stir crazy

Not me. I don't generally get stir crazy. I could hunker down like this for a long time, provided I could start running again. I like being cocooned in here, with the pretty blanket of snow outside. I do not miss the hubbub, of which I am barely a part anyway. I miss having more energy, but it's not like there's anything I want to do with it.

No, I went a little stir crazy with my schmancy new blender, and yesterday threw out a gallon of what was probably very yummy-tasting scallion potato wallpaper paste. It glopped its way down the drain ever so slowly, and is surely now creating some great clog in the Farmington water treatment system.

I also poured down a half gallon of a smoothie fail, a similar casualty to the blender that can handle everything, but maybe shouldn't. I had thrown in everything, all right, each food tasting lovely by itself, but creating the kind of unpleasant concoction that I might make if my mission were spiritual suffering and sensual deprivation. It's awful to throw together a smoothie and then find that I've destroyed perfectly palatable food. I feel guilty about it, and I tried the spiritual suffering route for about a pint. Then I became enlightened, which was really cool, and I threw it out.

Actually, not true. No enlightenment rush. I still feel really bad about wasting food. My parents would have eaten the paste and the glop until they were both gone. Pop maybe would have put on some hot sauce, but mom would have plowed straight through spoonful by sticky spoonful. Their example is a hard lesson to unlearn. Oh, sure, they paid a price for that now and then -- mom's food poisoning when she couldn't bear to throw out the rotten cherries, that kind of thing. But all in all, their frugality and inability to "waste" served them -- and the many people they fed around that big table -- very well. Mom's response when surprise guests arrived, as they did more meals than not as we grew up, was always that "we can just add more water to the soup."


Sorry, mom. Sorry, pop. Good and ironic news is that my appetite is better today. Good enough so that I have the judgment to throw away bad food.

Ellen came for a couple of hours today and helped me create an exercise regimen, which I now feel ready for. It's pretty humble. One of the exercises, for example, is to reach up. One is to reach to the side. Twice.

My fluid accumulation is really bad again, and I have another appointment to get deflated once more next Tuesday. I have to keep heat on the pouch of fluid, says the nurse. So I removed an insert from some warming booties the kids once got Laura (who used to get cold all the time and now has the opposite problem) and now pop it in the microwave, then slip it into my "bra." It is not comforting, and I hope it is doing something useful other than making me wait by the microwave every 15 minutes. Sometimes while I am waiting, I reach up. So maybe the heated compresses are actually a good thing.

We also now have appointments with the radiology oncologist as well as the oncologist we had hoped to be able to see. Since this person is in such demand, she sees people in order of their need, and refers many in lesser need to others in her practice. So when we got her, we were kind of like, "Yay!" and then "Hmmmmm."