brad garland

I’ve been getting a lot of emails, phone calls, and comments asking about how my surgery went but haven’t exactly been in the best position to get back to most of you. So, yet again, I thought I’d answer some questions to those that are curious.

So how’d it go?

All in all, I thought it went pretty well. I was hurting pretty badly the first two days but after that, it got much better. They tell you that you have to ‘walk, walk, walk’ and I thought that would be the last thing I would want to do but it did make me feel better.

I do have to say that you never know what you’re going to get as far as the nursing staff though. I had one nurse that was a real bitch and totally impatient and I even told her she needed to be more patient b/c I was hurting pretty badly. I also had the best nurse ever, as my night nurse, who was an absolute doll, she was very kind and took very good care of me. I need to send her something.

So how’s it going since you got out?

Slowly but surely. Anytime I take my medicine, liquid hydrocodone, I’m pretty useless for an hour or so, can’t focus or anything but other than that it’s been good. My diet is limited to sipping water, 8oz. protein shake (that normally makes all the eating I do for the day), jell-o, and my liquid vitamins. Today has been kinda weird b/c I’ve been light headed all day and I’m starting to wonder if it isn’t because I might not have drank what I was supposed to yesterday or could be lack of caloric intake.

Hope this feeling changes pretty soon because I gotta a lot of work to get back to.

Lost any weight yet?

Well, that’s a funny question actually because we’ve been trying to decide what my starting point was for weight because I get a different weight from the doctor’s scale, my bathroom scale, and the scale I got on at the hospital. Think we decided our bathroom scale since it’s the one that will be used the most (despite probably be the most inaccurate). So based off of our scale, my highest weight was 294, the morning of the surgery I got on it and weighed 285, and this morning it was 275. So 9 pounds in what, 5 days? Crazy.

Got another appt. w/ the doctor on Wednesday so I’m curious what that scale says and I’m real curious how much I’m expected to get down to? I always get the ‘you’re just a big guy’ thing so I don’t think you’ll get below 200 pounds. I have no idea how they decide that.

Anyway, all for now, need to go take my medicine. (Man, that sounds old.)

[tags]gastric bypass, weight loss surgery, WLS, surgery, brad garland[/tags]