Let me just start this by saying this is not for the squeemish.  Ok, so here are some photos that I have taken in the last week.  Well, I didn’t take the ones inside my stomach, but you get the idea.

Here I am the morning of my surgery.  I just took a shower!

Here’s a side view.

Ok, that was the easy stuff.  Now for the gruesome stuff!

These are a few shots inside my stomach.  The top left picture is the incision into my stomach.  The top right picture is the portion of my stomach was removed.  The bottom left picture is what my new stomach looks like now.  Kinda narrow with a small pouch on the bottom.  There’s a nice view of my pink healthy liver to the left.  And the bottom right picture is another shot of my new stomach and some of my lovely fat that I am looking forward to getting rid of!

This is what I came home to.  So sweet!!!  🙂

And these are my incisions as of today.  I have 4 incisions plus the hole where my drain was.  You can’t really see the last incision in this shot.  But the red mark that’s not covered on the left side of the picture is where my drain was.  The hole is actually closing pretty fast.  In fact, this morning when I changed the gauze on it, there was only a small amount of discharge on it.  I called the doctor’s office because Jeff wanted to put Neosporin on it.  They said that once it is closed completely and is starting to scab a little, I can put Neosporin on it and a small bandage.  Right now I just have gauze over it.

So there you have it!  I feel pretty good today.  Every day I feel better and better.  Jeff took me walking a little bit last night.  We walked down and up one flight of stairs, and across the whole 3rd floor landing.  It was fairly easy for me.  I did it again this afternoon, and I know Jeff wants to take me out again tonight.  Hopefully I will get out a little this weekend so I can get some light exercise (really just some slow walking).  But walking is really good for me and will help avoid blood clots.

As for pain medication, I have some Tylenol with codeine that I can take every six hours.  The last time I took it was last night before bed.  Today I’ve been feeling ok.  On a pain scale of 1-10, I’m hovering between 2 and 3.  So it’s not too bad.  The hardest part is getting in all the liquids that I need to.  My goal is 80 grams of protein each day and a total of 64 oz of fluids.  Yesterday I hit about 55 grams of protein, and about 40 oz of fluids.  I’m doing better today at it.