted for about 30 hours because I was taking opiates and not eating any greens that might help with digestion. I started my vitamins right away so I would not be malnourished. I had my 7 inch strip of staples taken out a week after my surgery which is really too soon, and I ended up having severe nerve damage in the left lower quadrant of my abdomen.

That lasted for several days, during which time I also force myself to get out of bed and drink broth and liquid Jell-O, which I highly recommend and then I was on to the Magic Milk phase. The recipe is in the postings here. Do a search for it.

Using magic milk I made

pudding of all flavors, Malt-O-Meal made with milk instead of water, cream soups and I don't know what else, but it was all delicious.

I ate soft foods for a long time, but that was my choice. I enjoyed the Comfort aspect of mashed potatoes and creamy soups and bowls of cereal.

I moved really really slowly, but I made sure that I kept moving. And as a result I lost 35 lbs the first month and 25 lbs the second. Then I lost 15 lbs here and 5 lbs there and then I hit the 6-month plateau. I went from 241 to 175 and stayed there.

I had started working out at the YMCA because I wanted to start hiking. And I wanted to learn how to swim. And I wanted to increase my weight loss, accelerated a long and I wanted my flabby skin to have some muscle under it so it didn't look so bad.

10 months later, I hiked a mountain to the elevation of 6600 ft. I had never done anything like that. It was the most amazing experience I ever had. And later that summer I went and hiked it again. Then I took a solo 7 Day canoe trip around Ross Lake in the North Cascades, camping out on little Islands, foraging for firewood, cooking over the fire and eating protein bars in order to make sure I was meeting my 50 to 70 grams of protein everyday.

My nutritionist gave me a formula which I followed strictly. She said for every 10 calories of anything that I ate, I needed to obtain one gram of protein out of it. So a 270 calorie MET-RX bar gave me 27 grams of protein. I had been using a different protein bar that tasted awful. But because I was on the move all the time oh, I did not have time to cook or to sit down. I was drinking a ton of water and along with the high calorie and protein count of the bars, I was getting a lot of nutrients. I also took a lot more supplements than most people do because I wanted total coverage of all my vitamins and minerals.

I had also been recruited to be part of a study of bariatric surgery outcomes all right. This was super awesome and conducted through the University of Washington. Once a year they put me through a battery of tests, weighed me, checked my fat percentage, and took several vials of blood to measure what kind of nutrition I was getting.

I saw my surgeon monthly and before I would meet with him I would always meet with his nurse who would examine me and make sure that I was complying with the post bariatric diet and supplements.

By the end of October, 14 months after surgery, I had lost 115 solid pounds and there was no drama to any of it. I ate everything that tasted good to me and made sure that it was served in a form that was easy for me to eat, and in an amount my pouch could handle.

Although it is true I'm a good cook and baker, my success in finding interesting meals to eat was really more a result of my inquisitiveness. I LOVE food and there was no way that I wasn't going to find a way to eat everything I wanted to eat, just like everybody else, but just eat way less of it.

What I learned and why post-op eating was not the hard part was that I could make food work for me and I could freely enjoy it in a way that I have never enjoyed it before. Here's the assumption. When you were fat and you were eating tons and tons of bad food oh, you were not enjoying food. You were not celebrating food. You were not even bothering to do anything more then tearing off the top of a bag of potato chips or opening up a can of chili or spooning large wads of ice cream into your mouth, all washed down with big gulps and super big gulps from the 7-Eleven store. The idea that you would not be able to eat like this again which spun you into a depression was upside down thinking on your part.

The fact of the matter is, you can eat delicious food every single day of your life after surgery. You do need to learn to cook. There's no way around that. But with a little research you can figure out how. So you can have a delicious but very small steak with a delicious baked potato alongside that you top with butter-flavored Pam and a lot of herbs like Dill. And you can have a giant salad to go with this and put things in your salad like little croutons and they will not make you fat.

For some reason even though I was raised by the biggest Hicks from the sticks, I was raised on Emily post, and my mother demanded that we write bread-and-butter letters and said please and thank you and sat quietly with our legs crossed at the ankles and did everything that the elite did in polite Society, even though we were just very poor kids living on a Hardscrabble Farm, wearing the same shoes for a year at a time, 1 nice dress that my mom would order from Montgomery Ward and that dress was reserved for Sunday, and one dress for the rest of the week that we wore everyday to school, and a few pair of pedal pushers and t-shirts for rolling around and working on the farm.

My mom really didn't want to be seen as inferior and I think that's why she was so strict and made us study manners. It was kind of brilliant actually. I knew where the fork and knife went on the side of your plates when I was 7 years old. We were required to set the table properly and if we failed, we did so at our peril.

So after losing all the weight I needed to lose, I worked on my table manners again. I stopped eating on my bed or in front of TV and sat down with a placemat and a lovely place setting and cut my meat the European way, setting down my utensils between small bites, and chewing until it was all liquefied and went down easily.

I embraced the Japanese philosophy that you eat with your eyes , so every time I dished up my plate it was a work of art.

I shopped at thrift stores to buy beautiful China and gravy boats and serving dishes and gorgeous silverware and stemware. If you think this sounds a little bit like a little kid having a tea party, you are right. It didn't matter if anything matched, even though I did buy a lot of Fiestaware. When I set the table I wanted it to look like I spilled a box of crayons on it.

I also splurged on flowers and plants for centerpieces on every table and occasionally I would have a candlelight dinner.

So I have to ask you, after reading this post , what do you think was the hard part? Was it the misery of my life, stuffing garbage down my pie hole and wearing clothes that were the size of camping tents? Or was it the genteel life I was able to adopt after I lost the weight that made me feel like I was living in a privileged class?

Girls and boys I am telling you, it is practically subterfuge to enter into this life of etiquettes and intelligence where food was something you dined on, not something you gorged on.

I am not dismissing your eating disorder, which is your constant enemy. That's between you and your therapist. And you have to make the decision to vaporize your eating disorder from your brain because that is the hard part. It's not the new way you get to eat. It's the old way you want to eat. That's the hard part.

I'm here to tell you to rejoice in food, because food is delicious and nutritious and there is no reason why you can't try every food on Earth and taste it and love it. But Cheetos? Come on. There are so many chemicals and nasty dead insect and fake cheese and addictive chemicals in a Cheeto that it is not a treat. It is poison.

The hard part is if you decide to stay fat and unhealthy and die a death that is most likely prolonged and painful because so many of your organs are going to fail. The hard part is clinging to your old life. The easy part is giving up your old life.

So if you are pre Surgical and you have doubts and fears, do what you're doing right now and ask for support. Then be present in the moment here and be future-oriented and think about what you are going to eat and how you are going to succeed and what a great life you are going to have. Anyone who calls that the hard part is ruled by an evil eating disorder that will do anything it can to make him fail.
Click to expand...
To: canecorso81 and anyone else who is pre-op and it looks like you're going to be testing now and will have surgery soon.

Don't worry. The surgery is the easy part.

The pre-op diet is the hard part. I could never have done it and I am so grateful it was not required.

And for most of us the REALLY hard part is dealing with your eating disorder after you have healed. Your eating disorder is the thing you should be most afraid of because that is the thing that is going torture and try to sabotage you.

But the surgery and any incidental pain you might have while you're healing is a breeze compared to trying to eat normal food in normal amounts.

As to smoking, I believe that in cities and metropolitan areas, even non-smokers take enough poisonous smog into their lungs in a day to be the equivalent of 1/2 pack to one pack of cigarettes.

But, do quit. I don't know what you smoke or how much you smoke but the big problem is that the smoke deposits tar on your very delicate lung tissues. That causes a cellular weakness and it adds a dimension of danger to general anesthesia because you can't get enough oxygen into your lungs as the anesthesiologist is monitoring you.

So quit now and get your doctor's help to do it using one of those anti-smoking medicines that's available now so you don't suffer. And ask for breathing exercises that will help you to strengthen your lungs.

You might even invest in a steamer or vaporizer where you suck moisture into your lungs to loosen any adhesions or wads of tar. You will cough up the sputum and that will help clean your lungs. It's not a perfect solution, and usually takes about a year to rehabilitate your lungs, but your surgeon will make the decision about how dangerous it might be for you to be under general anesthesia when you have just quit smoking, or if you are still smoking.

Be honest and get honest answers. Submit to breathing tests. That is the only way to make sure you feel calm enough to get this surgery.
 
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