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 :-)