So here I am 8 days left until I can finally eat. I can still honestly say I've felt good, not terribly hungry. When I am hungry it's still at the dreaded 2-5pm time frame of the day. So I've just been eating my biggest "meal" if you can call it that - during that time of the day.

I was able to move on to creamy soups which is like fricking heaven after all this time of drinking clear liquids. I found that the drinkable yogurt was just too thick for me. I would drink it and it just felt like it sat in my stomach - so I would only drink about 4oz of that a day. Now that I'm on to creamy soups i've just kind of given up the yogurt.

My port is still a little tender. When I sneeze or roll onto it it's still a little tender. I think it will take me longer than I thought to get used to having this inside of me.

I'm still losing so far - not as much as I was those weeks of clear liquids, but if it's coming off i'm happy. My mom and nieces even noticed that my face didn't look as 'swollen" as it had - so I was happy to hear that. I feel a difference in my weight - so that keeps me motivated to stay on track and not go crazy. Even on this section of the liquid phase I find myself reasoning why I can have something that's super high in calories. But so far I've resisted and stuck to "the basics" as Dr. Ortiz had said. If you're losing weight on a certain diet then I'm going to stick to it because obviously my body is reacting to that.

I can say my mental hunger is poking it's head up a little more frequently in these last few days. I've always craved sweets and that was my weakness but now I want meat!! uuuggghhh my first meal is going to be chicken for sure. Which craving chicken isn't a bad thing. I'm actually surprised I'm not craving anything sweet.

Looking back so far on this journey I can still say that day 1-4 were the absolute hardest for me and the rest of the time has been a mental challenge but not so much a physical one. I still can't believe I've gotten this far - but it's truly given me a lot of courage to be strong in some of the areas of my life that I have given up on.