Today's update (plus a sidebar on eating after DS surgery)

So, here's how things went with Mom today.

Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are dialysis days for Mom, so around 10:30 they wheeled her off to the mysterious place in the hospital where dialysis happens (I was not allowed to accompany her, so I ran errands, cleaned house, etc. for the next four hours). Dialysis always takes a lot out of Mom, both literally and figuratively. When she came back, she was exhausted. She'd also missed lunch, so she got a small snack to tide her over to the next meal. Unfortunately, her blood pressure dipped low again during dialysis and they weren't able to bring it up sufficiently, so they didn't take much liquid off her today. This likely means that Friday's dialysis session will be rough on her.

Despite being tired and having difficulty standing for even short periods of time, Mom underwent two different rounds of physical therapy today. She walked further than she ever has before. Go Mom!

Mom's heart surgeon stopped by in the late afternoon to check her vitals and see how she was feeling. She's still draining from a couple of tubes attached to her chest cavity, but I guess that's well within normal parameters a week after surgery. The surgeon didn't seem to believe Mom when she told him her typical dialysis dry weight, which was a little frustrating to her. Mom may be physically frail, but she's very mentally sharp and she knows her own dialysis stats. At any rate, if things go well she should be released to the rehab facility some time tomorrow. We've planned ahead by bringing her a change of clothing, so she doesn't have to be sent off in a hospital gown.

We ordered dinner so it would arrive at a reasonable hour, and Mom ate most of it, not having had much else to eat today. She watched a little TV, mostly Animal Planet and Discovery Channel. (Apparently there's this one show on Animal Planet that's all about these guys who build treehouses, and she's fascinated by it.) Nurses and respiratory therapists stopped by to do their thing. Everyone at this hospital has been very kind, solicitous and gentle with Mom, which I appreciate. A few hours after dinner I took my leave to pick up a few things, as Miss V's birthday is on Friday and I want to make sure I've gotten as much done as I can in advance to prep for her party.

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And now, a little something about eating after DS surgery.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I've had a tough time getting used to how much -- or, to be more precise, how little -- I can eat after surgery. It does help to visualize my new stomach as about the size of a banana to determine what will fit, but it's not precise. Liquid foods, for instance, go down easily and I can eat almost as much broth-based soup now as I did before surgery. Dense foods, on the other hand, fill me up so quickly that I can make myself dangerously overfull before I know it. Plus I'm fighting a lifetime of mental experience about how much I'm capable of eating at once; none of that information is accurate any more, but it will take a while until my brain and body sync up properly.

And today I figured out something else: if I dole out my own servings of food, I err on the side of caution and rarely end up eating too much, but if I let someone else determine my serving size (looking at you, takeout food), I try to finish it all and end up overfilling my tum. This has led to a couple of *blorp* incidents while I've been in Utah.

Not. Good.

I don't have much time to cook for myself since I've been spending most of the day in the hospital, but in future I think I'll be better off picking up items from the deli or Trader Joe's, portioning them out sanely and eating slowly, rather than snarfing down something from a drive-thru window. (Tempting and yummy as that option may be, it's not worth the unpleasant aftereffects. Barfing is not an entertaining activity.)