Is it okay to take Imodium 4 days post-op?

[southernlady]

Rogue eating update:

Well, I did take the sound advice offered for safely integrating foods. I started with just yogurt, as @southernlady suggested and after eating that, I felt incredibly better--I had energy, the blood sugar issue seemed to improve greatly, and my stress level dropped significantly. When that stayed down with no problems and no pain, I waited a few hours and tried some cottage cheese. Both times all I ate was about a tablespoonful and I took at least 30 minutes to eat that amount. Later that day I ate about a teaspoonful of tuna with lots of full fat mayo, again taking a long time to eat that. Everything stayed down fine and I experienced no pain at all. I was on my 6th day post op (Sunday). Monday morning I had my first "normal" BM and had no issues with that (thankful!)

Yesterday, I started to slowly incorporated those same three foods in slightly larger amounts, always eating super slowly, taking my time and listening to my body. I have had zero ill-effects and, in fact, started recovering even quicker from the surgery than I already was. Color returned to my face, the dark circles around my eyes lightened quick substantially. Of course, some of this is because I am finally getting more calories. I was tracking at about 250-300 calories a day on the full liquids. Like @Clematis, I was starving on that. I've been able to get those numbers up to around the 550 calorie mark with just the small inclusions of those foods. This also upped my protein and fat intake enough to give my body some energy (I believe so, anyway). Another "normal" BM this morning. It's amazing when eating food results in BMs, or maybe that is just for us newbie DSers, but believe me, I am celebrating the "normal" morning BMs :-D

Today, I am 8 days post op and I tried a tiny amount of mashed banana with my cottage cheese this morning. I know banana isn't going to be on the menu as a regular item, but since it is on some of the pureed lists for DS patients, I figured it couldn't hurt and it has a small amount of potassium that I guess can't hurt. No issues so far.

I just tried a small amount (about a tablespoonful) of scrambled egg a few minutes ago. Egg is one of those items that has me a little skeptical because everyone seems to have widely different reactions to them. I'll let you know if it does cause some kind of issue or gastric upset.

Here's the thing: I belong to several groups where I know DSers who had surgery on my same date from different surgeons and some of them are not doing as well as I am. They are following their prescribed liquid diets. They're starving and easily exhausted, etc.

Since my energy has been improving every day while experimenting with "rogue eating," I am going to call this experiment a success, at least for me myself. I can't tell you all how much I appreciate your advice and chiming in on this because I was feeling so badly before I started rogue eating that it was actually scaring me.

Good. The thing is, you are knowledgeable enough from reading here to know if something hadn't worked, to step back give it a couple more days and then try again.

 

[Munchkin]

Stop and think about this. Surgeons with the draconian pre and post op liquid fasts are probably NOT doing anything positive for their patients. The patient goes into surgery starving and depleted. Comes out of surgery to face weeks more liquid fasting when they need calories and quality food to heal.

Makes no sense to me and the ASMBS is actually against it.

 

[writegirl]

Stop and think about this. Surgeons with the draconian pre and post op liquid fasts are probably NOT doing anything positive for their patients. The patient goes into surgery starving and depleted. Comes out of surgery to face weeks more liquid fasting when they need calories and quality food to heal.

Makes no sense to me and the ASMBS is actually against it.

Excellent points! I felt "lucky" that my surgeon only required two days of liquid diet pre-op, but he required four weeks of me being on a draconian 800 calorie diet. He shills his own food products for both, of course. That's part of why I am so grateful to the veterans here because I was able to avoid four weeks of the cruddy products and I just tracked, weighed, and measured me foods for the 8 weeks. I think that left me in better shape nutritionally than those who ate the packaged crud for that long, but I was still terribly depleted by surgery day.

I know patients of other surgeons who were on 4 weeks of liquid diet pre-op and are on another 2-4 weeks liquid diet post-op. I don't know how they're managing, tbh. People follow their surgeons (and worse) their nutritionists like they are demi-gods or something. It's actually a little disturbing. For example, there is this one girl who has an RnY and is doing all the low fat, low carb eating recommended by her surgeon. She's horribly constipated. I made the mistake of suggesting she try maybe adding some healthy fats to her diet--like foods high in Omega 3s. She got snippy about that because she is supposed to eat low fat and then she chastised me for daring to suggest fat and ended with "I'll ask my nutritionist and my doctor." Yeah, and stay constipated sweetheart.

All I know for sure is that the more I read around, the more grateful I am that I have a DS and not one of the other procedures. But I am sorry for those DSers who are badly struggling with these liquid diets. I know it is not my place to tell them to do anything other than follow their surgeon's and nutritionist's recommendations, but I find myself biting my lip a lot and just try to direct them to join here and read as much about DS living as they can.