Post-Surgery Food Roundup

My wife had surgery on the 9th. It wasn’t a huge surgery. She’s had, I think 9 of them in the last 4 years for her transition from female to male. She’s one of the craziest strongest recoveries I have ever seen for surgery. When I was a nurse, in my first career, I did medicare units with post surgical recovery on and off, and so seeing my wife recover this strong is impressive to me.

For instance, she didn’t take anything much for pain the last couple days. She never does. She hates narcotic pain medication, so she switches over to Tylenol or something over the counter really quickly.

I think part of the issue is my wife has ADHD, and I am not sure if it’s related, but meds just hit her different. Stimulants put her to sleep. Every time she has general anesthesia she is incredibly busy until it wears off in a day or two. The night I brought her home, she was so chatty I had to tell her to be quiet at midnight so I could sleep. She was happy and up, but I was exhausted from getting her to Seattle and back and getting all the details taken care of.

For the bigger surgeries, she is more out of is and sleeps, but every little one like this? She practically doesn’t notice.

Anyways, on to food. My wife always wants Dick’s Cheeseburgers and jelly beans after surgery. I don’t know what the anesthetic does to her, but it’s pretty reliable. Once, years ago before her transition, she had a vasectomy in a town an hour away, and on the ride home, she was so insistent I get her jelly beans I had to pull off and go into a Fred Meyer to buy her a pound of bulk candy.

When we got to the house, 20 minutes later, she once again got insanely insistent, so I asked where her jelly beans went. Turns out, little miss post-anesthesia ate the entire pound of jelly beans without remembering. It made her a bit queasy too, so after that I was much more careful with her demands, and I only got her a small bag of jelly beans, and vetoed Dick’s Cheeseburgers on the way back until I could be sure she wasn’t going to be nauseated from eating.

For the first night I wanted to go easy on her stomach, so I made the above, sweet and sour rice and vegetables. I made the sweet and sour sauce from scratch and the green onions are from my garden.

I wanted her to have a good protein-rich set of meals for recovery. We don’t normally eat steak and red meat that much. The costs are prohibitive and we just don’t miss it, but I splurged to make sure she had good recovery food. I should note, I was so tired from the night before, that I got the groceries delivered, and the steaks I wanted were replaced with flank steak. Which is fine, but they looked like they’d been through it. I am a little pickier on my meat selection, so I just cooked them up in the pan with butter, salt and peppers and sliced them across the grain.

She woke up well, and I made her a late lunch, early supper with flank steak, country mashers with some leftover potatoes in the fridge, and carrots glazed in honey. She loves rolls, so I bought Hawaiian rolls. Normally they are a bit sweet for our tastes, but it was what was available for delivery.

Later that evening we were both hungry, so I used leftover steak to make burritos with steak, rice (leftover), cabbage, green onion, and cheese. I used some light sour cream for sauce in them. I forgot to get pictures of that one.

I made a nice frittata and used it to use up leftovers in the fridge. I used up the leftover polenta as well, broiled with parmesan.

The cheese in the polenta is pepper jack, and cheddar. The only place I buy cheese these days is Costco, in large blocks, and grate myself using a KitchenAid grater attachment. I swear the pepper jack tastes like pepper jack. Some grocery store versions are very bland and not remotely spicy.

I might do more sweet and sour vegetables for dinner. I need to get more veggies into her.

However, she’s been doing super well, and maybe now that she’s good, I can finally relax.