Stomach bruising and weight gain from surgery

Hi,

I'm new to this forum but hoping for any other experience. I started the program in Jan at 296 lbs of this year. While on the 6 months waiting, I lost another 40 ish lbs. My surgery weigh in on the day of surgery was 244 lbs. There were some minor complications and my stomach was hard and black literally on every spot. I also fell, re-opened a suture on the second day because of apparent sensitivity to the anesthesia. The dry vomiting didn't help. The day that I left the hospital, my stomach was swollen, hard and I looked very pregnant. I had to stay in for 6 days and on my release day, I weighed 263 lbs.

The Dr said this was normal and it looked fine but that really worried me. I am now 2 weeks out and have an appt tomorrow. My scale says 243 now. I am very confused. I did lose that 19 lbs to get back to pretty much the weigh-in at surgery weight. This is worrying to me. Technically I don't feel like I've lost all that much. Is this normal to any others? Can I expect this to ease? I've been hitting a bit of depression today and keeping some pain so it's a good time to see the Dr tomorrow but they are always so vague with their answers when I ask.

Any help appreciated. Thank you.

I had a nurse who was specially trained to work with bariatric patients. Before surgery, she took me to the scale and weighed me. One my first walk, about five hours after surgery, she had me walk the same hallway right to the same scale.

I was up 19 pounds. The next morning I asked the surgeon about the weight gain and he laughed. He said it was because they pumped me full of water for the procedure. He told me to just go home and pee it out.

At my first week check in, the 19 pounds were gone and I believe I was down a pound or two from surgery weight. After that I lost pretty rapidly for a while, then very slowly until I hit my goal at 18 months out. I always get bruising. This week I have a huge black and purple bruise on my right cheek. I had a dental filling last Wednesday and the bruise showed up on Friday.

The bruising will last about 10 days. When I saw it in the mirror, I thought it was dirt and tried to clean it off. When I realized it was a giant bruise, I thought that I could not go out in public. Then I remembered that I will be wearing a mask when outside the house. I laughed because for once I was grateful that I had to wear a mask.

Of course when family saw me, they were afraid I had fallen and hurt myself, My father used to bruise easily and now I do and one of my sisters does.

I am sorry you had such a rough start. At six days out, I was back to work at a desk job, driving, exercising on the treadmill, shopping, and doing any housework that did not involve lifting ten pounds. I never had any pain. I sometimes felt like I had not really had surgery, but there were scars and my hunger was gone.

Thank you so much for your response honestly. Yesterday was just a difficult day for maybe the hormones and difficulties keeping up with my work and the pain. Today I am feeling much better emotionally and rational again. I am now losing about a lb a day. I will be happy if I can even hit a real loss of 5 lbs in the next weeks then just rolling with life. I have heard the majority of people are similar to you in being able to be back to normal within the week.

It only got a little raw yesterday :-). My suture is still opening and I have to put dressing with some kind of septic every day and it still is not closed but the Dr looked at it a few days ago and said it seemed to be doing well. He's having me only do the minimal walking right now for that (it's on my lower right quadrant and the largest lesion I have). If I can start being more normal and real exercise next week, I can be even happier! Usually, I am the nut that has halloween stuff out by now in the neighborhood but now I'm just putting up a bit here and there; whatever I can do without being winded and stretched :-). Just waiting for normal again.