The New Ways

It's now the end of May, and my surgery was three months ago yesterday if you go by dates, or thirteen weeks ago today if you're counting that way. We're in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was just a rumour when I was having my surgery (I think, but I'm not sure, that case #1 in Canada was detected that day, in British Columbia). I've been working from home since March 13th. We've had a really awful spring, right up to scatterings of snow as late as May 9th... something I've never seen before... but at last, the warm weather is here.

I can't tell you might weight now. I threw my scales out just before things really got going. I knew I'd just be stepping on the things every day or even more, checking checking checking. Getting depressed if the numbers stayed the same or went up a bit, and getting cocky if they went down. So, this time, I'm just trying to eat sensibly, and once a week or so, going into the spare room to the closet there to see that fits.

For about 15 years, I maintained what I came to call my "hope chest". This was cardboard box of clothes I'd gotten too fat to wear, but wanted to hold onto so I could wear again, one day. Slowly, some of these shirts and pants are moving from impossible to too tight to wear in public to hmm, yes, I think I could just wear these now. Every few weeks, something else moves into the realm of a hope fulfilled. That's the only real measure I have.

There are other ones. I don't mind moderate-length walks anything like I used to. Now that the good weather's finally here, I really enjoy them if the setting is nice. A friend of mine in Hamilton has for a while now been suggesting we should hike Mt. Albion Road, a street that holds some interest for me because I'd driven it in the past but its upper portion has been closed to traffic for several years now. This was a daunting prospect for me because it gets fairly steep towards the end. But a couple of weekends ago he and I and another of our friends took it on, and though I was a bit winded by the time we made it to the top, I could still speak on the way up. Now, that's something I really don't think I could have done last autumn.

It's a little embarrassing to admit, but I was getting pretty rough by the end of 2019. I had a job interview downtown at the beginning of December (oddly enough, for the job I have now). Getting there involved climbing a couple of flights of stairs (let's say 30-40 steps, maybe?) out of the subway station, and then a walk of three short blocks to the office. I had to stop part way and catch my breath. My lower back was in agony. When I arrived, it took me five minutes to catch my breath. That was genuinely disturbing, even a little scary. I was glad I'd started the ball rolling on bariatric surgery a half a year earlier.

I got the job. Now I was faced with the same thing every morning! I realized pride was not my friend here and I reluctantly bought a back brace... a sort of girdle... to manage my bad back. I took the bus to the parallel line downtown and the subway up to the station on the other side of the office... It has an elevator, and it's only two blocks to the office. It added another 10 minutes to the commute, but it made it possible. Even with the brace, the first couple of weeks my back was shot, both going to work and walking home from the bus stop.

I wore the brace for the first five weeks on the job. By that time, I was taking Optifast four times a day as my meals. Weight came off reasonably quickly. Eventually I could manage without the back brace. I suppose that was two or three weeks before the surgery.

Almost immediately after my surgery, though, COVID-19 reared its head and aside from four days, I haven't been back downtown to the office since. Now, though, I'm wondering about taking the subway to the first station again and seeing if I can manage the stairs. Maybe even forget the subway and walk from the bus stop to the office... it's about a mile, I think. Good moderate exercise, and if I follow the line, I always have the option if I think it's too much for me. I don't think it would be, now, though. I think I might be able to manage it.

Interesting things along the way... Well, the most interesting thing, if I can call it that. There's something you're prone to after R en Y surgery called "dumping syndrome". It's probably not what you're thinking. What it refers to is eating too much, or too fast, and your smaller stomach being forced to dump food right into the small intestine. If it's too fatty, or more particularly, too sugary, your small intestine has a problem dealing with it. The sugar causes an insulin reaction and that draws water out of the walls of your intestine while the food makes its way through. Well, that happened to me two weeks to the day after the surgery. I waited too late to eat; my eyes were bigger than my stomach; and bang. Around 8 p.m. I started feeling it. Really bad cramps. I could feel the food slowly making its way along. It was a somewhat sharper pain than I'm used to in abdominal cramps. I went to bed and tossed and turned and moaned. It was not fun. It was tolerable, but only just. It was past 11 before it eased up enough that I could sleep. I do keep a close eye on the sugar content of things now, and I do my best not to drink anything till half an hour after a meal.

Meanwhile, complicating things a little, I'm also wearing Invisaligns at the moment. These are clear plastic braces, if you will. Every week, sometimes every two, you put in a new set, and they slowly conduct your teeth into new, straighter positions. My teeth have always been a bit crooked, and on the bottom, very crowded, even since I started getting my adult teeth. One morning in December I woke up with a severe pain in my right jaw that made it very hard to chew for about three days. It probably had something to do with the CPAP machine (another big change, since November), but I was reminded of advice in my 20s that I should get my teeth straightened because otherwise, I could start developing hairline cracks in my jaw in my 60s. Well, I was 51 going on 52 when that happened, so I finally got serious about getting this done.

It's weird having these things in your mouth pretty much all the time, but at the same time, you kind of get used to it. There are a lot of small inconveniences you just eventually adapt to, I suppose, and this turns out to be one of them. I'm a bit past half way right now, and I can't complain much about the upper teeth. My left front tooth used to slightly overlap the right and I felt it always gave me a country bumpkin kind of look that made me embarrassed to smile. The four upper front teeth are now pretty close to being in line, and I'm genuinely pleased with how much better they look. The bottom ones are still crowded, and even when this is over at the end of 6 months, they still won't be completely straight. But they'll be much closer to it.That should be good enough, I think.

The bottom trays tend to warp on me. I think they've gotten a little ahead of where they've actually managed to drag the teeth, so the company is currently reworking the therapy (ostensibly) on the basis of moulds I made for them about a week ago and sent back. It was interesting. They sent this package with four U-shaped trays and four sets of two little tubs of silly putty kinda stuff. You knead the two substances together over 30 seconds, and then roll it into a snake and put it into the trays. Then you put your teeth into it for two and a half minutes. The stuff starts to set 90 seconds after you start kneading it, so this is more or less a 4-minute process. I did this four times; two for the upper teeth and two for the bottoms. They were pretty firm by the time I drew them out. Then I FedExed them back. We'll see what becomes of all this.

So, anyway, there you go. Three different projects all at the same time in the hopes of improving my health: sleeping using a CPAP machine, straightening and uncrowding my teeth with Invisaligns, and trying to shed as much of my extra weight as I can with better eating and a smaller stomach. Every one of them has paid some dividends.