11.30.07
Posted in wls at 12:54 am by Shari
So today I had to go see Dr. K. She’s pleased with my progress on losing some weight. She’s pleased with my A1C going down from 6.6 to 6.1. We talked about the stress test I’ll need to do. For anyone over 300lbs, you have to go to the hospital and do it in “2 stages”. Hmm…. But we’re not worrying about that just yet. She wants me to do it before I go for surgery, but apparently not too long before the surgery. So, for now I am just to continue dropping weight, get up to walking enough for a stress test, and go back after the next time I see Dr. D. Hopefully by then we’ll have pre-approval and a better feel for when the surgery is so we can look at doing the stress test.
Today I was hungry all day long. Even right after a dinner of salmon, broccoli and rice. Some days I am fine with reduced portions and some, like today, don’t work well. I tried to ignore it, but wasn’t altogether successful at that. So I had 2 extra 100 cal snacks. I guess that’s not so bad - it could have been 2 candy bars instead.
Chuck’s headaches have been bothering him lots. He pretty much always has a headache, worse when he’s up around and doing things. He’s had numerous tests done - all negative. He’s taking Topamax which seemed to help back at the beginning, but not enough. Today he got in touch w/ the neurologist and has an appt tomorrow, so I get to go with him to that. It’ll make a full day - that’s at 10:45, we have a newsletter folding party at the library at 1 and work at 4. In between I have to pick up the newsletters, try to get some laundry done (unlikely but very necessary), all the driving from one place to the next and get some website work done too. If I get up early enough, I can take the computer to the laundromat and kill 2 birds with one stone.
If I’m going to get up early, that means I need to get to bed. Last night I slept sitting up in the chair. I had curled up with a piece of fleece and fell asleep, and when I woke up, it was nearly 7am. Grrr…. Sleep without the CPAP isn’t really sleep, so I need to make up for it tonight.
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11.28.07
Posted in wls at 9:26 am by Shari
In the last week or so, I’ve had two appointments for my surgery journey. Last week it was a meeting w/ the dietician, Jeanne, to get screened. She went over lots of points - ways to reduce portion sizes, ways to slow down eating, scheduling and planning meals, snacks and drinks, the importance of chewing to a liquid consistency, etc. Then I had to do an evaluation, answering a bunch of questions to see if I’d grasped it. I was actually in pretty good shape when I went in and understood most of what she was going over. Then we spent some time talking about what the surgery would be doing, the points of absorption, sample diets for the clear liquid, liquid and pureed food stages of post-op as well as longer term eating plans.
That all went well and she approved me for proceeding with the surgery. I was pretty psyched from the beginning of the meeting, though, because I had just found out that I had dropped another 4 lbs (which made 7 of the 20 minimum that I had to lose)
Today I met with Dr. D again. It was 6 wks since my last appt with him. I had done all that had to be done (psych visit, dietician screening, PCP letter written and bloodwork done). They are preparing the pre-approval request now and we hope to hear soon if it’s been approved. We talked about what else will need to be done before surgery (3 hrs education w/ Theresa, lose more weight) and what kind of timeline we’d be looking at for scheduling. I’ve had it in my mind that I hoped to have it in early April and from his reaction, I’ll be ready well before that and I’ll be able to pretty much pick when I want to have it done because his schedule isn’t crazy busy. Yippee… so I looked over the schedule for stuff at work and see that there’s an event on 3/1 that I should really be there for and then there’s an open-enough time after that that seems like it would work well for some time off of work. So… that’s my goal - to have surgery the first full week of March. Oh, yeah, I was down another lb too.
One of my other questions was about what was a reasonable goal for post-surgery weight. He decided to shoot for a BMI of about 32, which puts me at about 192 lbs. So I made up a ticker to help chart the progress. Down 8 so far, at least 12 more to go pre-surgery and lots and lots afterwards.
Next step with him is an appointment the first week of January. Hopefully I’ll be very close to my pre-op weight loss goal so we can consider a date and get the rest of the process moving. Yippee!
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11.14.07
Posted in knitting, wls at 2:10 pm by Shari
…that my sister had the right idea some 35 years ago.
She was always hassled at the dinner table (and breakfast and lunch) for how long she took to eat her food, especially things she didn’t like much. How many times could she chew those scrambled eggs and mashed potatoes???
Mary and I talked the other night about my upcoming appointment with the dietician. I wanted to know what I should expect. She shared with me the things she had to start doing right away so she was ready for after the surgery. So I figured I’d better start working on it now, even before the appointment. I am trying to find techniques to remind myself to take more (much more) time eating. From smaller individual bites to more chewing, putting down the fork, cutting off only one (tiny) bite at a time, etc. It’s almost like the playing with food we tell our kids to NOT do. Some of the biggest challenges I’ll have, I think, is separating eating and drinking and drinking only a sip at a time. An idea that Linda told me she was using recently might be good too - she would pack all of her food for the day in a lunch box, regardless of if she was out of the house that day or not. Then she’d eat from the lunchbox all day and didn’t make impromptu food decisions as the day went on. So many of my days are all over the place in terms of where I am and when, and I’m out of the house a LOT, so this would probably be a good idea to help avoid the “on my way home and I’m already too hungry to wait ’til I get home and fix something appropriate to eat.”
So I haven’t gotten to packing a day’s food yet, and I’ve only started to really focus on slowing down how fast I eat. I keep finding myself holding a fork, or forgetting to put down the piece of string cheese, or jumping into the next bite too soon. I guess practice will make perfect, or at least better prepared.
Last night at knitting group we were looking at the new Knit ‘n Style magazine and I saw some tops that I liked. I got all excited about the idea that one day I’ll be able to look at them and actually make some without investing as much as I would now if I tried to knit clothes for myself. It might be dangerous to go back and look through all the patterns I have because my project queue will be overwhelming.
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11.08.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:58 pm by Shari
In blogland? I spent too much time last night reading through a few blogs of some folks I know or at least know of… I feel so shallow. They seem so introspective, pondering lifes questions in ways that I never seem to have the time, or honestly, the desire to ponder. And so full of pictures and images - I can’t even get to getting new batteries in the camera for hubby’s big 50th birthday.
I felt the same way listening to my daughter and her friends talking over dinner a few weeks ago. Did I ever have so much passion about the world around me? the environment? politics? even music? They were playing a “game” where you name the 5 artists you would choose if you could only listen to 5 artists and all of their existing recordings for the rest of your life. Which would you choose? DD helped guess some that I might choose, naming Rod Stewart because I like him and with his newer cover albumns it would give a lot of variety to what was available. Heck, I seldom can name the artists that I hear even when it’s someone I’ve heard over and over and like. Fortunately that also deflected from me because they started in on discussion of who else has that kind of variety in their work and I was off the hook.
I feel like my life is mostly a matter of getting from day to day. Making the decision to have WLS certainly means I’m thinking much further than day to day, but still…. I mostly live in the moment. Back when I was finishing college, I was pregnant, then a new mom on a shoestring (ie, welfare). Getting her fed, laundry and classwork done was all consuming. Then finding a job and starting a career while single parenting…. Did I not have a chance to develop some of that thoughtfulness? or is that a character flaw that I didn’t try to?
Whatever the case, the moment is here to get ready to go teach a crochet class, so here ends that moment of thought about lack of thoughtfulness.
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11.04.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:11 pm by Shari
Tomorrow is Chuck’s b-day. The big 5-0. He doesn’t much care for his birthday.
But it’s 50. How could I not do something about it.
The original plan was to save up a bunch of money and take him away for the weekend. I wanted to pick him up from work on Friday night and just whisk him away with no clue about what we were doing, or even that we were doing anything. The $’s didn’ accumulate at all, so that didn’t work out.
Next best idea was a surprise birthday party. So 3 wks ago I stopped at one of his fave restaurants - Lindburgers . Made arrangements to use the back room of the restaurant for a party, planning to invite his family and our friends, John and Kelly. That worked great, but then time sped by and before I knew it, it was less than a week left to finish making plans. Argh… some fast phone calls to family and they could nearly all come… order a gift and it came in time…. order up a cake, pretend I had a knitting group so I could go out to get the cake, balloons, crime scene tape, goofy flashing light pin, etc, deliver it to the restaurant and order up some appetizers and drinks so there’d be stuff when we first got there.
Naturally, he wasn’t ready when I told him to be, but I had planned on that. I had told him we were meeting John and Kelly “someplace”, but not where. I drove some back roads to get there and he expressed some confusion about where we were going, but he did figure that out. We got there about 10 after 3, just enough after everyone else made it. They had the lights out so he couldn’t see what he was walking into…. voila, a successful surprise.
Michelle and Ben at Lindburgers were great. Michelle called me after I dropped things off and had an idea to run by me - a chalk outline on the floor as you went into the room we were using. Great idea! so they taped out an outline, which was very entertaining for Kolby to play in, lay in, etc. Ben was our server and was very attentive. I was so pleased at how easy going it was to set up this party there. I’ve done many a party when I was working at Kodak and there was always the “only one bill”, “parties of 8 or more we’ll add gratuity”, “can’t bring in any other food”, “limit selections to just a few”, etc. Michelle said they’d set things up however we wanted, bills however we wanted, we could order from the menu however we wanted, we could decide the tip… and they set up, decorated and had that great chalk outline idea to boot.
I just wish I had had good batteries in my camera. Last I knew they were good, but in the meantime it had accidentally gotten turned on and drained the batteries 
So, what he got for his birthday from me was an MP3 player. Truth be told, I wanted one and actually bought his and hers players. After borrowing a book on tape when I went to see Shaun a few weeks ago, it rekindled my desire to do more of them. Since I wasn’t into the MP3 technology, I didn’t know about being able to download books from the public library (in Monroe County, at least, apparently not in our county) to the player, nor that I could get a free New York Public Library card and access their collection too (I’d have to pay to get one in Monroe County). I think he’ll enjoy that once we get into that collection to see what’s available there and get his player set up. Of course we have to wait for the library card to come first. I did apply for one the other day.
I’m so pleased that things went well today. But it was a long day, so it’s time to hit the hay. And watch the end of “The American President” (How did I miss seeing that over the last 12 yrs?)
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11.01.07
Posted in Crafts, wls at 1:26 pm by Shari
Today was my psych evaluation for surgery. After my last visit to Dr. D’s office, and finding out how LONG it can take to circle the parking garage to find a place, I left plenty early today - I don’t want anything to look like I’m not serious about this. I took the opportunity to weigh myself while waiting for my appt and found I had lost 3 lbs since my last visit. Yippee!
The evaluation seemed to go just fine and Pat declared at the end that she felt that I was a good risk for the surgery. She pointed out some things to keep in mind, some things to do in preparation, but all in all didn’t see any reason to say I shouldn’t be going forward for the surgery. We also talked to Theresa about the support group, which is currently non-existent and it sounds like it’s likely to be held on a night that I’ll be able to make some of those meetings fairly well.
That’s one more step in the right direction, or two if you count losing some weight. After my visit, I stopped at Dr. K’s office to drop off the instructions of what I need from them. No need to worry about it there - I know she wants me to make this step and is in support of having the surgery.
I haven’t made much progress on my chain maille project and time is running out. Gotta kick that up a notch. As much as I like using graphs in knitting, crochet, etc, this graph is SOOOOOoooo hard for me to read. I’ve re-done several sets of rings over and over and over again. I think it’s partly because it’s so close to the beginning edge, so I’m hoping it gets a bit easier after I get a bit more done. Now the debate is whether to gift it in an un-finished state or not. I guess that decision will be made when the time comes.
I’ve been working on knitting the Qiviuk Webs Tam and Scarf on page 33 of Interweave’s Holiday Gifts special issue. I’m using Jojoland cashmere laceweight yarn to make a store model for Louise . Silly me, I chose the black yarn to use and am having a heck of a time doing just the ribbing (on size 1’s). I hope it works up nicely, though, because it seems that it’ll be a good use for a single skein of this cashmere.
Hmm… I actually have a project to write about in Ravelry - I guess I should go put it in, huh?
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