Baby Steps

Over the past week, I've often found myself drawing analogies
of the body relearning to eat and process food being akin to that of an infant:

In the hospital I constantly referred to the liquid feeding tube nutrition as "formula."
The natural progression for patients after a TG is obviously to start out eating soft foods and progress to solids.

The other night as I began to eat my dinner, I made a startling observation. I had a very small portion in a little bowl of half a hamburger and about 1 oz. Of cheddar cheese both cut up into little pieces. I stared at this portion of tiny bites for a minute or two and realized that I'm eating like a toddler.

I had a craving for pudding last night and was discussing with my husband what to look for on the labels. I abhor Splenda and other artificial sweeteners, so I'm looking for something with real sugar, just not a lot of it. While discussing the differences between such marketing labels such as "unsweetened" and "no sugar added, " it seemed like a lot of work for Dan to just pick up some pudding. I got to the point where I almost told him to just get me toddler food pudding.

This surgery really is such a gross violation to the body, it's a wonder that it responds positively all. Think about it, the esophagus and upper intestine have their mutual friend, the stomach, literally sliced away from their lives and then the two are violently brought together and told to get along. Nicely. Forever.

Then the Small Intestine is told it has to do work it never signed up for and for which it will never be properly compensated. It's like you work at the fish-breading factory and for years you've been getting these nice filets to dip in crumbs. Suddenly the conveyor belt is spitting out whole fish and now you have to completely gut and clean the fish before you bread them. And you have no new tools or more time in which to do it.

Quite a miracle of biology.

And this is why I have such peaks and valleys. It's a long road.