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Instead of composing an entry, I’ll just post the latest e-mail to Elsa because that usually says it all. I’m writing about my latest experience with skin cancer, the third one, that showed up on my forehead and was removed last week:
It’s good to be silly right now–it helps more than anything. I don’t look at myself too long in the mirror except to have a good giggle. The bandages are still on and the stitches come out tomorrow, which feels way too early. The wound is still fresh and painful, but the doctor said the sooner the better in terms of scarring. I trust him even though I’m pretty sure I’ll want to throw up during the stitch removal. I think I’ll take some xanax before my appointment–I got a prescription a few months ago before my parathyroid surgery in case the panic attacks came back and I really could have used them last week. The nurse reasoned that my twitchy, tear-filled reaction was due to all the adrenaline they used on the area in order to reduce the blood flow (in addition to numbing.) During the procedure, the doctor and nurse both kept urging me to talk about our upcoming trip as JM held my hand, but that didn’t work and the nurse and JM tag-teamed me with cold, wet cloths in order to keep the clammy, flop-sweat at bay. It wasn’t pretty and I apologized profusely thereafter even though my doctor insisted I did quite well. JM said the doc worked incredibly fast, but I suppose anyone would under threat of projectile vomit.
So here we are. Tomorrow I’ll see my new face without all the bandages. In just a tiny way I’m sad. I got used to the old one and even admired her awkward beauty from time to time. I think I might like this new one even better though. It reminds me of the time when I dyed my hair bright blue way back in ’88. Whenever someone looked at me, she or he would immediately look away in any other direction, la la la, acting oblivious which made me laugh. I think that experience can help me now. My face isn’t that different–the change is subtle. I still wouldn’t get cast as that odd extra in a Woody Allen film, but I’m exactly who I want to be inside and out. Life has been good to me…
So I had surgery for my parathyroids. Three are gone for good and the one remaining is slowly getting up to speed remembering it’s function. While everything is normalising, I need weekly blood tests to measure calcium levels and take a supplement from which they will gradually wean me. The problem is that I’ve got tingles that are driving me batty and the doctors just shrug because my numbers look good. I basically feel electrically charged, vibrational, and then my arm or leg will suddenly be overcome with that sensation like it’s about to fall asleep, intensely so. It’s not painful, it’s just, well, disrupting. And the last two days it’s been particularly active.
This afternoon I started going a bit stir crazy. I needed to literally make some sweeping gestures, larger than my Wacom tablet would afford. I needed to move and I needed to MAKE SOMETHING. There was no paper in the house large enough to do this on, so I took A3 sheets and taped them together for my palette. I discovered I have no charcoal, only a piece of white chalk, but then found a tube of black paint and some brushes. It didn’t have to be pretty, it just had to be the act of putting brush to paper and moving my arm. It didn’t help in the physical sense, but it still felt really good.
From the Historic American Cookbook Project at Michigan State University Libraries, here’s an excerpt from Aunt Babette’s Cook Book: Foreign and domestic receipts for the household (published c. 1889) instructing the reader how to fashion a bacon bandage as a treatment for sore throat:
Cut the bacon in strips one quarter of an inch in thickness and two or three inches in width and long enough to pass entirely around the throat. Remove the bacon rind and any lean meat there may be in it to prevent blistering of the throat or neck. Sew the bacon to a strip of flannel so as to hold it into position and prevent its slipping and then apply the bacon to the throat and neck. Pin it around the neck, so that it will not be uncomfortably tight. The throat and neck should be completely swathed with the bacon. If after an application of eight hours the patient is not better apply a new bandage in the same manner.
I particularly like “the throat and neck should be completely swathed with bacon.” This seems more like a sound brunch-time policy rather than a health concern, though.
At the endocrinologist’s office while he studies a bone density report on me:
Dr F: Do you have any shooting pains down your legs?
Me: No.
Dr F: Maybe down the back. They would be strong, shooting pains.
Me: Um, no.
Dr F: Well, if you ever do, give this to your GP and he’ll know why.
Me: Great.
Dr F: But it’s completely unrelated to your condition.
Me: Ah.
I admit it, I love exercising. You wouldn’t be able to tell this by looking at me, but… Wait, actually I don’t like exercising at all and often want to quit while I’m doing it, but I feel so good afterwards that it makes the exertion worthwhile. About 12 years ago I started running in a group and loved it. We ran a long, hilly loop and the faster runners would encourage the slower (me) as they passed time and time again. And when I actually passed someone else, wow, what a feeling. So here I am about to embark on a solo campaign. Over the last 25 years I’ve attempted to start running on multiple occasions and failed miserably. Now I have an iPhone, so I’m totally certain I’ll succeed. The only problem I foresee is wanting to stop to take photos.
Last year JM bought one of those Nike+ sensors that goes into a running shoe to track runs. He had started a program only to be waylaid by injury. Too much, too soon. Earlier this week I decided to do the Couch Potato to 5k and even downloaded a handy application for the iPhone which gives me voice prompts when to walk and when to run. The first day went great. Yes, I was tired and ready to be done after 30, no, 15 minutes, but I stuck it out the entire time. Then I went home and uploaded my run to the Nike site with the ease of my iTunes account. It even showed me a little graph of how tired I got at minute 15 and how my workout declined thereafter. Joy.
Today was my second excursion and, hello, suddenly it’s summer in Perth and I was miserable. I rallied around the 15 minute mark again and then it all went downhill, figuratively mind you. I would like to add blame to the music because who can run to the Dave Matthews Band? Certainly not I. Or me. Whatever.
I came home all aflutter to upload my workout again and see the graph showing my steady decline, but lo and behold, the whole Nike+ site had changed (but, yes, the graph was there as well). Now they offered me their own 12 week ‘walk to run’ training program which really pleased the couch potato in me. I’m ditching the 9 week Couch to 5k program for Nike’s even though I don’t have voice prompts. Hmm, I may reconsider this in the morning. That’s the one drawback to Nike’s program–they haven’t updated the iPhone software to include these new coaching programs which means I’ll have to keep pulling the iPhone out of my bra to look at what time it is. This may not work for me at all, however at the moment I am undeterred. Check back in another week…
It’s “feed a cold a pepperoni pizza; starve a fever,” right?
For the first time this year, I bring you Can I Eat This, a catalogue of almost entirely revolting, occasionally reassuring, oftentimes hilarious questions regarding food safety, from the users of Ask Metafilter. The following are quotes from actual user’s questions.
broth
- “Can I keep re-using the same cooking liquid over and over forever and ever amen?”
- “How do I tell whether beef or chicken stock/broth, that has been refrigerated, has gone yucky?”
the ever-popular poultry
- “Turkey brining fiasco – Is my turkey that has been sitting in cold tap water for the past 18 hours still good to cook?”
- “I bought a Value Pack of chicken thighs at Safeway, like the frugal shopper I am… and then promptly left them on the kitchen counter for 3 hours, like the absent-minded bumbler I am.”
- “Can I cook a chicken with the giblet bag in?“
the car is not a refrigerator
- The other day I bought a package of a popular brand of vegetarian breakfast link ‘sausage.’ I bought it in the late morning and I forgot it in the cab of my truck for about seven hours on a day that saw temperatures reach the mid-60s.”
- “I got a fully cooked ham from my employer, put it out in my car trunk during the day, and forgot about it when I got home. Over the next few days, I didn’t remember it at all.”
condiments, spices, & accoutrements
- “What’s wrong with my Szechuan peppercorns?
- “Will an infused oil I make today, still be edible come Christmas?“
- “Can mold grow on food packed in oil?“
- “How long do condiment packets last? Recently I have opened duck sauce packets that had thickened to silly putty consistency and ketchup that had turned almost black. Also, are they dangerous to eat, or just gross?“
an emergency!
- “Emergency should-I-Eat-This! Burger King Apple Fries showing discoloration.“
bugnuts
- “I found a bug in my pistachio. 
“
boozy bread
- “Did I just make alcoholic bread? Can I eat it?”
dried sausage
- “If I have a big piece of dry summer sausage that’s developed mould, do I have to throw it away?”
thermos safety
- “Is it OK to keep tea+milk in a thermos for 24 hours before drinking?”
paneer
- “There is some absolutely delicious palak paneer that I had been saving for today because I didn’t finish it at the restaurant last night. When I got home from the restaurant I put it in the refrigerator with the intention of taking it to work this morning. I took it out of the refrigerator this morning and left it in the vicinity of the front door, but I forgot about it. So the question is, can I eat it when I get home?”
suspect fish and shellfish
- “Aw crap, I left some salmon out overnight. Is it still safe to eat?” (Elsa’s note: it’s worth directing you to this response, too, if only for a rare example of justified use of the usually grating and unnecessary blink tag.)
- “Should I eat it filter: Can of Bumblebee whole baby clams. Dumped them into my chowder only to notice that they looked a bit green.”
- “Bought a bag of frozen shrimp (cooked, tails on) on Saturday night. Husband defrosted about half of it by running it under water, then changed his mind and cooked something else for dinner. Shrimp has been in the refrigerator since (in sealed tupperware). Is it still OK to eat? Will it be OK tomorrow (i.e. 3 days since defrosting)? How about Wednesday?“
- “I boiled about a half cup of quinoa with powdered vegetable broth yesterday at lunch time, then mixed in a can of tuna and two cans of salmon… Mixture was left unrefrigerated for ~20 hours… So, can I eat it?“
warm mayo
- “I bought a sandwich from a deli 14 hours ago (ham salami cheese and mayo) and left it out unrefrigerated. Can I still eat it and not get sick?”
slow cooker, slow cleaning
- “For various reasons I’d rather not go into, none of them particularly good, the ceramic cooking portion of my Crock Pot was filled with soapy water and beef stew remains, but also various muck like laundry detergent and Comet. When I poured the mixture out, there was a slimy blue residue at the bottom. I used dish soap and rather hot water to clean out the nastycrap, and soaked and washed it like three more times, and now I’ve got some water in there cooking on the high setting to try to get it to boil.”
cat litter, mmm
- “Let me be clear here: I have no intention of actually eating cat litter. But! We recently switched to the laboriously named Swheat Scoop-brand cat litter (which works quite well), which appears to be made of nothing but dried, cracked wheat.
Could I, say, cook this stuff up in some hot milk or water, add a little butter and brown sugar, and enjoy a piping hot kitty-litter breakfast? If not, why not?”
poison mushroom? no — poison ivy!
- “One of my favorites. Chicken of the woods. It has both the taste and texture of chicken. On the way home I spotted it on the side of the road. I told my wife and then after her night class, she stopped and harvested it. When she brought it in I noticed bits of poison ivy poking out of it. Mostly stems but also a few leaves and berries. I’m sure this was poison ivy.”
No, I didn’t make any resolutions, I’m done with that fruitless endeavor, however, I have been eating a gluten-free diet for the past week. It’s more an experiment than anything–I want to see if it makes a difference in my energy levels and in a way it has. I go for a brisk walk every other day and by the third day of the experiment I didn’t know if my legs would carry me home. I had to lay down at least twice that day just to make it through (but it was also extremely hot and I don’t own an A/C.) The past few days when walking though I’ve felt like sprinting and this evening I even broke into a fast trot for a minute. My energy may be perking up a wee bit.
The gluten-free experiment doesn’t mean finding a replacement for grains. I’m following the 5 veg and 2 fruit guideline (although I only manage 1 fruit at the moment) and eating just a small amount of rice or potatoes if I need a side. I suppose soon I’ll try a few rice pastas, but I like the idea of minimally processed foods, corn chips always being the exception. Right now I’m making my way through a packaged gluten-free cookie and I can really do without it. In fact, from now on I’ll indulge in a small block of dark chocolate instead. I saw a cook book today for $55 and decided it was totally unnecessary, this has been pretty simple so far. I keep putting off making that polenta Elsa told me about, but it’s on the list.
Ah, we did have dinner at friends’ this weekend and they decided on pizza. I bought some gluten-free wraps and made my own mini-pizza. It was perfect because I’m a thin crust kinda gal anyway. I used just a small amount of spiced tomato paste and a thin layer of cheese so as not to make it too soggy. Mine was probably the best.
The down side: JM just started brewing his own beer at home and I can’t have any! Maybe in three weeks when it’s ready I’ll treat myself to one and see how it affects me. Also, we’re having a house warming this weekend and I’m torn making things I can’t eat. Most of it I can and those few things I’d like to try, but won’t, will be okay as well. I’m specifically thinking about these corny dogs from Homesick Texan.
Elli
Elsa