Day 15

I fell asleep pretty late last night, mostly because I really wanted to finish the book I was reading. You see, I entered the Goodreads reading challenge and I set my goal at 40 book this year, but I've fallen behind before the surgery. Now I have 4 more books to read by the end of the year, which is in... two weeks! So yeah, I wanted to finish the one I was reading, and ended up going to sleep at around 3:30am. I woke up a few times during the night, but eventually got up at 11am. I don't think I really got 8 hours of sleep, but it's somewhere around 7 hours if you aggregrate all the fragments.

Today was a gloomy, rainy day, which is actually kind of nice when you can just snuggle up at home. Plus, the Christmas tree really helps light up the mood!

Still feeling tired today, but I didn't take a nap. Maybe I should have though; during the afternoon, at some point I had this weird split second where my vision went double. I'm pretty sure it's just ocular fatigue or fatigue in general. I was staring at my computer screen for too long.

Swelling is about the same I think, still looking pretty good!

I did struggle with dinner tonight, mostly because my experiment with blending Panda Express was a TOTAL failure.

I kept adding water, but the thing was so thick that even my Blendtec was struggling and making weird angry noises. I eventually gave up, tried the little bit I could squeeze through the rubber tube of my bottle, and it honestly tasted like slightly sweet wheat glue. It also had the consistency of wheat glue, you know the stuff you use to do papier-mâché? Not good at all.

I guess I'll have to wait a few months to be able to chew my way back to a delicious Panda Express meal. My health will thank me though :P

So there I was, starving, without the meal I was expecting. My husband had Trader Joe's mac & cheese and some hot dog, so I thought "why not try to blend that?" Well, it didn't work either. Maybe I just needed a little more liquid, but after trying 2-3 time with different consistency, I gave up. It was squeezable through the tube, but it felt so thick going down, I was afraid of choking on it. It actually tasted really good, but it was too sticky for my liking. I ended up just drinking an Ensure at that point, too tired/frustrated to make anything else.

It's a bummer though, I really don't want to rely on Ensure so much because it's basically sugar and water with some vitamins. It's not exactly good for you if you can eat something else that's more nutritious. But today, I tried having Joylent and for some reason, I can't deal with it anymore. I think the fact that I've had it almost every day for the past 15 days, coupled with the fact that I've been eating much more palatable meals, just made me completely sick of it. So if there's one thing to learn from this: don't buy too much Soylent/Joylent. I still definitely recommend it because it pulled me through the dark, malnutritioned phase I was in, but I would say only get enough for one week's worth, and buy more later if you need.

So in my search for an Ensure replacement that's a little more healthy, I did find something about Orgain being slightly better, but I couldn't find it at my local Target. However, I found a recipe for a smoothie that has more calories than Ensure and seems to be a good replacement. I've just tried it and it's pretty yummy. Definitely not as sweet, but if you really crave more sweetness, you can just add honey or straight up sugar if you want. It has the same slimy consistency as Ensure because of the banana, which isn't my favorite but if you don't mind it with the Ensure, you probably won't mind it with the banana. So I'll try to have this smoothie every morning and see how it goes. It packs about 450 calories per serving (the link says 370 calories, but they're using fat-free yogurt and milk). I feel like it could even use more peanut butter, so more calories. I'll try it tomorrow.

Peanut Butter Banana Power Breakfast

1 banana

1 cup of whole milk

1/2 cup of greek yogurt (full fat)

1 tbsp of peanut butter

1 tbsp of cocoa powder
6 ice cubes

Other than that, I spent today working on this blog, adding a Timeline and a Supplies section. Hopefully you will find them helpful!

After dinner, we went to Fry's to get a part that my husband needs to build his new computer, and then we stopped by Target to get the ingredients for the smoothie and a few other things. I was able to talk to a few employees when I needed help, and they seemed to understand me without any problem. I've also stopped getting weird looks from people, so I must look pretty normal now! Yay!

Today I also took a profile pic for a friend who asked, and I still can't believe the difference. I'm loving my profile more and more as the swelling goes down. I'm still stunned by the fact that I have a jawline now. I've hated my profile for so long that a profile pic would make me feel depressed and cringe, so I never took any. Now I can't stop looking at this one. I sound really vain and self-absorbed haha, but it's just such a relief. I wasn't expecting such a big change, since this surgery wasn't done for cosmetic reasons, so it's like the best Christmas gift in advance EVER.