This is not a post for everyone. I warn you now, if the post title didn’t warn you enough, it has the potential to get graphic. This post is for other lap-banders who are scared of what might happen if they get the stomach flu. Let’s face it, it may not happen very often (oh please don’t let it happen very often) but most of us do succumb to the stomach flu eventually.

Mine hit on Sunday. It’s Tuesday, I think, and I’m still alive. Maybe that’s all I need to say. I survived.

This was also the ironic flu. I spent all last week telling myself that if I made it through the week on plan, I’d have a special treat on Sunday. I know I’m going to eat off plan and I want to learn to do that in a controlled way rather than my usual chaos and guilt. It sounds reasonable. I tried to stick to a fairly healthy meal plan Sunday despite my plan to make a half batch of sugar cookies (and freeze most of the dough) but I ate about 2 bites of my oven barbecued country ribs before it became clear I wasn’t going to eat anything else, including the planned sugar cookies.

And the pity is, those ribs turned out really well and I can’t stand the smell of them right now. I hope they freeze and reheat well.

I find I want to whine and tell you every detail. I want to moan about how I lay in bed in jammies and fuzzy robe with heating pad and not one but two down comforters covering me as I shivered with the chills. But that’s not the point. The point is the lap-band thing.

Somewhere in the middle of the night is when I started heaving. I hate vomiting on the best day and this was particularly horrible because the band would not let anything past. I heaved and heaved until my ribs hurt but nothing was going to come by that band. That is not a nice feeling and all those horror stories they tell you about the band slipping and your stomach pushing up past the band filled my fever addled brain during the rest of the night. I seriously thought about going to the emergency room to get unfilled but the thought of being driven half an hour to the nearest ER was much to awful to contemplate.

Still, I survived. I woke up yesterday morning with my fever broken and headed back down toward normal. I was as weak as anyone is after a bout of the stomach flu and I slept off and on most of the day. I tried to eat a little but a couple bites of chicken soup or oatmeal were all I could take. I really should have tried a protein shake but I just don’t like them and trying to force myself to drink that when I was already nauseous didn’t sound appealing.

And yes, I worried. Did I damage the band? Should I be rushing off to see the surgeon as soon as I was capable of rushing off anywhere? So I did some reading. It seems that it’s perfectly normal for lap-banders who have had the stomach flu to be a bit swollen and unable to eat normally for a few days. My surgeon has previously told me that a single bout of stomach flu was unlikely to do any damage – it’s repeated bulimia type vomiting that can cause problems. I’m slightly more able to eat today although nothing sounds very good right now. I think it’s just going to take a bit longer than it normally would to recover from this.

So I’ve survived. I’m drinking my tea and trying to rehydrate. I’m upright for a little while at a time now and I’m hoping that by tomorrow I’ll be more or less my normal self. And I’m hoping that I didn’t carry whatever bug got me into the nursing home and generously give it too all the old ladies there.

NB: I forgot to mention a possibly helpful tip. As it happened, I was listening to NPR on my way to Cassville on Sunday and The People’s Pharmacy was on digestive health. They mentioned, at some point during the show, that sugarless gum was good for reflux because not only does it cause you to produce saliva, it encourages peristalsis to work the right direction so stomach acids don’t reflux. But also, saliva apparently produces a form of bicarbonate which may help to reduce the acid to begin with. I found that chewing sugarless gum while so nauseous seemed to help.