the_child and I spent the first part of the weekend at the beach house my parents own with lillypond.
(Details and next steps, including medical-digestive TMI:)
Much July 4th at the beach action, but I was also in violent, miserable bowel distress most of the time. I became very draconian in my diet and the distress seems to have tapered off, but it left me with another of those ‘flat’ days yesterday — the only thing I accomplished was driving back to Portland, and that took everything I had. I am now Officially Behind on the deadline for “Forests of the Night”, though with any luck I’ll only miss by a few days at most.
At this point, the post-operative functionality seems largely restored, in general. I don’t have pain from the suture site, stuff passes from top to bottom more or less as expected, and so forth. However, my digestive functions are now extremely sensitive to both diet and stress, at least an order of magnitude more so than pre-op, and I have been a bit careless from time to time. (In particular, I appear to be lactose-intolerant now.) I’m going to be very strict with myself this next week or two and see how things stabilize. Given how much I love food in general, and cheese in particular, this isn’t a happy-making thing. And yes, I have a doctor’s appointment right after I get back from my next trip.
On the plus side (such as it is) as of this morning, I am down 32 pounds from the beginning of the year, and down 21.5 pounds from my last pre-op weigh in, back in April. I am also below my discharge weight, post-op. While I’m the last person on earth to complain about weight loss, I’d strongly prefer it to be planned and under my control. This isn’t the real deal, though with some decent management and the interim realities of my new dietary restrictions, I can probably maintain. And if they become permanent restrictions, well, it’s not like my body is going to suffer from fewer pepperoni pizzas and onion rings. Still, grr.
I seriously considered cancelling my trip to Omaha and San Francisco. Given how I felt Thursday and Friday, getting on an airplane would have been impossible. At this point, I believe I’m good to go, but you’d better believe that tomorrow morning I’ll be hopped up on Imodium AD and dry toast. And frankly, the morale impact on me of cancelling the trip would have been huge. I’ll deal with a limited schedule and a bunch of lying down as needed, but not going at all would have been a bitter disappointment. I did contemplate travelling with “adult undergarments”, and decided that would be even worse for my morale than simply staying home.
So today is low energy. I am packing (takes less than an hour, given how routine that is for me), doing a tiny bit of Day Jobbe work that needs to be delivered for Monday morning, and then mostly relaxing. Might go out later and see Wall-E if the energy holds. I also hope to write some more, if body and brain cooperate.
As usual, once I’m gone, expect continued light blogging with intermittent bursts of hypergraphia.
Originally published at jlake.com. You can comment here or there.