Recovery Day 24 - Weight Gain!

Something to celebrate! My weight is back up to about 150 lbs! I was really disheartened when it dipped below 145. So my weight coming back up to a more reasonable 150 lbs is really good news. I have been pumping 7 cans of formula a day (3 daily, 4 at night) at 90 to 95 ml/h to work my weight back up. I have also started eating an actual breakfast and dinner.

Breakfast consists of a souped up large bowl of Cream of Wheat. Cathy makes this ahead of time and stores portion size containers in the fridge. She used evaporated milk, butter and brown sugar to rev up the content.

Dinner has been Salmon Quiche with gravy - another Cathy concoction. I can't taste much of it but it smells good so that will have to do. The quiche is fairly soft but I still need gravy to get it down. Eating it requires a lot more focus on swallowing than does the Cream of Wheat. It also requires a lot of time to eat due to the small bites I'm taking. Most everyone else at the table is finished and I'm still working on just my quiche.

The only formula I have been pumping is Iso-Source 1.5 (375 calories/can). I tried pumping two cans of Nutren 2.0 (500 calories) yesterday and I ended up with a stomach that was so sore that I stopped pumping and dumped out all the Nutren. Something in Nutren just doesn't agree with my stomach. Unfortunately, I have two cases of very expensive Nutren - that I won't use - and I just opened my last cast of Iso-Source. So I think I'm going to have to order more Iso-Source. I don't see me eating 2,000 calories by mouth yet. I would really like to get rid of the stomach tube but that's a couple weeks away I think.

I went to Sean's Boy Scout meeting last night. It had been quite a while since I had been to one. It was great to see the adult leaders as well as the scouts. I really missed interacting with many of the adult leaders.