Okay, a lot of wonderful things happened this year but as far as negatives, 2012 was full of them.
Goodbye, 2012, I am carrying the positives with me to the next year, but all of the cancer and death crap that happened can stay in 2012. I know that I can’t live a life without significant pain or challenges but 2011 was really hard then came 2012. Let’s have a bit of a easier year, shall we?
In any case, I’m going to keep breathing, walking, and living.
Wishing all of you a healthy New Year!
Thanks to the very inspirational Tracy of FEC-this, my blog has received another nomination for Very Inspirational Blog. I have again fudged the rules for the nomination, mainly the rule that I nominate fifteen other blogs for the award. Instead, I will write something related to inspiration.
In my last post, I wrote about my initial foray into gluten-free bread baking. At the recommendation of my naturopath, I checked out the Gluten Free Girl and the Chef blog. I found what I was looking for, gluten free recipes but I also found an inspiring love story. Gluten-Free Girl, a.k.a. Shauna, is a woman who was terribly ill for YEARS until she was diagnosed with celiac disease several years ago and cut gluten out of her diet.
Then she falls in love with a chef. He ends up owning his own fine dining restaurant. Eventually, without her even asking, he changes his cuisine to gluten-free. He wants to share all of his cooking with her and also to provide a place for people to eat safely who have celiac disease, which I’ve learned is really quite awful. Even a little bit of gluten will make Shauna sick for three days, like chemo-level sick. So chef’s restaurant was (it has since closed) a mecca for folks who had not eaten in restaurants in years because of their health problems, as well as to people without celiac disease who were simply looking for a fine meal.
Shauna is also a professional writer and former English teacher. She is passionate about the subject as well as about her family. This combination is a recipe for a very well written blog.
A little lumpy but delicious!
P.S. My bread is delicious! I followed the recipe here.
To make a long story short, I may be allergic to wheat. A couple of years ago I had a skin patch test and a skin biopsy. Based on the results, my dermatologist suspected that a food allergy was responsible for my very annoying eczema. She referred me to an allergist. I opted not to follow up. Now my naturopathic oncologist suspects a wheat allergy and suggested that I try going gluten free for a couple of weeks and see what happens. Since my cancer treatment put me into menopause, I am experiencing an increase in eczema flare-ups. So my skin is even more annoying than usual.
I love wheat. I really, really love wheat. Bread and pasta, yum, yum, yum. I eat very little in the way of prepared food so I’m not so worried about hidden wheat. I have to tell you though, the corn and rice pasta noodles look gross. Also, I’m not crazy about increasing the amount of corn in my diet. Corn is in everything!
I just whipped up my very first batch of gluten-free bread dough. It looked doughy. The ingredients were incredibly expensive—sorghum, brown rice, and tapioca flours. I forgot about the xanthum gum. That was a fortune but I only needed two tablespoons. If this ends up being a more frequent baking project, I’m going to go to a store with bulk bins of this stuff, sold by weight.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
As a kid growing up in the Seattle area, I often wished very hard for a white Christmas only to end up with a soggy one. This Christmas morning was no different. It has been raining steadily for hours. What was different this year was that I put on my rain gear and went out for a three mile walk, which is my new daily habit.
Yes, the rain was falling and heavily at times, but I was warm and mostly dry, as I like to remind myself on rainy walks. And although I took care to avoid walking through the deep puddles, I did admire the patterns the rain drops made as they landed on the water’s surface. I even got to see some squirrels chasing each other while splashing through them.
And the human animals were active, as well. I could see children opening their presents in their brightly decorated living rooms. Some others were watching Curious George wearing a Santa hat, on television.
I ended my walk in a very merry mood, indeed.
Merry Christmas! And if you don’t celebrate today’s holiday, I wish you a very terrific Tuesday!
As they say, “You win some and you lose some.” But today both the gains and the loss are good news! We have two more minutes of day light today! And two more tomorrow! And two more the day after that! Until the summer solstice!
As for the loss, I lost a pound this week, which makes for a total of 30 pounds since May 5th! In one pound, my BMI will enter the “Healthy Weight” range. Hooray!
I had a visit with Dr. Welk, my plastic surgeon, today. Although I have another bandage (one of those tiny round ones), I received a great award today. I do not have to see him again until February 28th! I saw Dr. Lucas, my naturopath, last Friday. I am not scheduled to see her again until February 22nd! And my next mammogram and medical oncology appointments are not until next month! I do have other healthcare appointments, not to mention the fact that I am planning to start acupuncture to address the sleep and menopause symptoms, but I have to tell you that it is a huge boost to me for these appointments to slow down some. Since my screening mammogram on May 7th of this year, I have had 70 healthcare appointments, only two of which have been unrelated to my cancer treatment. Five of those visits included time in an operating room. (I’ve had six surgeries but two of them were done on the same day. If you think I’m cheating, both surgeries hurt like Hell and also remember that I’m counting my mastectomy, which required overnight hospitalization as one healthcare visit.)
Seventy appointments is a lot for a 7 1/2 month period of time. Some people call the kind of cancer that I have, “cancer light” because I did not do chemo or radiation. And believe me, I am incredibly grateful to have skipped chemotherapy and hope to avoid it altogether in my life. I am here to tell you that there’s no such thing as “cancer light.” I’ve seen a couple of women’s blogs where they were apologizing for complaining about the inconvenience of cancer treatment because “other women have it much worse.” This reminds me of one of the mom’s of my patients. She said, “This has been a really hard summer.” I said, “Yes, it has.” Then she apologized for complaining since I had been in cancer treatment all summer. I told her, “You don’t have to have the shittiest summer to have a shitty summer. You definitely had a shitty summer.” (I don’t normally curse but with some folks it introduces humor.) So I may have “cancer light” but it’s still shitty.
How did I get on this tangent? Back to my story. Hooray, hooray, hooray! I have fewer doctors’ appointments for awhile! I have none at all during Christmas and New Years’ weeks!
Join us this summer for our reunion in Renton, WA!
George Lakoff has retired as Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. His newest book "The Neural Mind" is now available.
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