Gastric Bypass Part 2 Day 1

First, a synopsis of Day 6 of Part 1, since I skipped it: pretty much the same as Day 5. The multivitamin water had to be diluted to 1/3 or 1/4 strength to be palatable, so it's better for me than Mio but there's no way I can drink enough for it to be equal to my daily vitamin needs. The chocolate whey protein powder is FANTASTIC.

Now, on to Day 1 of Phase 2 Gastric Bypass diet: Pureed and soft foods! My surgeon says I'm doing well, and was pleased that I've been able to do the 60-80 grams of protein this past week. She said I can start Phase 2, with 1 tablespoon of soft or pureed food as a "meal" 3 x daily. No drinking for 30 mins before or after. The picture above is of a demitasse spoon and a spice dish with a tablespoon of lowfat small curd cottage cheese, which is the first thing I have eaten for a week. It was delicious.
Next week, I can advance to 2 whole tablespoons per meal! And the week after that, 3 tablespoons -- if I can tolerate it. I'm supposed to take as close to 30 minutes to eat as possible, and I came pretty close today, I think. Mike ate a whole foot long deli sandwich in the time it took me to eat my cottage cheese.
I was so happy when my surgeon said I could progress to this phase. In Star Wars The Old Republic MMO, there is a Party Jawa that you can deploy, who circles you in flight being held aloft by some balloons, with the sound of party favors being tweeted and confetti flying around. THAT'S how happy I was about this, and only wish I could deploy the Jawa IRL.
My surgeon also explained that I can't do a lot because I'm not eating enough to be able to sustain a lot of activity, and was pleased with the activity which I have been doing: walking out to the front lot, scattering scratch grain and loosing the chickens, then gathering eggs. I can also drive if I need to now, so long as I'm not taking narcotic med, which I only take at night and will probably stop taking the end of this week.
I can sit at my computer for a long time, and I should probably knock off the afternoon nap, but I really like afternoon naps and am so happy that I have time off to take them for awhile. I am also VERY glad that I do not have to go to work and try to manage any of this, because it is taking up most of my day. As a bonus, my knees don't hurt and my thumb joints have only twinged a few times -- not constantly, as they do when I'm hauling the bag in/out of my car and up/down stairs all day.
I don't have any idea how much weight I've lost. My PCP on Monday said 8 lbs since they last saw me in late February. My weight today was 286, and that's about where it was when I was doing the low-carb diet back before Christmas. So, I'm calling 286 as a starting weight -- the past week has been recovery and healing as a focus.

Gastric Bypass Part 1 Day 5

Went to see my PCP today and my blood pressure is still high, so he prescribed a lower-dose prescription of Amlodipine, which we agreed I would crush and add to my protein drink every day. I'll have it rechecked in a month.
While at Costco, one of my favorite places in the world, I decided to get the big bag of chocolate-flavored whey protein powder and some almond milk, and I found a vitamin powder that you mix with 16 oz of water, called EcoDrink Complete Multivitamin. I'll try to drink 3 daily, but it does have 50 to 100% of 32 vitamins and minerals. Unfortunately, not Iron. I tried the Children's chewables, and they just taste awful to me. Too strong and chalky. My gummi vitamins are great, but I fear them getting stuck in my pouch opening, even if I chew them to mush -- although I'll probably resume them when I can advance to the pureed diet.
So, I'll probably survive for another week, even though I hope I'll be able to advance my diet on Wednesday when I see the bariatric surgeon. But the chocolate protein drink does not taste strong at all, the liquid vitamins are tolerable and seem safer than gummi's, and I'm making a duck broth from the meaty carcasses left over from the Feast that Mike did, with some carrots, onions, and garlic thrown in. I'm going to strain all that out, obviously, but it will enrich the broth and I can use my Himalayan salt and some pepper to season it, and it won't be as bad as bullion. I made more than enough for a week or two.
Feeling about like I did on Day 3, and unfortunately also had another day where I'm sure I pushed myself too  hard (walking in Costco is a lot of exercise post-op). Keeping an eye on the color of my urine, which was darker when I was in the hospital on IV fluids, so I'm thinking I'm fairly well-hydrated. Whew. This is hard work! I'm so glad I took a month off from work. Maybe next week, with Mike's help, I can get some compost into the raised beds and plant some turnips, kale, onions and beets.

Gastric Bypass Part 1 Day 4

Beginning to get really tired of the liquids! But I can do it. I overdid yesterday: cleaned bed linens and made bed in guest room, cleaned kitchen, cleaned pots/pans/bowls that Mike left from his Feast prep, dusted. And as it turned out, the overnight guests decided that they didn't want to stress me out, so they ended up staying at a motel after the Feast!
I keep waking up at 2 or 3 am with a headache. Last night I took a dose of Lortab and that sure did help. I think that might be what I do from now on, despite my resolve not to take a narcotic pain reliever if I'm not having pain. Cause a headache that wakes you up in the middle of the night IS pain. I'm a bit concerned that my oxygen level might be dropping when I sleep, but it's one of those things that I don't really want to know for sure at this point.
So, today has been pretty much the same. Feeling ok, trying to stay hydrated. I might try Patti's Mio ice pop later. And tomorrow is appointment with my PCP for b/p check.

Gastric Bypass Part 1 Day 3

Three days post-op, and feeling MUCH better. Pretty sure I'm going to survive now. Bowels are working fine, since late yesterday. And it was a big psychological boost to get all my protein and water in yesterday!
Patti brought me daffodils from her yard, which are just beautiful and amazingly cheery. Jeff and Patti came over yesterday evening and stuffed dates, and Jeff ate the Kimchi and pronounced it good.
I was able to chew up my two children's vitamins this morning, but they were not tasty. The calcium chew WAS tasty. I even took a wild chance and mixed my protein with buttermilk this morning, as I'm allowed to mix it with skim milk and buttermilk is skim milk (really, it is). It was not as tasty as when I tried it prior to surgery, but I'm sure the extra calcium and good probiotics in it will be helpful, so I'm going to keep doing it.

Mike is finally out the door, about 2 hours late, as usual. I hope his Feast will go ok, and that he and his crew  can catch up. He has a really hard time doing things ahead of time and preparing well. He's using my surgery as an excuse, but in my opinion, he would be running 2 hours late even if I hadn't had surgery. I think if he uses the ovens at the hall, in addition to the smokers he has, he will be able to get the meat cooked. He also has two very experienced cooks helping him, and hopefully they won't be too hard on him.

My job over the next 8 hours is to clean up the kitchen and make a fresh bed in the guest room for some Feast guests that traveled a long distance to attend and would like to not have to drive back tonight late. Yes, it's a bit early for that, but my plan is to do what I can, then take the doggies into the master bedroom and call it a night -- not going to entertain, and I think that will be understandable.

Day Three has been GOOD.

Gastric Bypass Series Part 1 Days 1 and 2

This is my tummy, which usually isn't quite this round. You can see two of the six small incisions I'm now sporting on my tummy. There are two more above this area, and one on each side. The incisions are very small, and only slightly sore. My tummy is swollen, because a lot went on in there 2 days ago. I had a gastric bypass surgery, and my surgeon also repaired a hiatal hernia and did a biopsy of my liver, which is fatty. She says that the liver problem will likely resolve as I lose weight. I didn't know I had either of those problems when I went in to surgery, but neither surprises me -- excess weight causes both.
My surgery went well otherwise. The staff at my hospital were friendly and supportive. The anesthesiologist put an oxygen mask on me, gave me some medicine in my IV, and the next thing I knew I was waking up in Recovery. As soon as I woke up, I decided to go right back to sleep, because I was feeling nauseated. There was a nurse sitting at a computer right beside me. After several times of waking up/going back to sleep, the nurse happened to notice when I woke up and spoke to me, and I told her I was nauseated, and she gave me medication. That helped, somewhat. Before they transported me to my room, I asked for more medication, because I was fearful the moving and bumping would make me more nauseated. I had gone into surgery at around 10:30am, and I got to my room around 3pm. Vital signs were taken. My RN removed my oxygen, but I was still dozing off/on and an NA put my oxygen back on when she noticed that my oxygen sats dropped into the 80's while I was sleeping. I also had a urinary catheter in place, and IV fluid running into the same IV that they'd placed prior to surgery. They had given me some Ceftin in that IV during surgery and recovery, and now I was getting Tylenol (yes, IV!) and either lactated Ringers or Normal Saline. I also had a Morphine pump with a button that I could push every 6 minutes for a small dose of morpine. I used it a bit for that first night in the hospital. There was pain, but it was mostly in my shoulder area and I think it is from the air they use to poof up your abdomen to do the surgery. It's still there, 2 days later, but not as bothersome. I needed help to get all my tubes and IV lines squared away so that I could walk in the hallway, which I did twice on that first night. I was a little dizzy the first time when I stood up, but it went away quickly, and I didn't walk until it passed. Mike stayed with me until 4:30pm, then he left to make the hour drive back home to feed the animals and lock up the chickens. He came back at 7:30pm and then left again at 9:30pm when we both agreed that the staff was taking good care of me. I pushed my morphine button and went to sleep, woke up briefly around 2am, pushed the button and went back to sleep, woke up when the lab came to get some blood at 5:30am, then dozed off again until 7:30am when my surgeon came in and looked at the incisions and asked how I was doing. She told me that I would likely be going home later that day, and we briefly discussed the hiatal hernia and fatty liver. I dozed off again, and Mike was there. The staff brought in sugar-free sorbet, sugar-free protein drink in fruit flavors, broth and water. My RN wrote on the board in my room that I was to try for 30 mls an hour x 2 hours, then 60mls an hour x 2 hours, then 9 mls an hour x 2 hours, and finally 120mls. I could only comfortably do 60 mls. I can STILL only comfortably do 60 mls today. If I drink more than 2 sips every 10 minutes, it feels very uncomfortable and full and the pain in my shoulders gets worse. They wished that I would pass gas, and I STILL haven't! I do burp frequently. Yesterday was pretty much a blur of drinking, drinking, drinking. I walked again. My daughter Jess came and helped me with the drinking and braided my hair after Mike left to prepare for an event he is cooking for tomorrow. After a couple hours, she went home, and I napped again. I discovered that broth did NOT taste at all good. At about 2pm, the RN came in and said that my surgeon said it was ok for me to go home. I was able to reach Mike by about 4 pm, as he was in the store and his phone didn't work until he got out of the store. Meanwhile, the RN insisted I take a dose of oral Lortab for pain before my trip home, even though I didn't really have that much pain. I was worried it would take up too much room in my new stomach, but she reassured me and it was ok. I took off my hospital gown and put on my jeans and T shirt (jeans were not a good choice, and I'd recommend sweat pants or yoga pants instead). I packed up the hospital stuff: basin, emesis basin, protein drinks and water bottles, Blistex for my lips, little toothpaste tubes. They throw this stuff out, and I figured I could use it for something. When Mike got there at around 5pm, we called for Transport and they put me on a transport chair and whisked me out to the Durango. I didn't get a chance to say good-bye to the staff. It's a busy floor, and they were all off helping other patients.
The drive home was unremarkable. Mike chose the least winding route, which probably helped a lot. I was entirely comfortable. When I got home, I walked a little bit around the house, found a bottle to put my drink in, and mixed up a batch of protein drink. Mike had the kitchen and dining area pretty much filled with stuff for his cooking event, and I figured that was enough excitement for one day and went to bed with my protein drink. Every time I woke up, I went to the bathroom and rinsed my mouth out, then drank two sips of protein drink. At about 2 am, my mouth was really yucky and after I rinsed it I drank 4 sips of water, and my stomach protested immediately. I walked a little, burped, and went back to bed. Mike came in around 7am, and I asked him to fill the vaporizer, as I think that makes it easier to breathe and my mouth doesn't get as yucky. Sure enough, by 9 am I didn't feel nearly as congested and my mouth wasn't so horrible. I got up, checked Facebook briefly and posted that I was alive, made my day's worth of protein drink and another bottle of water, and began sipping. Took a nap between 11:30 and 1pm, then came back to the computer to post this. All in all, I feel like I've been hit by a truck, but it's not necessarily PAIN. The soreness to my belly is entirely tolerable. The worst of it is not being able to drink much. I rinse my mouth a lot, which helps. I think I'll feel much better when I'm able to either pass gas or have a BM. My goal for the rest of the day is to finish my protein drink, check Facebook, and maybe stuff some dates for Mike later if I can tolerate that. Even looking at food is hard, to be truthful. Although yesterday I did have some thoughts about refried beans, which won't happen for weeks. I did try sugar-free Jello in the hospital, and it tasted fine but didn't seem to leave the pouch well, so I'm sticking with protein drink and water for now.

Fermented Tea???

About a month ago, around the same time I was making the kraut and kimchi, I became intrigued with Kombucha Tea. I headed down to the Nugget Market in El Dorado Hills, which is a remarkable supermarket that stocks raw milk and organic foods in addition to conventional food industry stuff. Sure enough, they had raw Kombucha Tea.

At the time, Miach had some GI thing happening and I suspected he needed some good microflora, so I bought 3 bottles of the Kombucha Tea and made him drink one. I also drank one (not bad...) and the third I saved for the live cultures.

In doing some research, it seems that Mother of Vinegar and Kombucha Mother are pretty much the same mix of organisms that form a leathery, rubbery disk that covers the top of your fermenting juice or tea. This blob is called a SCOBY: Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast. The main bacteria is Acetobacter and the yeast is wild yeast from the environment. Now, I have a real admiration for the wild yeast that live in my geographic area. I have a wild yeast sourdough that is absolute gangbusters. It can be in the back of the 'fridge for months, untouched, and yet you can feed it some flour and water and it will snap into action. It raises bread dough almost as quickly as commercial yeast. In traditional San Francisco sourdough, the tartness of the bread is very important. This is NOT that kind of sourdough. This is more the kind of sourdough that people have been making bread out of for thousands of years, and it produces bread that is indistinguishable from bread made with Fleischmann's Yeast or any other commercial yeast. But it's LOCAL yeast! So, I had a lot of hopefulness that I could end up with a very viable and productive Kombucha SCOBY, if I could just get it started out well.

The directions for making your own Kombucha SCOBY were to mix 1 part Kombucha Tea with 3 parts sweetened tea; put it into a large non-reactive (glass, ceramic or food-grade plastic) container with a large surface to volume area (not a wine bottle, but a canister or bucket) and stir it like crazy getting plenty of air into it, then covering it with a thin, medium-weave fabric to keep out bugs but let in air and yeast. I took it a step further, and figuring since Mother of Vinegar and Kombuch mother were virtually the same thing, I dug around in my cabinet and found my bottle of Bragg's Natural Apple Cider Vinegar with The Mother. Sure enough, a SCOBY had formed on the top. I had to pour the whole bottle into a glass pint measuring cup to get the SCOBY out, because it had a narrow neck. I tore off about half of it, and put the rest and the vinegar back into the bottle. I used a large glass storage canister from IKEA as my fermentation vessel, cleaning it with soap and water first. Then I put the 16 oz bottle of commercial raw Kombucha tea from Nugget into the canister, threw the vinegar SCOBY in there, and brewed up a half-gallon of strong black tea, which I cooled to room temperature and added quite a bit of sugar. Probaby 1/2 to 3/4 cup. It tasted sweet. I added that to my canister, covered it with muslin and tied string around the neck of the canister to keep it in place, tucked it into a dark corner of my counter and tried not to bother it for a few days.

Sure enough, presto, after about 2 weeks a SCOBY had formed on the top of it and I had a sweet/sour kombucha tea. I poured this out of the canister, leaving about a cup or 2 with the SCOBY, and refrigerated it. Then I made another half-gallon of tea, this time sweetening it with honey, and did it again. That tea was much less full-bodied when fermented, so the next time I went back to sugar. Most recently, in preparation for an upcoming surgical event that will limit my ability to tolerate sweets, I fermented the tea for 2 full weeks and have a very tart, only slightly sweet tea now that I'm going to attempt to take after the surgery in very small amounts to see if I can tolerate it.

TMI ALERT!!!!! DO NOT READ IF YOU CAN'T TOLERATE TALK OF BODILY FUNCTIONS.
I'm a gassy person. It's really aggravating and occasionally embarassing. Obviously, one tries to be polite and discrete, but there are times when things are just totally beyond one's ability to stop them, and this situation had gotten worse and worse over the past few years. I'd noticed that when I follow a low-carb diet, it takes care of the problem about 75% of the time, which is going to be the subject of a post-surgical blog post, I'm sure. Well, Kombucha Tea seems to take care of the problem, too, but for it to work most effectively I've found that I need to drink it with most meals. If I do that, no intestinal gas. I don't have to drink much; maybe 2 or 3 ounces. A 16 oz bottle can last me 2 days in the car in winter (it isn't fermenting much in a cold car).
YOU CAN START READING AGAIN, GENTLE ONES.

Other claims that I can't verify (yet) that are attributed to Kombucha Tea:

Due to the composition and metabolic by-products of this microcultured, living food -- which I do not want to go into, as it is beyond my pay grade and kind of boring unless you're a biologist -- Kombucha helps balance your acid/base profile, makes assimilation of B vitamins much better, makes GERD symptoms much better, helps you sleep, improves your skin and hair tone, helps you to digest food, regulates your elimination (both kinds)  and energizes you. Many people who have tried it quickly become proponents of it, and I am certainly one of them. I'm not entirely sure what the Kombucha is doing, but whatever it is, I feel much better when I drink it and my inclination now whenever I have a slight dyspepsia or other digestive problem is to swig some Kombucha tea. I recently had to stop my arthritis medication, which is NOT FUN, but on days that I have somehow missed the Kombucha tea, my arthritis is much worse and on days when I drink it the arthritis pain seems to be tolerable. This is a relatively new observation, and it could be dependant on several other factors like barometric pressure and ambient air temperature, so I'm not quite convinced the Kombucha is a good arthritis reliever yet.

The Final Fermented Cabbages

So here we have them, the Kimchi (3 and 3/4 jars) and the Kraut (5 and 4/5 jar, plus one jar of kraut juice). The Kimchi continues to be a delight, with complex flavors. The saltiness has subsided, and the pepper heat is just about perfect for my taste, which is kind of in the low middle range. The Kraut is very tart with a very kraut-y aroma, and it's the consistency that I remember from my childhood although I think it would have been a better consistency had I refrigerated it a week ago. The juniper berries were a wild card for me, as I've never eaten them before, only attempted to make ale with them. They don't taste the way I expected, which was more like a pine tree. They taste peppery.

I'm leaving the Kimchi out at room temp for a day or so, and watching for bubbles. Hopefully, I'll get a few, then I'll refrigerate it. The Kraut is going straight into the fridge, because it's texture is already soft.

As you can see, these are colorful ferments. They're really lovely.

Right after I poured the rest of the kraut juice down the sink (where it will hopefully survive in our septic tank) I realized I should have given it to the chickens. Darn. So I did take out the Kimchi brine for them, and they drank it. The microflora in those liquids is good for chickens, too!