Category: Blog

ARGH!   I really want to scream at someone really bad.  I have to go back a third time because the lab screwed up a blood test.  At least this time it’s a finger stick and can be done in house. <sigh>

Good news: surgery is scheduled for 8:30 but might change.

More good news: drinking slim fast first then correcting my blood sugar is keeping my blood sugar in the 150 range which is where I like it.

Bad news — we just had to evacuate the building.  We’ve evacuated more times this year than we ever had and for the dumbest reasons.

Woke up at 106 this morning.  Yes, a good blood sugar but a bit scary when you are used to waking up at 150.  Glad I tweaked the pump down as much as I did and I’m seriously considering not bolusing with the morning Slimfast.

Weight continues to go down, I’m losing somewhere around a pound a day AND I can feel that the weight is gone. 

Still haven’t gotten the labs back (or at least they aren’t on the doctor’s website yet).  Sure glad I didn’t listen to the doctor’s receptionist.  Who was new and an idiot.  She wanted me to do the preop after school tomorrow.  I think I would be freaking out now.

So why
am I putting myself through this anyway?

Well, the past few years have been a bit difficult for my physically, but I hit the wall last fall.   I gained 20 pounds from August to October.  When none of my clothing fit, I realized I need to do something.

The first thing I did was find clothing that fit.  It helped a bit.

The second thing I did was to find someone locally who could help me with the weight.  I looked into TLC-Edge because they had both a medical program and a surgical program.  I didn’t even walk into this thinking — oh, I’m going to do to surgery.

In fact, I’ve been violently opposed to gastric surgery for a long time.  I really felt, and I do feel that now, is that surgery is for the last resort.

So I sat down with a nutritionist and came up with a plan.  The good news, I stopped gaining weight, but couldn’t lose.  That went on for several months, we’d come up with a plan and I wouldn’t lose weight. About three months after that, I decided that I needed to go for the lap band.

That’s what I’ve been working towards for the past few months. Sadly, I’d found that the only way I can lose weight now is through liquid diet, and I am hoping that will change with the Lapband.  My biggest problems are portion control and stress eating, and I’m working hard on both.  I’m hoping that Lapband will make the portion control much easier.

And my goal — is to be able to have fun at dog agility trials again. 

Working out is still difficult, stairs are still difficult, but then I’ve only lost a few pounds.

Good news, less than 3 1/2 days to go.

I’ve been running in the 120’s all day, and have been dong really good on the liquid diet all day. I switched the pump to 20% reduced basal instulin about 4 hours ago and am still running pretty low so I went ahead and change my basal rate to 20% low.  I also increased my carb ratio and my correction rate.  Why?  I don’t want to go low!

I actually kept my pump on my weekday rate all weekend and have been having really low blood sugars and I sure don’t have time or energy to deal with crashing tomorrow.  Right now, I’d rather run slightly high than slightly low.

That also meant I dropped my surgery basal rate too.

That should mean some other good things — like I can lose even more weight.  I’m told the more weight I can lose during this stage the better.

Well, slightly less than that, and yes, I might start counting hours soon.  Of course, I don’t have an actual surgery time.  Won’t get that until Wednesday.

Part of it is the liquid diet – very hard to do without having had the surgery.  Hopefully it will be easier next week.

So still frustrated and just wanting to get it done, but am making some other progress – just did 20 minutes on the treadmill and thinking I can do another 10 (I’m doing it in sets of 10 right now since I’m recovering from a bad arthritis day).

I’ve been busy reading Cynthia’s book – have tentatively put Fill scheduling in my outlook tasks.  From her book they are done every 6 six weeks.

And I did get 30 minutes on the treadmill!

I am thinking of going to a support group meeting on Tuesday – even nothing else to give me something to do.

Got message from doctor — all results are back but one, and the rest won’t show until it’s back.  He does say everything looks good.

Been checking on the Vytorin — it’s too big to swallow and the pharmacist says that the literature doesn’t recommend splitting so I’m going to look into getting the original medications in separate pills and see if that will work.

However, today hasn’t been a great day as it was raining and aggravating my arthritis.  I did work with my personal trainer.

Just want to get past this process!

Lab results from the PreOp are not in yet. I honestly didn’t expect them to be, but the doctor does.
I’m sure they will be back on Monday.

Rough day, but Fridays usually are, but this one more than normal.  We’ve got a teacher who always gets her way, no matter what she wants and she wants new software installed on the library computers.  Fortunately the hard part was done by our network engineer but I really don’t have time to get it going. 

The good news is that the district is trying to get the new principal what he wants.  Guess they would rather put up with me rather than someone they don’t know.

So I’ve been stressed.

Got through the day and just trying to get through each of them one at a time.

Had a good workout with the personal trainer.  She’s playing with my Max weight machine and figuring it out.

Frankly I’m tired of dealing with the liquid diet and still have 5 weeks to go and then fill liquid diets.  It will come.

The good news, I was pretty sure my husband wanted me to do this and we did talk about it tonight.  He has not wanted to be over supportive, as he wants the decision to be mine which is pretty cool.

Just wish I was 5 weeks out.

Logging into the Live Chat and asking them to fax the approval letter to TLC worked. Case Manager said she had it around noon.

Saw the surgeon.  That went real well.

So everything is called down, the ducks are all in a row, and I just need the labs from the primary care which I can access online from home.

Coolness!

Went back to the primary care physician, got blood drawn and was out by 9:00 am. I could have gotten someone to cover first period BUT they did threaten to send me to Medical City if their Quest lab tech couldn’t do that and I didn’t want to leave my kids without a sub that long, or put that much on other people.

Of course, the Novell server is down.

I did get my final review packets done.  I’ll print them in the morning and get them copied tomorrow.   And can use that as a Final Exam for seniors.

TLC still doesn’t have the approval letter so I went to the BCBS Live Chat site and asked them to fax it and they said they would. Haven’t heard from TLC so I’ll check before noon.

All set for the surgeon this afternoon and will post again then.

I’ve had more fun in the last two hours than anyone should be allowed — not.

So today was the day for my pre-Op appointment.  Got there are 3:40 and only two people are the office — I think — good.

Well the man in the waiting room started screaming at everyone in the place because he wasn’t getting the script he wanted and he wasn’t going to wait for the doctor etc.

In the middle of this tyrade, the receptionist told me that I didn’t have an appointment, which set him off again.

But I knew that the doctor would see me and he did.  Come to find out three people didn’t show that evening so he had plenty of time.  But my records were not in the EMR so we had to go through all that.

They ended up doing the blood work last, at about 5:30.  However, no one could find my veins.  They didn’t want to mess me up with the surgery, so I have to go back in the morning.

I expected to see my approval letter in the mail so it was missing.  Decided to try Live Chat and the agent told me that I was denied and that a denial letter went to TLC Edge on Friday.  Told him that they told me twice it was approved, gave him the diagnosis code and “whew” he came back and said, yes it was approved.

So now I need to set up things for the sub….