15 YEARS AGO I discovered how hard it is to live without cheese.
If you are lactose-intolerant or vegan, you probably have little problem with this. But I’m neither, and it wasn’t just cheese. My chemo and medications came with a whole list of dietary restrictions. Off the top of my head, I remember they included sausage, beans and beer. But the hardest to adjust to was cheese.
No pizza, of course — and it also threw a curve into making other meals on a tight budget. I never realized how cheese-dependent I was until then. At least I didn’t have a problem in doing without beer.
You can imagine how these restrictions would hinder going out for Mexican. But fortunately, the El Chico would run specials on fajitas. Leave off the cheese and sour cream, and I could manage all right.
And even with the restrictions, I was still gaining weight.
About the only bright spot in this was that I wasn’t under these restrictions the whole time. In each four-week cycle I had to adhere to them for the two weeks of chemo, then for the next week while the drugs worked their way out of my system.
The next week was Cheese Week.
I looked forward to it every month, a full week without restrictions. Pepperoni pizza, quesadillas and refried beans, cheesy casseroles, sometimes washing it down with a cool malted adult beverage.
I didn’t realize that others looked forward to it, too. “Is it Cheese Week yet?” I heard our friend Valerie ask Gwen one day. Seems it not only made cooking for our gatherings easier, but meant my other side-effects were lessened, making me easier to get along with.
While I wouldn’t want to deal with chemo again, or recommend it to anyone else, it was kinda neat having a sort of holiday every month.
(NEXT)
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Friday, April 10, 2009
Pillow for a bitter pill
15 YEARS AGO I was incredibly thankful for marshmallow fluff.
On some odd whim – hey, it’s on sale for only pennies a jar! – sometime in the previous year we had bought several containers of marshmallow fluff. Perfect for desserts or fluffernutters or whatever Gwen thought we might someday make. Naturally, we put them to the back of a kitchen shelf and forgot about them.
Until I started on chemotherapy.
Part of the regimen was taking pills, and that included a daily dose of prednisone. This medicine is a wonder-steroid used in the treatment of dozens of diseases, disorders and complaints. And you’d think that with it in such high demand, someone would make a prednisone tablet that was coated, or otherwise masked the fact that the pill tastes AWFUL.
Sure, it’s only in your mouth for a moment, but that’s all it takes for you to want to retch. And feeling like you want to vomit is not conducive to getting necessary medications to go down and stay down. And I got to look forward to this ordeal day after day, two weeks on, two weeks off, for six months.
Maybe if we put the pill in something to mask the nastiness, we thought (hey, it works for dogs, right?). So Gwen hunted through the pantry and, with triumph, she produced a jar of marshmallow fluff.
In the coming weeks she became a master at enrobing the obnoxious pill in a pillow of white sweetness. Between the fluff’s tendency to melt in the mouth and the pill corrupting the flavor of the coating I still had to swallow fast. But it did go down a lot easier.
One day she absent-mindedly licked the fluff off of her fingers, and it had just a trace of prednisone residue in it.
“Ugh!” she exclaimed. “That IS awful. I’m so sorry you have to swallow that.”
From then on, she was extra careful to ensure the pill was completely covered, and extra careful not to accidentally taste it again.
We were so glad when I finally took my last dose of prednisone. As it happened, we were on our last jar of fluff.
That was fine. As grateful as we are to the stuff for helping us get through those months, it would be years before we would even consider eating that stuff again.
(NEXT)
On some odd whim – hey, it’s on sale for only pennies a jar! – sometime in the previous year we had bought several containers of marshmallow fluff. Perfect for desserts or fluffernutters or whatever Gwen thought we might someday make. Naturally, we put them to the back of a kitchen shelf and forgot about them.
Until I started on chemotherapy.
Part of the regimen was taking pills, and that included a daily dose of prednisone. This medicine is a wonder-steroid used in the treatment of dozens of diseases, disorders and complaints. And you’d think that with it in such high demand, someone would make a prednisone tablet that was coated, or otherwise masked the fact that the pill tastes AWFUL.
Sure, it’s only in your mouth for a moment, but that’s all it takes for you to want to retch. And feeling like you want to vomit is not conducive to getting necessary medications to go down and stay down. And I got to look forward to this ordeal day after day, two weeks on, two weeks off, for six months.
Maybe if we put the pill in something to mask the nastiness, we thought (hey, it works for dogs, right?). So Gwen hunted through the pantry and, with triumph, she produced a jar of marshmallow fluff.
In the coming weeks she became a master at enrobing the obnoxious pill in a pillow of white sweetness. Between the fluff’s tendency to melt in the mouth and the pill corrupting the flavor of the coating I still had to swallow fast. But it did go down a lot easier.
One day she absent-mindedly licked the fluff off of her fingers, and it had just a trace of prednisone residue in it.
“Ugh!” she exclaimed. “That IS awful. I’m so sorry you have to swallow that.”
From then on, she was extra careful to ensure the pill was completely covered, and extra careful not to accidentally taste it again.
We were so glad when I finally took my last dose of prednisone. As it happened, we were on our last jar of fluff.
That was fine. As grateful as we are to the stuff for helping us get through those months, it would be years before we would even consider eating that stuff again.
(NEXT)
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Games people play
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, I helped run a live-Vampire game at Fayetteville’s first all-games convention, Razorbattles.
Actually, Gwen did most of the work. Our role-players had the run of the common areas of the hotel, plus the room we used as game headquarters, which also doubled as the local vamp “prince”s lair and meeting place. Gwen, with the help of a couple others in our club, was roving Storyteller, keeping the action going and mediating disputes.
My job, since I had had chemo just days before, was to stay put at HQ and be the Storyteller there. That way I could help without exerting myself, and stay in one place since I didn’t feel like moving at all.
Feedback in the days and weeks that followed was that everyone had a great time and were looking forward to the next year’s event during Razorbattles 1995. To whatever extent I gave plot points and direction and handed down decisions, I must have done a bang-up job. Oh, the stories I must have told. Wish I could remember it.
Sometimes the side-effects are unavoidable. Doesn’t matter what you and your friends have planned for months to do on a certain weekend. I’m not upset that cancer and its treatment stole away the memories of that weekend, I have other good times to remember.
Exactly 15 years ago, on Monday, April 4, I wasn’t feeling too bad, but Gwen was under the weather (this may have been the Monday after Razorbattles, such events are taxing even for the healthy) so she and I both called in sick.
We had spent the evening watching something on the VCR when suddenly we heard shouting and car horns and firecrackers outside. Puzzled at first, we suddenly remembered that it was the night of the NCAA men’s basketball finals, and that the hometown Arkansas Razorbacks were playing. Had they won? We switched the TV to live broadcast and sure enough, the Hogs had just won the national championship!
With us living just a few blocks from the U of A campus, you can understand the pandemonium.
We knew it wasn’t likely we would be in this kind of atmosphere often, so we ventured out and walked towards the University, ending up on Dickson Street, the kind of bar/restaurant/shopping street that most college towns have just off-campus, where students like to gather. There were so many people in the street that the police found it easier to put up barricades to traffic than to try to clear the pedestrians off.
We didn’t have money on us to buy a drink or anything, we just hung around a bit among the jubilant fans. There were also TV cameras there from local news and national networks. Since we were supposed to be “sick,” we avoided those – as did a couple of people from Gwen’s work she noticed. Seems “Razorback fever” had caused them to call in as well.
So we wandered back towards home. Feeling energized by all the excitement around us, we walked a little further to the house of Chris and Cheryl, friends we had met through the Camarilla (vampire club). They weren’t into basketball or native Arkansans, but they liked seeing everyone else around acting nuts. The four of us decided we could act out as well. Being fans of werewolves as well as vampires, we decided to howl.
So we stood out in their front yard, howling at the sky at the top of our lungs. And nobody noticed.
That was how we played our games, had our fun. And that memory I got to keep.
(NEXT)
Actually, Gwen did most of the work. Our role-players had the run of the common areas of the hotel, plus the room we used as game headquarters, which also doubled as the local vamp “prince”s lair and meeting place. Gwen, with the help of a couple others in our club, was roving Storyteller, keeping the action going and mediating disputes.
My job, since I had had chemo just days before, was to stay put at HQ and be the Storyteller there. That way I could help without exerting myself, and stay in one place since I didn’t feel like moving at all.
Feedback in the days and weeks that followed was that everyone had a great time and were looking forward to the next year’s event during Razorbattles 1995. To whatever extent I gave plot points and direction and handed down decisions, I must have done a bang-up job. Oh, the stories I must have told. Wish I could remember it.
Sometimes the side-effects are unavoidable. Doesn’t matter what you and your friends have planned for months to do on a certain weekend. I’m not upset that cancer and its treatment stole away the memories of that weekend, I have other good times to remember.
Exactly 15 years ago, on Monday, April 4, I wasn’t feeling too bad, but Gwen was under the weather (this may have been the Monday after Razorbattles, such events are taxing even for the healthy) so she and I both called in sick.
We had spent the evening watching something on the VCR when suddenly we heard shouting and car horns and firecrackers outside. Puzzled at first, we suddenly remembered that it was the night of the NCAA men’s basketball finals, and that the hometown Arkansas Razorbacks were playing. Had they won? We switched the TV to live broadcast and sure enough, the Hogs had just won the national championship!
With us living just a few blocks from the U of A campus, you can understand the pandemonium.
We knew it wasn’t likely we would be in this kind of atmosphere often, so we ventured out and walked towards the University, ending up on Dickson Street, the kind of bar/restaurant/shopping street that most college towns have just off-campus, where students like to gather. There were so many people in the street that the police found it easier to put up barricades to traffic than to try to clear the pedestrians off.
We didn’t have money on us to buy a drink or anything, we just hung around a bit among the jubilant fans. There were also TV cameras there from local news and national networks. Since we were supposed to be “sick,” we avoided those – as did a couple of people from Gwen’s work she noticed. Seems “Razorback fever” had caused them to call in as well.
So we wandered back towards home. Feeling energized by all the excitement around us, we walked a little further to the house of Chris and Cheryl, friends we had met through the Camarilla (vampire club). They weren’t into basketball or native Arkansans, but they liked seeing everyone else around acting nuts. The four of us decided we could act out as well. Being fans of werewolves as well as vampires, we decided to howl.
So we stood out in their front yard, howling at the sky at the top of our lungs. And nobody noticed.
That was how we played our games, had our fun. And that memory I got to keep.
(NEXT)
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