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Today I got an accurate sense of just. how. awfully. bloated. I am.

A few months ago I ran into a store to buy a jacket because it was unexpectedly cold and I wasn't adequately dressed, and I saw one on sale for $14.

Naturally, the jacket was in a size smaller than I usually wear, but I got it anyway, because just a few days earlier I'd found a different style jacket in the same size and it fit fine.

The new coat did not fit. Well...to be clear, it fit my shoulders and waist. It did not properly fit my pear-shaped lower half. I could zip it, but across the hips it was uncomfortably tight.

Fast forward to recent times, when I've been on a severe low-fat diet and kind of not eating much, thanks to the gall bladder. At least once a week I've taken that jacket out and tried it on. It's gotten bigger and bigger on the shoulders and waist -- and slightly, yes, slightly, looser around the wide hips.

On Monday, the day before my gall bladder surgery, I tried it on again.

It fit! It was the loosest it has ever been around the hips (with clothes on underneath) and I could have worn it out that day and nobody would have raised an eyebrow. I'd like it to be just a little bit looser, but even I recognized that it fit me better than it had.

Now then. What do you think I tried on this morning? And do you think it still fit?

No it did not!!! I couldn't even get the zipper to meet! I measured a three-inch distance from one side to the other across my lower belly. OMG!

The puffiness will be gone soon, my doctor assures me. But until then, just call me Puff, the magic non-dragon.

Made It

Gallbladder surgery was exactly as advertised = quick (to me) and pain free.

Recovery, not so much. Surprising amount of pain from the gas they pumped into my stomach to separate organs. The better to see them, doc said. That's fine by me, but Oh Lordy! The last thing I expected to wake up with was a massively distended, swollen belly.

Am surviving. Thank Goodness M was there and took the next day off too. I was really shocked by the pain, and the gobs of percocet the docs lobbed at me. The cure for the gas is to get up and walk, yet the more percocet one takes, the less one feels like getting up to do anything (and the more constipated one gets, as well).

In any case, I am decidedly on the mend. Now I am in my warm apartment, wrapped in a frowzy bathrobe pacing the floor like some modern day Mrs. Rochester. (I'm dying to see the new Jane Eyre movie.) It's impossible to get outside (two flights of stairs plus nasty weather) so I pace, pace, pace, nap, nap, nap, pace, pace, pace in an effort to rest and get the gas and anesthesia moving out of my system. Suspect I will feel very good indeed once the worst of the gas is gone.

Worst moment of the whole thing? Cab ride home from hospital. Delusional being that I am, I somehow thought I'd float out in minor discomfort and just hop in a cab. Instead, I hobbled out, bent over in pain, fighting the urge to vomit everywhere, and was treated to your usual 20-minutes of cabbie hell in NYC rush hour traffic. Start, stop, swerve, brakes, pot hole. I finally had to cry to the driver to please take it easy.

M said I was the whitest he'd seen me all day when I finally got out at our house. He grabbed my elbow because he thought for sure I was going to keel over. He wanted to take me back to the hospital, but no way was I getting back in another cab!

Learning moment in all -- do not send your friends flowers when they are recovering from an operation. It's a very, very nice gesture.... but who do you think has to get up to answer the door?

Thanks everyone for all the good wishes and for checking in. I'm ok, or I will be, once these next few days are over.