Reason #325 I'm glad I visited Nicaragua

From e-mail sent to my friends last Friday.

Hi dears ,

I haven't been feeling well since sometime on Tuesday. Told my family I had an unhappy gut. Yesterday on my way home, I checked with parents for advice. We agreed that the possibility that I picked something up in Nica made it worth going ahead and getting to the doctor sooner rather than later. 

Doctor wasn't sure what was going on. Symptoms weren't really parasite. Not really flu. You still have your appendix? I was sent home on watch and wait with instructions to go to er if I had pain get worse or started a fever of 100. 

So when temp was 99.1 at 6 and 99.3 at 6:30 last night, I called a friend to take me in. The ct scan gave a clear diagnosis of appendicitis. Apparently nasty too. This morning the surgeon who took it out last night was trying to assess my pain. Is it worse than last night? Last night was never all that bad. But your appendix looked like a kielbasa sausage.

So, given all of that, I am very glad that I thought it might be a parasite and worth visiting the doctor. And also glad that I don't. (This is so much easier to diagnose and treat in the US.)

Feeling fairly well now. Sore but I was just given more pain meds. My ant is with me. Mom is flying out. I will probably go home this afternoon. Hope your life is less exciting than mine at the moment ;)

Love,

Me

~~~

Mom flew home this morning. I have a Google doc with friends signed up to visit me every day for the next week. I'm planning on going into the office everyday next week. Though I'm not promising a full day there any day. Healing is an exhausting process. And it's naptime again.

Highlight of being sick while living alone

Registering that List Guy had said his half of the good night litany and hung up the phone. Realizing that I didn't have a clue how long I'd been asleep. Guess I'll find out when we compare how far he read with how much I remember.

I've been too out of it to do much more than sleep and look at old videos posted on friends blogs. My voice is kinda like this today.




Only I don't think I'm as cute as anyone in the video.

I woke up from a nap two hours ago. Time to go to sleep for the night.

A day of doing not much somehow equals a long post

Real food is important at any time. I haven't read much on the subject--but it seems like a mindset I was raised with. I do how Michael Pollan sums it up in his manifesto:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

...And you’re better off eating whole fresh foods rather than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to “eat food,” which is not quite as simple as it sounds. For while it used to be that food was all you could eat, today there are thousands of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages elaborately festooned with health claims, which brings me to another, somewhat counterintuitive, piece of advice: If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

You can see how quickly things can get complicated.

Being sick I want real food, but don't have much energy to prepare it. A couple of recipes that seemed easy enough to prepare, despite not seeming to be out of bed for more than 2 hours at a time all day.


First, chicken. Mom's recipe for the crock pot. It turned out simply enough, despite my not having cooked a chicken any time recently. And now I'm prepared to make chicken soup in the crock pot tomorrow.

Roast Chicken

Thoroughly wash one 3-4 lb. roasting hen and pat dry.
(Patting dry ensures good browning.)

Sprinkle cavity generously with salt, pepper, and parsley.

Place in Crock Pot. Dot chicken breast with margarine.

Sprinkle with parsley, basil, tarragon, or rosemary.

Cover and cook on HI 1 hour, 15 min.; then LO 8–10 hours.
(Or to cook it faster leave it on high. I'm not sure how long it takes then. Maybe 3-5 hours?)

Second recipe is adapted from Mollie Katzen's Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Basically chop up the ingredients and throw them in the oven. The pan I used was a bit big for the amount I cooked, so a little bit of burning happened, but it was still good enough to make again.

Tsimmes

1 sweet potato, peeled and chopped into inch-size pieces (or so)
1 carrot, peeled and chopped
1 onion, peeled and chopped
1 apple, chopped (see what I mean about the chopping?)
Handful of dried apricots, chopped
Squirt of lemon juice
Pour in some orange juice
Add a little apple juice (the original recipe, about double what I made, called for 1 and 2/3 cups of juice)
1/2 tsp. salt
Sprinkle of cinnamon
Dash of ginger

Preheat oven to 350.

Mix ingredients together in bowl. Put in baking dish (apparently want it deeper rather than thinner layer). Cover (aluminum foil worked for me) and bake for a while. 1.5 to 2 hours? I went a bit over. Then again, I burned.

And it is now most definitely time for bed again.