Weak

I hate feeling weak, I hate being weak and I hate appearing to be weak.  All of these are true of me right now.  Let me catch you up:

On 4/1, I had a gastric emptying exam.  For this exam, you eat nothing for 12hrs prior and then eat a small amount of easily digestible food, laced with a radioactive marker (technetium in this case).  They then scan you for about 2 hours, watching the food pass from you stomach and into your small intestine.  For a normal person, about 50% of the food should have left the stomach within the first 90 minutes but, at 100 minutes, we had to stop the test early because I had to vomit.  At that point, 2% (essentially nothing) had passed into my small bowel which gives a fairly confident diagnosis of paralytic stomach.

So, that afternoon, we met with the GI doctor and he started me on Reglan which  should help stimulate stomach activity and I started taking it that evening.  4/2 went well and then, on 4/3, I had my regularly scheduled bilateral stent swap.  The stent swap was successful but it is getting harder and harder for the urologist to fish that stent up my right ureter, taking almost a full hour this time.

Food did not go well that day nor did it go well on Saturday with my vomiting a large amount of bile and/or stomach acid on Saturday afternoon.  Sunday was a good food day with me getting about 1600 calories but today (Monday) has been a down day with my target being about 1300 calories by the time I finish tonight.  For someone of my height, I should be eating about 2000 calories on days when I do absolutely nothing and need to be significantly above that to increase my weight and strength.

We are giving the medication until Wednesday and then will contact the GI doc again about either other medication or starting me back up on TPN which I had 2 years ago.  At least with TPN, I will be able to regain some strength and calories with both TPN feeding as well as some oral feeding as well.

For now, I am trying to do as little as possible and trying to eat whatever I can, whenever I can tolerate it.  Seems odd, being an American, and having trouble eating.  This is certainly a diet that I do not, under any circumstances, recommend.

I am keeping somewhat intellectually stimulated, working on my pet personal project of a thread based optimistic simulation engine and actually have made a lot of progress since I left it behind after my recovery in 2013.  It has been fun learning new features of C++, Boost, and finding cool ways to make some awesome templates.

I have watched some movies I missed, seen some bad TV and taken a bunch of naps.  I would MUCH prefer to be out and about, back to work and play but that is not going to be for a while unless we can solve this food issue.

Thanks for the well wishes and I hope to see all of you soon!