Day 5

The long-awaited day 5! The one where I was supposed to be almost back to normal and be ready to take on the world! Well, not quite, in my case.

I woke up nauseated, and didn't have the energy to wash my hair like I had planned before going to the surgeon's office. I felt depressed and worried. If I couldn't count on "day 5" being the cutoff for the worse of the surgery, when was it ever going to end? I was being a drama queen, as you can tell. I'll take this opportunity to say that I know the past few posts have been kind of negative, and I hope I'm not scaring you. I just want to be completely honest and expose exactly how I felt without sugar-coating it. Just remember that most of the time, I felt alright while laying in bed watching TV. It was mostly difficult at night and when I felt nauseated/shaky, etc. Time still goes on, nights turns into days, and eventually you will feel better if you do the right thing for your body. Which, as you will find out, I wasn't doing.

So we got to the surgeon's office and they took us into a room right away. The surgeon came in, cleaned my nose and then looked at my sheet of questions, which basically consisted of variations of "why am I still feeling horrible?" and "Is this normal?". He said it wasn't, and my heart sank. And then he said that my problem was not eating enough. He actually sounded kind of mad, but it was hard to tell because he's always so calm and collected. I guess the best way to explain it is that he sounded very stern and annoyed (but in a "I'm concerned about your well being" kind of way), saying I was already pretty thin and had most likely lost a lot of weight already (he was right, I had lost close to 10 lbs), and it was simply logic that I wasn't feeling good. I needed to be drinking food all the time. I needed to intake as much calories as I could. When I asked how much, he said he didn't want to put a cap on it, that I now had a nutritional deficency and needed to eat, eat, eat to make up for it. He said there was nothing they would be able to do if I went back to the hospital. Basically, it was entirely my fault that I was feeling horrible, and I had the means to fix it, but I wasn't doing it.

I tried not to cry when he was talking to me so sternly, but I knew he was right, and I knew I needed him to say it like this to wake me up. I knew he was frustrated at me because he did this amazing job at fixing my jaw, and here I was, not taking care of myself enough to recover well. The ball was in my camp and I had dropped it. I felt like I had let him and my husband down. The surgeon then told me to take Zofran every four hours without missing a dose, and eat all day, all the time. Then he sent us on our way, asking my husband to call him the next day and tell him how I was feeling.

So we got back into the car, and I finally woke up. I just had to stop being so dramatic and whiny, and eat. I suggested we stop by Jamba Juice where I got a medium Cookies 'n Crème protein smoothie for a whopping 590 calories! We went back home and I chugged that thing. It tasted good for the first few sips, and then it was gross, but I kept swallowing it.

It tastes more like artificial chocolate than cookies, but still pretty good.

My husband started keeping track of how many calories I was taking in, and we aimed for 2000 calories. I know the surgeon said he didn't want a cap on it, but I needed an actual goal. I usually eat about 1600 calories a day, so 2000 seemed like a good number to recover.

How my husband kept track of medicine and calories.

So I spent the day forcing myself to eat half bottles of Joylent and thinking I would never enjoy eating again, but I knew I had to do it. In the end, I only reached 1700 calories, but it was still so much better than the pitiful 500 calories I'd been eating in the past few days, so I counted it as a victory, and aimed higher for the next day.

I didn't immediately feel better that day. It wasn't a magic fix, because like the surgeon had said, I was starting at minus calories and needed to catch up. We also tried to crammed the most calories in as little volume as possible, so we started using whole milk instead of water for Joylent, and making it thicker than usual. Basically, we wanted every bottle to be 250-300 calories. I could only eat half of it at a time, then I'd take a break for an hour or two, then have another half bottle, and repeat all day.

Swelling-wise, it was a bit better than the day before. Going down, down!

Yellow bruise leaking down.

That night was better. I didn't feel too shaky, although I did feel a little more nauseated, but Zofran took care of that. I finally felt like I was getting better!