First Complication...

I had my first complication the other night.  And it was not fun.  Last week I had another band fill; I'm now up to 8cc's of fluid in the band.  That means the opening from my "new stomach" to the old stomach is smaller than a quarter.  In fact, it's probably closer to a nickle.  And that means that my food needs to be chewed up pretty small. 

I was eating a piece of breaded chicken and I just didn't chew it up anywhere close to where it needed to be.  So it got stuck in that opening.  And holy moly it was painful!  Do you know how tight your chest feels when you are drinking a soda pop and you inhale at the same time and you feel like you have an air bubble that needs to be released?  That's the kind of pain this was.  You can't rub it out, you can't do anything about it but breathe deep and hope it goes away.  It lasted almost 3 minutes.  But I waited it out because I really didn't want to throw up. 

Lots of bandsters (as those with a lap band call themselves) would just throw up and keep going.  But I think that sounds awful.  I just let my stomach continue to pump and work on getting the chicken through the opening.  Needless to say I have been chewing my food up way better! 

As I was telling my mom about it, I said after it was over, it wasn't the worst thing in the world.  Because it gave me a nice reminder that I have this band and I can't just eat willy nilly without consequences.  And this was the first time that I've really "felt" the band.  I said in my last post that I've been so blessed because I haven't had any issues.  But because I haven't, I have also worried about my band not really working.  Sure, I've lost a lot of weight, but I work out like a crazy woman and I kind of assume that I would have lost this much without the band. 

This past weekend I spent a day volunteering for the Christmas in October organization.  I worked on a house at 51st and Walrond.  The woman that owns the home had every single window broken.  She had a drug house close to her and quite a few drug thugs used her yard to cut through to get to it so she had a fence put up.  And it's assumed that some of the drug thugs threw rocks at each of her windows in retaliation.  So we replaced all the windows.  And her house was in desperate need of new paint.  We spent the first half of the day scraping and getting it ready to paint and the second half of the day painting.  It was a GREAT shoulder workout and a good dead.  Of course, standing on a ladder wasn't good for my knee, but I see the Orthopedic Extraordinaire on Wednesday for some steroid shots so it should feel better in just a few days. 

And I was still able to get in 12 miles this morning on the bike. :)