Jackson Pratt and my 1st post surgery follow up

Today I had my first follow-up visit at the hospital since my surgery. The visit lasted about 20 minutes, and overall it went very well. The big thing that I was happy about was that I got my JP drain removed.

The picture you see below is called a Jackson-Pratt (JP) drain. It's a special tube that prevents body fluid from collecting near the site of your surgery. The drain pulls this fluid (by suction) into a bulb. The bulb can then be emptied and the fluid inside measured.

At first, this fluid is bloody. Then, as a wound heals, the fluid changes to light pink, light yellow, or clear. The drain stays in place until less than 30 cc (about 2 tablespoons) of fluid can be collected in a 24-hour period.

So now that I have it removed, I have a brand-new hole on the side of my stomach covered by a new bandage. I'm to keep it on for a day, replace it tomorrow with a new one, and by Friday the hole should be healed enough that I can remove the bandage.

This is good because I had the rest of my bandages removed today, which I was grateful for as they were starting to itch.

The other news I received today was that I'm allowed to move to the next stage of my diet, and by this weekend I was told I could go to the soft food stage of the diet. While I'm really happy to hear this, and I'm very much looking forward to eating real food again for the first time in what seems like forever, I have to be wary of the one side effect my doctor told me about today. That being: that until my body and my mind learn just how small my new stomach is, my body will tell myself I am covert you cannot buy throwing up. So, if I eat one or two mouthfuls too much, it will probably come back up within about five then. Not very appealing.

Lastly, I got weighed today, and I lost 12 pounds since the day of my surgery last Monday :-)

My one week anniversary.

One week ago today I had my surgery. On Wednesday I came home. By Friday I was off my pain medicine, out going for walks, going to see friends, and going to the movies. I'm not sure if the average person recover this quickly, but I am actually shocked with how well I am feeling after the first week. And, it's not just that I'm feeling good physically, I'm actually feeling good mentally as well. I don't mean to imply that I was sad or depressed before the surgery, I was not. I just mean to say, that in the last three or four days, I've really been in an exceptionally good mood.

But feeling this good does have its own set of problems. Right now the biggest problem is with my diet. There is an approximate four week transition for me to go back onto regular normal food.

This transition it in four stages, with stage one being the clear fluid diet, which I did while I was in the hospital.

Stage two is the full fluid diet. This is the stage I am right now.

Stage III is the puréed diet, which is as appetizing as the name would suggest. It essentially mean I'm eating puréed foods, soft foods, kind of like baby food I suppose. The good thing about this day, and the food I am looking forward to most, is scrambled eggs.

The final stage in the soft food diet. After this day, I can have normal everyday people food. Just not a lot of it :-)

My biggest challenge is, because I'm feeling so good, I want to hurry the process along and skip stages. However, I'm going to be good, and not move to the next day until my doctor tell me I can. All in all though, it should be about three more weeks before I can have normal food once again.

My next appointment at the hospital is on Wednesday. After that appointment, I'll post some more, and I will probably talk about more how much I weighed before the surgery, on the day of the surgery, and what my aspirations are.

Also, I friend of mine gave me the idea to start taking pictures of myself before the surgery and every few weeks or so after the surgery. I'm not sure if or when I'm going to post those, maybe when I have a few more so that the comparison vis-a-vis the weight loss will be more noticeable.

The Story so Far.

Well, this will be my first blog entry. it's been forever since I kept a blog, and I'm sure I am a bit out of practice. I guess the best place to start will be the beginning.

 In December 2009, I decided I needed to do something about my way. They did not have a family doctor, because I only recently moved to Ottawa, I went to a walk-in clinic, found a doctor and ask for a referral for weight loss surgery. in about February 2010 I got the referral to the Ottawa Hospital.

Fast forward one year now March 2011, and I had my first meeting at the Ottawa Hospital. This was a fourth of pre-surgery class to let people know about the risks of surgery, and to allow people to make an informed decision ask you whether they wanted to proceed with surgery or some other course of action. After this meeting I was told that I needed the surgery and I should be fast tracked to have this surgery. I was told that I could either have surgery in Toronto, where I live now, or have surgery in Toronto, which should take place a lot faster than Ottawa. I obviously chose Toronto.

This turned out to be my first mistake. I met the surgeon in Toronto, and after about three minutes of him looking at my file and maybe 5 minutes to me he basically said I needed to lose 50 pounds before I can do the surgery. He then sent me on my way. This was in May or June 2011. This also started my adventures with Optifast. I'm not going to talk much about Optifast here, except to say that it works if you stick with it, and for me it was incredibly hard to stick with it because of the side effects tht it gave me. After about nine months struggling with Optifast I had lost about 45 pounds which I thought would be close enough to have surgery in Toronto.

 This turned out to be my second mistake. Have it turned out, the doctor did not want me to lose 50 pounds, rather it was 60. So instead of being 5 pounds away from my goal I was now 15 pounds away from my goal. The nurse practitioners at the Ottawa hospital decided that the restriction that the surgeon in Toronto put Honwee were a little unrealistic, and they referred me to a third inning on tour. I readily said yes to this. After seeing the surgeon, I got a phone call about three days later, and a surgery date was set for one month after that.I was initially told that the ideal surgery for me would be a Roux-en-Y gastric bypass operation. But I was told that this may not be technically possible, and that a gastric sleeve procedure would be done if the Roux-en-Y could not be done. the advantage to doing the gastric sleeve procedure is that it will help me lose a lot of weight, and if my weight loss plateau, I can go back and do a full Roux-en-Y procedure at a later date.

 I went into the hospital Monday morning, and got home yesterday afternoon, having had the gastric sleeve procedure done.