Hurricane Sandy Post-Op Regret

As most of you know, the east coast was hit by hurricane Sandy, some areas were hit harder than others. I live in an area that was hit hard but not as severely as Staten Island or the Jersey Shore. I had no power, heat, hot water or fresh food for a week. I had to throw out my Greek yogurt, soy milk, purees just about everything I have been living off of in my post-op world. I had to revert back to a liquid diet to get the protein I needed. Protein powder being the only thing that didn’t need to be trashed. When FEMA and the National Guard came with military rations for us, everything was crackers or had rice in it, nothing I can currently digest. All my local hospitals and clinics were shut down. Bellevue Hospital, where I received my surgery took a lot of damage and is not set to reopen until February 2013, hopefully sooner.

Surrounded by all this disaster made me start to feel immense regret for having the surgery. It made me realize how little prepared I was for a disaster and had I lived on Staten Island, the forgotten island that was left trapped for days in the storm how would I have survived? This surgery doesn’t give you much option in terms of nutritional survival in a disaster, especially when you are recently post op. I was on the borderline end of mushy on to solid stage when Sandy hit and I didn’t have many options. The first day of the storm all the supermarkets were selling premade bags of bread and water and nothing else. That didn’t help me. The next day they were all closed and dumped everything in a dumpster, old and young alike were starving and digging through the supermarket’s trashed stock for anything they could eat. I was too afraid to do that fearing the risk of becoming ill with no bariatric doctors available. The regret I felt was more about the inability to survive if things became worse. I kept asking myself, how could I have done this? If another disaster hits how will I survive? Then I would tell myself not to worry, by the time another disaster hits I should be further down the post op line… I hope.

Things are slowly recovering in my area but it made me wonder what are the ways someone post op can prepare for small and large disasters? Winter is upon us and if this current weather is any indication of what is to come, we are all going to need a plan.