I'll Have The Exploding Heart, Please

There I am minding my own business and that of my spouse’s internal blood parts, when the entire Cancer Institute that manages his myeloma goes into overdrive to ensure he will partake next Monday of a medicine we recently learned killed six people -- out of a total of 300 -- when their hearts exploded. 

By Grabthar’s Hammar … what a bargain.  

In a different trial, I discovered another five participants died of exploding hearts… out of a total of 526!  They’re getting better at killing less people.

If maths serves me and it never has, I think this translates to a 1% chance of spontaneous cardiac death.   

Meaning, he has a 99% chance of not dying. Using a + or - margin for error, worst case is a 96% chance of not dying …

This led me to wonder if dying in a plane crash was statistically similar to him perishing from his life-saving myeloma therapy. I only ask because, after he is infused with this heart toxin on Monday and again on Tuesday, he is scheduled to board an airplane on Wednesday, and still ANOTHER one on Thursday to return home.  

Why not walk into oncoming traffic or take up fencing in lightning storms?

Meanwhile, according to the The Flying Book by David Blatner, more Americans died in car crashes in the last six months than in airplane-crashes in the last one hundred years.

I would have to consult with my math students at AMSA or SOKCS to be certain, but does that mean he should -- or should NOT -- be infused with a Heart-Disintegrator next Monday?

More helpful numbers:  in 1998, 2.5 million – total –Americans died of the following statistics:

 700,000 of heart disease

 500,000 of cancer

 50,000 of medical error

 and 20,000 in car crashes.

 Interestingly, not a single American died from a plane crash that year.

 Evidently, there is a greater chance of death from diagnosed heart disease he does not have … than from having a heart-toxin shot directly into his bloodstream. 

The greatest actual risk seems to relate to nausea.  There is a 60% chance he’ll get that, meaning – as long as his heart doesn’t explode – the risk of death only comes from missing the infusion room’s emesis basin and sliding face-first through his own emetic trail, slamming his head into a stainless steel footboard, dying from a brain hematoma.

Fortunately, this side effect isn’t scheduled for another 24-48 hours, post-infusion, when he can, at 35,000 feet, worf into an air bag located in a padded flap inside the cushioned chair in front of him, in a wall-to-wall carpeted aircraft.

The reason he still plans to journey on this safetycraft for a business trip?

So far, no medical personnel have told him not to.

To be fair, they have not told him much of anything, due to them not returning his calls yet.  They do return emails – but they are sort of nebulous.  “You may or may not have nausea so you might feel nauseated on an airplane, or you might not.  This depends on whether or not you typically get air sick,  and if you do, it makes this side effect pretty much a 100 % certainty, once you're airborne."  

Tick tock.  Three business days remain before the Big Infusion.  

Do we blindly open our veins Monday to receive cardiac C-4  we don’t know our insurance approved that we DO know might kill us prior to boarding a plane that seems statistically safer to ride than drinking tap water that contains coliform bacteria? You’d be surprised how often coliform shows up in drinking water.  There’s some fascinating statistics on that, but I will save them for another day.

Meanwhile, I feel confused that modern medicine – modern oncology in particular – at least appears today to be a non-integrated labyrinth of disjointed parts. 

It’s like Institutionalized Multiple Sclerosis, where the brain tries to keep all of the moving parts in synchronicity … but the legs and arms have totally different plans for the day.

I have been told that in times like these, I should jump rope or vacuum to spike my endorphin levels, and then my calmed mind can rationally ponder our choices.

I totally swear to you –I am not making this up – regard BOTH therapeutic options:  

The cord to the vacuum and my jump rope Houdini’d themselves into irrevocable magician’s clots.

What are the odds?

Our Dead Cat Romeo Came Back To Our House Last Night

Dear Jonathan, Abigail, Nick/ Jake/ Zach,

Raise your hands if you are familiar with Mommy’s ‘THE CAT’S NOT REALLY DEAD’ Syndrome.

  --------------

Really?  

No one? 

This forces me to compose a private email that will end up on my blog, so here goes:  I experience Phantom Door Syndrome. I expectantly open the deck's slider and call out to a dead cat so they'll come in.  I do this off and on for about a week, after they’ve ascended to the Eternal Litter’d Beyond.

Every single time we lose a cat – and I have lost count now, are we up to seven? – I do this.  It doesn’t matter if they have died unexpectedly or of natural causes (which I think only happened once: Tiger died of being, like, ten thousand years old. She was part turtle. And LB didn’t count, unless you consider ‘dying of being an ASS’ somehow 'natural.' And while Francis-Firecat was old, she technically died of Sudden-Euthanasia because, after her fur fell out and her skin oozed, she looked too stupid to live so I had her put down.

*If I ever start oozing like that, I want you to promise you'll put me down, too.)

Anyway, Daddy and Abby both have a version of Phantom Door Syndrome, except they don’t actively call into the darkness to get a dead cat to come in.  They’re just ‘vigilant’ about the slider-door the cat once paw’d at. Always looking in the door's direction, expecting the cat to paw at it. This vigilance lasts about three weeks.

I am sure spiritual people or those who are just decent consider this phenomenon an act of human hope, civility, or ‘muscle memory’. 

It is none of that.  It is an act of stupid. We simply forget the cat is dead. Our brains stay locked in the habit of Ready To Let Romeo In. 

It’s identical to the Human Phenomenon most folks have where, after a loved one passes, we get perilously close to dialing the deceased to share some snippet of news.

Few of you, fortunately, are in any way versed in this experience. Actually, by the time this happens in your lives, I expect you to text or vid-chat the dead.

Back in the day when technology was slow, there was, thankfully, plenty of time between cultivating the thought, "I should phone Mom to tell her Jake is Salutatorian for his class!" and the walk I had to take to get to our landline telephone.  By the time my hand touched the receiver, my brain had opportunity to fire off an instruction, "Hands OFF that phone, Carolyn! Your mother is not going to answer."

Fortunately, now that Romeo has been gone for more than six months, all of us have transcended the "Phantom Door Syndrome" grief stage.

Until last night, that is, shortly before midnight, when An Actual Romeo-Style-Cat appeared at the slider-door and used Romeo's cry-voice to be let in.

And that's not even the creepy part.

My mind went on 'Auto Pilot' as I calmly walked over to Let Romeo In.

I got as far as touching the slider-door handle. That's when my brain engaged.

The Romeo Imposter and I stared at each other.  She was fully expecting to be brought in. She even bowed her head down at the corner of the slider where it touches the house, then looked back up, eyes agog.  Just like Juliet used to. 

I called out to Daddy.

"Come see the Romeo Cat! There's a Romeo Cat here!" I shouted excitedly as I nearly opened the actual slider door. Because in that moment, hope lurked within my heart ...that maybe ... this was the real Juliet.  

The mind is a terrible thing.

Daddie came pounding over.  Or he would’ve if he were a pounder.  He is a stealth-walker and at least three times per year I need a heart defibrillator from him soundlessly manifesting before me.

But last night he pseudo-pounded over, his voice drenched in foreboding, "Do NOT let that thing IN."

Maybe it was not foreboding.  

More like ...threatening.

So I threw open the slider, wide.

That is when the Romeo-Style-Cat took one look at Daddy's voice -- and turned using her Totally Romeo Body and White Romeo Legs and trotted down the deck steps, into a darkness as black as Romeo's Tail.

I wanted to examine him, smell him, hold him... 

I wanted to know if it was Romeo.

And here's the weird thing.  As the Maybe-Romeo banged on down the steps, our deck motion-sensor light was not triggered.

I know what you are thinking, Abigail.  You are thinking the light was not tripped because this was The Ghost Of Romeo Past.

But that light is just fucked.

We don't understand its mercurial nature.  Certain things -- a strong wind, amoeba – activate it. 

Other things, like large lumbering men with myeloma foot neuropathy who risk their lives ascending stairs in the dark, do not make that light go on.

So I wanted to pad off in search of our big blue lantern flashlight to peer out after her, but I was too busy quizzing Dad.

"Are you SURE it was our Romeo that was dead in the driveway last November? Because there are tons of imposters. Remember when one of Zach's friends thought Romeo escaped two streets away, so she coaxed that cat into her car and drove it to our house, because we were away on vacation for two weeks, and she closed that thing inside our home to keep it safe -- causing the other cats to not eat or sleep for twelve days?? We came home to our two skittering-zombies plus one happy stray -- a taller- than-Romeo ‘Faux Romeo’ with dandruff, one wild eye and a uterus teeming with offspring.  So what you found, Jonathan, might NOT have been Romeo.  And now ours wants to come home."

Daddy just stared.

Since he’d evidently acquired spontaneous mute syndrome -- I blame myeloma -- I went on, "Were there any distinguishing features, Jonathan, on the alleged-Romeo you found?"

"It was Romeo."

"Was Romeo wearing his collar?"

“I think so!  It was the one Tiger, rest her soul, used to wear.  The expensive one.”

“And you’re certain Romeo was wearing Tiger’s expensive collar on the night of her demise?”

“Well, I wouldn’t bet my LIFE on it in this particular moment, Carolyn. I do know that Tiger's expensive collar is down in the garage, though."

"Ahh HA! So you can't recall whether allegedly-dead Romeo wore definitely-dead Tiger's collar -- but you SAY that collar is in the basement -- and you THINK Romeo might have worn it -- which means... eh.  Wait.”

(It is good no one paid money for me to go to law school)

"It means, Carolyn, I took it off of Juliet's corpse and put it in the garage."

"Not where I was headed, Jonathan. It means you were mistaken that Romeo wore it.  We'd never do that to him:  make him wear a dead cat's collar. That'd be like me wearing my dead mother's bracelets and  necklaces or—eh.  Wait.”  

"Romeo is dead, Carolyn."

"I want an autopsy."

"We land-filled him."

“I knew this was a mistake.  Back when we had scruples because our kids lived here, we used to bury our dead cats. Now I can't compare last night's Romeo-DNA with Exhumed-Romeo. Although I suppose I could use a lint brush like on CSI and acquire trace-evidence from the guest room comforter she slept on and—“

"I'm going to bed, Carolyn."

 ------------

I swear ... this is how Stephen King gets his best ideas.  I used to think it was nightmares but it's from real life.

Anyway, I hope it is Romeo and that he comes back again tonight. 

This time I am not letting Daddy pound over and use his scary voice. I am just going to quietly let her in.  Make her spontaneously manifest in front of Daddy.  Let HIM know how it feels to need a defibrillator several times per year.

I have to go to Walmart now.  They're having a spring sale on lint brushes.

Love,

Mommie ... of Pet Semetary

Cinco De Mayo Fiesta Potato Recipe!! Olé!

It’s that time again!   Time to share more un-recipes from my collection, ‘Errant Recipes Gone Good.’

As you know, I once made bruschetta in error with a broken bread maker, and gluten-free pizza crust the day I ran out of flour.  Check it out here >  Accidental Pizza Crust

And now, JUST in time for Cinco De Mayo Sunday, I’ve created Fiesta Pomme-Porridge!

SO …  

Yesterday, I was simmering organic red potatoes to make potato salad to celebrate Cinco De Mayo, but it seems instead of turning them OFF... I turned them DOWN.

They simmered all day long while I busied myself joining Twitter for several hours, ensuring the privacy-violation of every person and organization I have ever emailed by allowing Twitter to invite them to join the cult.

I am certain the reservation hostess at Davio’s, a Pro-Flowers customer service rep with whom I exchanged hostile words, and the owners of Mount Wachusett were thrilled to receive a big e-envelope with my name in bold, “CAROLYN GIVEN invites YOU to join TWITTER!”

The resulting guilt led me to take my spousal unit on a two-hour meander through undiscovered rural recesses of our town. 

As the sun began to set and our calves noodled beneath us, we quivered our way up to the house to microwave spaghetti squash and pour sauce over it, eat, then doze to Touch.  

Just before bed, I remembered to drain and refrigerate the potatoes.

Which is when I noticed the stove-top’s ‘red light’ blaring, alerting me that a burner was on. 

Huh, I thought.  I wonder which burner I lef---

Oh

My.

I ever-so-gingerly lifted the pot’s lid – much like a coroner lifting the sheet so survivors may identify the remains. 

“There is Elmer’s,” I reflected, “and there’s... this.”

In the hot murk lurked a mighty flotilla of ex-pomme de terre – (Do you speak French? This means apples-of-the-earth and they are eaten in Paris and most Territories of Canada.  In the US, they are spuds.  In my house, they are gruel.)

Bobbing in the white-wash was what looked like a poorly re-enacted naval battle.  Nobody won.

After draining the glue-water, I anger-mashed the carnage and tossed in some coconut oil and coconut milk (I had not planned on making mashed potatoes so had no dairy products on hand). 

As a ‘nod to the missing dairy’ I tossed in some Fiesta Cheese I was saving for Sunday.

The BEST mashed potatoes, ever!

Here is the Recipe: 

Fiesta Pomme, Olé!

On the Eve of Cinco de Mayo, boil infant red potatoes violently for one day to ruin-stage; mash or simply ‘move’ them about with a wooden spoon; add oil-of-the tropics from lands-afar and mild cheese.  Sprinkle a little sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.  Reverently sing, ‘Hear us when we cry to Thee, for those in peril on the sea’ – then plate. 

Garnish with black beans, corn niblets, minced garlic and finely chopped serrano chille.  Use safety scissors to cut-up some cilantro and, voila!  Or as we say in Spanish, ‘Hé aqui’ which means, “Enjoy These Cinco De Mayo Fiesta Potatoes!”  

Happy Cinco De Mayo Eve! 

"My Tummy Sits On My Thighs Like A Lumpy Toddler With No Soul"

"My stomach sits on my thighs like a lumpy toddler with no soul."  

I first wrote that sentence in an email to a friend the year I landed my first teaching job, roughly 18 months after my mother died. 

My lower tummy-inflation was novel and gave fresh meaning to the term ‘frontal lobe’.  I’d turn quickly and snap short women in the head with this appendage I’d never before had to navigate.

I won't say I was exactly ‘thin’ in the many months prior to my mother's passing. But I was very “busy” then and had little time to think about anything cookie or ice-cream related. In fact, during several intense funerary-arranging days, I subsisted largely on probate forms, attorney fees and coffee, which didn’t improve during the six months it took to settle the estate.

I conceded I was down fifteen pounds by the time I sold her house to a Mafioso-style family who, one day, simply took occupancy of it, painted the interior, stripped the roof of its shingles, began re-roofing, and cut down several trees … before there was a purchase and sales agreement. In fact, to acquire access to the inside of the house, they had jimmied the back-porch door.

“Boy these are motivated buyers!" I reassured anyone willing to listen, then off I went to lick a Rolaid wrapper, full of the electrolytes stressed women need.

These are the occasions for which chewable vitamin necklaces and Gatorade are made.

I would not earn my paunch-based frontal-lobe until well after the year 2000, after completing a graduate program in education, then acquiring my teaching license.

After three months working at an alternative behavioral site, teaching post-adjudicated children, I was forced to confront what looked like stillborn ballistic gel that implanted itself under my navel. I say "forced to confront" ...  because there it was, squeezed beneath my keyboard where I was building worksheets, stressing both quad muscles until they started to twitch.

You know how cows twitch their tails to keep mosquitoes away?  My thighs were trying to ‘twitch off’ my gut.

In nary a single education class had anyone warned me that schools inflate teacher-waist lines. Although it’s not the schools as systems that do this. It is the parents of the students who go there.

They love to love us pretty much each day, endowing us with endless gastronomical graft.

 Teachers become sadly adept at lying to ourselves. “Why, LOOK at all the work Mrs. Hoffnagel went to, to prepare these treats for us. This could very well be the day I learn I have been accepted to NASA’s training program and I might never eat another warm, home-made fudge frosted cupcake again. It would be rude not to have nine.“

As it turned out, my school didn’t have parents because, sadly, neither did our student body.

What this site did have was vocational training. The one responsible for my soul-less frontal lobe was, of course, Culinary Arts. Specifically, their infamous Phat Fridays.  Each week, our students collaborated to manifest some of the most original cookie designs ever.  These children were visionaries: Macadamia and Mocha Drizzle.  Oatmeal Scotchies with Glazed Kilt.  Sugar Cookies With Nothing Else.

 I was in my early 40s and thought I could still eat whatever I wanted, but my metabolism had other plans.  So after enjoying Phat Fridays to bolster the self-esteems of our society’s most fragile youth, there in my lap by Thanksgiving Day rested an unmistakable wobble-paunch, which had grown and evolved, not unlike organic curriculum.

In all its resplendence, there it sat: a wad that looked like a still-shot of a rolling ocean wave.  

In short order I embarked upon the more stringent Atkins diet (it is much more user-friendly today). If you are following my blog, which most of you aren’t, you would know that I have a very rapid-weight loss experience on Atkins for reasons I have been advised not to re-write publicly.

Weight comes, and weight goes. 

And in the last 8 months since my husband’s diagnosis with a plasma-cell disorder called multiple myeloma, I decided to respond to this health challenge with exercise, diet, a clear head.  Limited alcohol, no diving into entire cakes.  I used jogs, skiing, elliptical machines to release endorphins so I could rationally research treatments and clinical trials best suited to his needs.  

My weight was wonderful! 

But I ended up dragging stress-symptoms -- albeit fat-free -- to my physician.  She is enormously talented and a non-hysteric: things I admire as, when it comes to health-crises, I have lots of neither.  In fact, having done exhaustive research on my own symptoms, I was reassured to learn I likely had systemic lupus aggravated by multiple sclerosis with a touch of brain tumor, all confounding an underlying and undiagnosed diabetic pre-coma.

The thing about hypochondria is that, when all other diagnoses fail you, at least you’ve got that.

My doctor ruled all of those things out and came back at me with a diagnosis of Stress. I left with a new diet and exercise regimen and a list of vitamins, largely to reduce my blood pressure but to additionally quiet my busy thoughts. I had to return in a couple of weeks for a re-check of my blood pressure.

Between my first visit where I presented my doctor with stress symptoms and my blood pressure re-check, my doctor’s digital-scale informed me I had gained 8 pounds.

“Eight pounds in 13 days?" gawked the digital scale technician. "Maybe we should check your kidneys."  They checked my ankles to make sure they weren’t swollen, listened to my heart to see if it was beating.

“What are you checking for?  Congestive heart failure?  End-organ failure from undiagnosed diabetes? AM I EVEN ALIVE?” none of which boded well for my high blood pressure.

Meanwhile, my rational doctor simply asked, "Have you changed ... your EATING habits?"

"Well ... if by that you mean ... being forced to engage in three wine and vodka intensive ‘special memories’ then, yes. I threw one bridal shower then threw myself two follow-up pity parties. The post-festivus stomach acid didn’t exactly allow me to stick to my salad with chicken diet plan."

"What kinds of things would you say you've eaten that were different -- besides wine and vodka -- in 13 days?"

"Umm... a little bread. The kind they wrap around double cheese burgers.  A vat of home-made macaroni and cheese.  One loaf of breakfast toast, a box of Italian cookies."

"What about exercise?"

"Exer - who?"

"I see. Let’s give you this NEW prescription to get your anxiety AND blood pressure down, and get you back on a treadmill and out of cookie and wine boxes.”

"Elliptical and bottles."

"What?"

"Elliptical, not a tread mill. And I don't drink wine out of boxes."

"Well you don't drink wine 'Any More' -- your prescriptions will be at CVS in an hour.  You could take a nice WALK there."

"It's four MILES from here!"

"Indeed!"

Now that my tummy toddler is back, I have to say it is a comfort!  It reminds me of 13 glorious years of full-time teaching which I very much miss, in my rare spare moments. 

With my new blood pressure reducing medication, I feel very calm about my enjoyment of the occasional rice cracker and gallon of rocky road.

My fitting for the Mother of the Groom dress comes up on May 11^th, but if I pop a blood pressure pill, within an hour I can calmly note to myself that the color ‘teal’  rhymes with ‘conceal’ and ‘keeps it real.’

By the time all of my children are married and have kids of their own, this long-loved lap-land will be amply ready to accommodate several beautiful grandbabies, so I am wasting not another nanosecond worrying about my resplendent ocean wave.  A thing of beauty is a joy forever.  Pass the Oreos, please.

THE GREAT BLEET-OFF VS TWEET-OFF

THE TWEET

ON FEBRUARY 15, fellow Tweeter Ruth Reichl, renowned foodie, tweeted the following:

Woke up thinking about last night's dinner. Lightly steamed fresh Maine shrimp.Such tender tails. Rich heads to suck. Fine finger food. 

THE BLEET

ON MAY 3RD, Carolyn Given bleeted: 

The last time I wrote sexual inneundo like that I was flagged for pornography. "The Right Tool For the Right Job; My Plumber Was The Right Tool," became, "Our Plumber Fixed A Baseboard."   -- pffft --

Mama Given's First "BLEET" in under 60 characters

Just drank organic peppermint-tea and took the final swig. Almost died from minced peppermint tearing my esophagus. Didn't know the tea bag burst. I HATE when health foods almost kill me.

Cannot BELIEVE 'The Bleat' was already taken!

Oh! Let me introduce you to the vegan logo for the Bleat!  This is an organization formed to promote the vegan lifestyle, although why it is named for onomatopoeia made by an animal many carnivores INGEST, I do not know.

Naturally, they launched the Bleat, its logo, website and all of its many legal protections the day before yesterday.

So I guess my own personal version of The Tweet cannot be called The Bleat.

I DO, however, deeply admire and promote vegan lifestyles of all ilk -- not elk -- and other forms of manichaeism and ascetic flagellation.

 One of my three daughters-in-law is a vegan and her culinary artistry has awakened a palate I knew naught that I possessed!  Often, we have Meat-Offs vs Vegan-Offs and I swear I am not lying to you when I say that her Swedish Meatballs made of tahini and sin... are FAR superior to the kind I make from Bleat Meat.

 So go forth, Non-Followers of my blog and my Twitter Tweets, and investigate the vegan BLEAT ... while I go in search of a different logo for my ...BLEETS.

:(