Okay, I’m not usually one to complain. Alright that is a lie, I am the first one to complain when I don’t like something and I have no qualms about telling you that I DO NOT like Vitamins, especially ones that taste like dirt and make me burp stuff that tastes like dirt for hours into my day. Why the hell can’t someone make a chewable adult vitamin that has everything a bariatric surgery patients need in their vitamin without it tasting like plant soil or ass?

Let me just break it down for you here because this is the one part of being Post Op that I can honestly say sucks some big old donkey doo.

First you have the multivitamin – okay this one by itself, really isn’t TERRIBLE. I got the watermelon flavored selection from Bariatric Advantage and it is actually pretty tolerable. The problem is it doesn’t end there and from there it just becomes nastier and nastier.

Next is the Vitamin B-12 sublingual. You put this little tiny pill under your tongue, and then you proceed to sit there and let it dissolve in your mouth. It has that typical grainy and sort of dirt taste that most vitamins have, but its under your tongue not on top of it, so while there could be worse things in the world to endure, they are coming up very shortly, so don’t take for granted that it hasn’t been too bad yet, it’s about to get HORRIBLE.

Then there is the Vitamin D liquid. It doesn’t really taste bad, but it tastes like oil, so you sort of have this nasty oil after texture. But I found a trick for this too, if I just squirt it directly down the back of my throat I can avoid the texture in my mouth and circumvent the issue entirely.

But then there is the Vitamin B-50 Complex. I don’t even know where to begin with this. Honestly, the thought of it brings tears to my eyes, that is how traumatized I am by this stupid vitamin, and really, I’m not the type of girl that cries over things easily, no matter what I do, I just can’t get this vitamin down in a way that doesn’t make me hurl and lose whatever is in my pouch when I try to take it.

Now granted I have always been the type of girl that is extremely sensitive to tastes and smells. I could never even watch that show Fear Factor because I’d gag just watching them eat nasty crap. Jason is constantly amazed at how I can smell even the faintest scent of something and start gagging over it.

The biggest issue with the Vitamin B-50 Complex is that it comes in the form of a capsule, which I can’t take yet because the little opening from my pouch to my lower intestine is too small to swallow anything like that right now. I’m still on liquids and I’ve got the whole pureed food stage and soft foods stage to go after that. So what do you do with a pill you can’t swallow then? Well you crush it. Or in this case, you open it up and pour the powder into a liquid that you can take. The only problem is, no matter what I put it in, no matter what I try to hide it in, it tastes horrible, vile and disgusting and it makes me hurl.

I feel like an idiot whining about a vitamin. I really do. I knew that I was going to have to do this. I knew taking the vitamins was an important part of the post op behavior. Everything they have told me to do thus far I have done, I have followed the rules, good god even when I cheated on the stupid all milk diet, I cheated with plain, non fat, Greek yogurt, which had less calories than the amount of milk I was drinking!

The Calcium requirements have posed a big issue for me as well, though I found a way around it, unfortunately the way I found around it is costing me 90 calories a day. I originally bought the Calcium Lozenges from Bariatric Advantage; I got the mint flavored ones. They are also, nasty, vile and disgusting. But I switched over to the Lemon flavored Calcium Chews that Bariatric Advantage has and those I am able to do just fine on.  They taste an awful lot like lemon Starburst Candy chews to me, and I like that. What I don’t like is that it takes 6 of them a day to get my Calcium requirements in and that it’s costing me 90 Calories a day to be able to stomach my Calcium.

I’m sure that too many, my complaints seem pretty petty and silly and a small price to pay in return for what I have been given and the opportunity I have to finally lose the weight that has held me back for so long. In a lot of ways that is probably true, in the big scheme of things this is probably a very little thing. But right now, today, nine days post-op and struggling to get that Vitamin B-50 Complex down, it’s a huge deal, a big obstacle and one of the hard parts that not everyone tells you about when discussing Weight Loss Surgery.

It’s not all roses, rainbows and smiles, it’s not easy, there are days that are hard, there are things that seem impossible and there are times like today, when I still feel like failure is just around the corner if I don’t make the right decision. That’s honesty, and that’s what I promised you here.

So today, I hate Vitamins. Tomorrow may be different, tomorrow may bring a solution I have yet to see, but today, I hate Vitamins.

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