The 11-day plan to lose 14 pounds
The absolute worst weight loss plan ever!
Day 1: Get tonsils out at age 35. Sleep most of the day. Remain in hospital
Day 2: Pain, no food. LOTS more sleeping
Day 3: Better drugs, less pain, no food. Return home from hospital. Feast on liquid yogurt (4 oz) and about the same amount of apple juice. A nice 7 hour nap in the afternoon for refreshment is advised.
Day 4: No food. Lots of water. A little bit of juice. LOTS of drugs. Try to limit napping to under 6 hours.
Day 5: Some ice cream. Did I mention LOTS OF WATER and pain killers? Napping + sleep should take 18 hours out of an otherwise busy day.
Day 6: Oatmeal (1 packet) for breakfast. Mac-n-cheese (1 packet Easy mac) for lunch. 1 shake for dinner. Light 3 hour nap.
Day 7: No food. Too sore from overdoing it the previous day. Lots of water and pain killers instead. Don’t bother getting out of bed.
Day 8: I feel fantastic. I think I’ll feast on….painkillers. And some apple juice. Add a 5 1/2 hour nap and we’re good to go.
Day 9: Hmm…I think I’ll start the day with a nap on the couch. Then a shake in the afternoon followed by a nap on another couch. This will be followed by a nap in the easy chair by the fireplace.
Day 10: Doctor checkup! Doctor looks at your throat and says “Wow, I’m glad that’s not me. But it looks normal. Have you tried napping?”. Return home. Painkillers for lunch, 6 hour nap to follow.
Day 11. 1 scrambled egg for breakfast after weighing myself. You gotta eat after all. I’m getting a bit tired….perhaps a short nap is in order.
Sleep Apnea – surgery and recovery
This is part two in the series. The original article can be found at Sleep Apnea: The Back story.
Day of surgery
The day of the surgery was unremarkable. I showed up, they did they prep stuff, and wheeled me off to surgery without anything unusual happening. I’d had surgery before for both right and left inguinal hernias so I knew the routine. The expected drill was in by 9, out and back home by 5. This was same day surgery.
UPPP and Septoplasty
The actual procedures I had were simple – Uvulopalatopharyngoplasty (UPPP) and Septoplasty. As bonus they threw in a turbinate reduction
UPPP surgery is for sleep apnea. In my case the ENT/Surgeon (Dr. T.) ended up removing my tonsils, my adenoids, my uvula, and some tissue along the upper-back portion of my mouth in the area called the soft palate. Think of this as the “ouchie” spot you get when you a taco shell or something that pokes you in the soft tissue in the back of the mouth. In any case Dr. T removed all of that.
Septoplasty is the procedure to fix a deviated septum. Essentially they cut a flap in one side of your nose in the middle (septum). Then Dr. T. went in through this opening and removed the bone/cartilage that was out of place from me breaking my nose. Finally he did a turbinate reduction to open up the airway in my left nostril. After that they just suture the flap up and you are done.
Waking up
I woke up to a world of pain. I knew there would be pain – I was well advised of it ahead of time and I wasn’t surprised. I was however surprised at the intensity. I was being given morphine and this didn’t do ANYTHING to reduce the pain. All it did was knock me out. The first few days the nose repair tends to bleed a lot so I’d often wake up to my very patient wife wiping up the blood draining down my face from my nose. I think she and I went through about a zillion tissues.
My nose didn’t hurt though – my throat was unbearable. The intensity of the pain was actually far worse than when I had my hernia surgeries (although, as I am finding out – the hernia surgery pain lasted a LOT longer in one of the instances – the other time I have virtually no pain).
I actually ended up staying overnight that Monday and was put on different pain killers on Tuesday. This helped considerably but I still couldn’t swallow. Thankfully I was on an IV so I didn’t get dehydrated since I was definitely not drinking anything either.
Side note: I love nurses. My mom was a nurse. I have a soft spot for anyone who chooses that profession. However, there should be a simple screening question added to weed out potential nurses that goes like this:
Q: You enter a patient’s room at 4AM to administer drugs/check vitals/whatever. Do you..
- Leave the door/light how you found it (closed and off respectively)?
- Leave the lights on?
- Leave the door wide open?
- Wear perfume?
Anyone who picks answers 2-4 should immediately be escorted out of nursing school.
Day Three
By Wednesday I was feeling good enough to go home. Fortunately I had lots of good drugs to take home and my wife/daughter picked me up. The pain was greatly diminished by the drugs (in my case Toradol to reduce inflammation and Vicodyn for pain) but still – I hate taking all this crap. On the plus side I’m sleeping about 14 hours a day at this point and things are considerably foggy most of the time.
One Week After
I’ve lost 10 pounds. I’ve developed Vidodyn-alepsy where I just randomly fall asleep on various pieces of furniture.
I also am still having a very hard time eating. I went out to dinner today with my wife to Arbuckle’s in Stevens Point. I got cheese ravioli which was a good option for me but I am still only able to eat small portions. I think I ate a total of two ravioli (they were the large variety). I did however get in some serious coveting of my wife’s sandwich.
I also tried their famous cheese fries – I was able to eat some small pieces I cut up but in the end my throat was too sore to really eat much. At this point I am only in Vidodyn (not Toradol) and Tylenol. The pain has again increased a bit but is manageable – I just don’t like eating very much right now since that just plain hurts a LOT.
Did I mention the Bad Breath?
One thing they warn you about the UPPP surgery is you will develop bad breath while everything heals. What they do not warn you about is how REALLY bad your breath is. It is amazing just how bad your breath can be when your throat is healing. My wife and toddler were very gracious about it but since I can feel it all the time I really pity the times they caught a whiff of it. It’s just nasty.
Fortunately that’s starting to improve.
According to Kurt – a friend who had the same surgery – you need a good solid month before you are back to eating normally. Also, you can randomly expect things to come out your nose that were intended to go mouth > teeth > stomach. His wife Amy said Kurt recently laughed an M&M out his nose.
I’ll post more updates when anything useful happens.
Sleep Apnea: The back story
My Sleep Apnea Personal History
First – my basic background – I’m 35 and I snore. My parents snore. My sisters snore. My brothers snore. And I don’t mean “they have a nice cute little snore like my toddler” I mean they have this god-awful unhealthy snore that kept me awake for YEARS growing up whenever I’d have to share a room with them (family trips, etc).
I have snored for many years. My college roommates used to yell at me because I’d keep them awake, as did anyone who ever slept in any proximity to me.
I weigh quite a bit more than when I was 17 and weight 155 lbs. However, I snore the same now as I did when I was 17 and weighed 155 lbs. It is safe to say (in retrospect) that I have probably had obstructive sleep apnea for a long time. I’m working on reducing weight but I highly doubt that will have much of an effect given how long I’ve snored like this.
However…it was never an issue for ME – it just annoyed those around me. That was, of course, until I got married – then it became a larger issue.
Let me preface all of this by saying my wife has been supportive and none of this is a comment against her – but the basic facts are simple. She went through a period of time where she had great difficulty sleeping. Any minor disturbance would wake her up – including me snoring.
Naturally, she would wake me up and ask me to turn over, etc, so I’d stop snoring.
Obviously this is a viscious cycle and we continually would wake one another up – or one of us would just accept defeat and go sleep in another room. Obviously none of these approaches are good long term solutions so eventually I went to my doctor and he referred me to an ENT.
The ENT’s take on it…
The ENT wanted me to do a sleep study. Since I am fortunate enough to have good health insurance this was completed in short order. The results gave a clear indication of sleep apnea.
I would stop breathing for up to 60 seconds at time – I woke up 137 times in 6.5 hours – and my Oxygen levels dropped below 90. The other indicators were all conclusive as well.
During that study they also tried CPAP on me. I hated it with a passion. I had a LOT of trouble falling asleep with it and I had a sleep aid (ie, drugs) administered. What was worse was my reaction when I woke up. I panicked. I don’t think I have ever truly panicked in my life before but seriously – if you had taken the CPAP machine off and replaced it with a live squid on my face I don’t think I would have reacted worse. I woke up and started swinging at the thing to get it off my face.
I’m probably in some kind of “Hall of Fame” at the sleep center since they record every second of the process. “Look! Here’s Squidboy!”
Moving on….
I met with the ENT again and he explained all of the options. At my age I’m old enough to have run through several doctors of different types and I’d say he very good. He explains things well and was very patient. In his opinion/experience I was a very good candidate based on the shape of my face, mouth, throat, etc.
One thing I haven’t mentioned up to this point is my nose. I also have a deviated septum. I’ll summarize the story here and just say I smashed my nose into someone accidentally in college years ago. That was easily the worst I’ve ever bled. Ever since then airflow on one side of my nose is about 20% of what it should be.
Although they do not think this is a contributor to the sleep apnea it is really inconvenient (Warning: Gross sentence ahead). I’ll skip the political correctness and just be blunt: when the airway is that small it tends to get constantly plugged with boogers regardless of your hygiene. (Gross sentence over).
So – on April 20th – all of that got fixed ( and by fixed I mean operated on – whether or not it worked needs more time…)
I guess the appropriate question to ask is this – what do I want to get out of this? I’d say three things:
1.) Ability to actually sleep in the same room as my wife without waking her up constantly
2.) To feel well rested again (I haven’t for years…but I also have a toddler so….)
3.) Be able to breath out my nose again
That’s my story – and I’m sticking to it. Feel free to ask questions. The next part covers the actual procedure and after effects.
Septoplasty and UPPP tomorrow
I having surgery Monday – specifically a septoplasty and Uvulopalatopharyngoplasty (surgery to hopefully improve sleep apnea). This is going to make me not feel like talking/writing/moving etc for a while (or so they tell me).
I may actually recover quickly – there’s no way of knowing. In any case I’ll post as time permits.
For more fun I’ll take pre and post pictures of my nose and throat. That should freak a few people out 
Enjoy.
Forcing the Remedy Email Engine to use HTML for Outgoing Messages
I recently ran into a problem where outgoing messages were not necessarily going out formatted as HTML. There’s an easy fix for this but it is not documented anywhere.
Step One: Create the Filter with HTML Notification Text
This is very straight forward - just embed HTML in your notification text as demonstrated in the following sample notification text. This is taken from a Filter Notify action:
Remedy Notification HTML Example
Step Two: Create a blank HTML Email Message Template
This is the easiest thing in the world. The Remedy Email Engine just needs to know to specify the format of the Email. You can do this with a standard HTML template. First, create a blank template file and call it something like “outgoing.html”. It will only have the following contents:
Outgoing Email HTML Template for the Remedy Email Engine.
Step Three: Attach the template to the Outgoing Messages Mailbox (AR System Email Mailbox Configuration Form):
This is also straight forward configuration – just perform the following steps:
1.) Create the template entry in the “AR System Email Templates” form
2) Attach the template to the “Header” section for the outgoing Email box configured in the “AR System Email Mailbox” form under the “Default Templates” section.
An alternative to #2 is to just attach the template in each filter that you are doing notifications from – assuming of course that all of your people being notified are being notified by email and not some other method like the Remedy Alert tool (which not many people use.)