Fine Young Fauves

So it’s January 31. The first day of the rest of my life after the Whole30.

It’s hard to know where to begin, so I’ll begin with the scale. I lost 10.5 pounds.

Now, weight is only one small measure of overall health, and there the story is of course a lot more complex. But it’s a measure. It’s quantifiable. It’s clear. And for me, this is a good steady, safe pace of weight loss. It’s just a start, of course, but it’s a solid start.

The most important thing to know about this is that, after the initial couple weeks of brain fog, tiredness, crabbiness, confusion about what to eat, etc., this did get easy. I am never hungry nor unhappy about food. Indeed, I’m happy! I’m eating a lot of great food! The sheer volume of food coming into the house and being consumed by all is amazing to me.  The boys are chowing too. (I can’t keep apples and carrots in stock!)

The usual horrors of dieting (measuring and weighing things, walking away from the table hungry and depressed, feeling deprived and half starved) are just not at all in evidence here. There can also be a punishing, self-loathing quality to diets (“I’m fat so I have to suffer through this.”) It’s not like that at all. It’s abundant and delicious and pleasant. This is more “I love to be nourished with food that feels great” and “I can have all I want.”

I think this psychology is part of why they (the Whole30 mavins) forbid you to weigh yourself during the 30 days. You will lose weight, but that is not the only point. Healing your body after years of mistreatment, reducing inflammation, gathering more and more energy, ferreting out andy food sensitivities you may have, and overcoming a dependency on food for emotional support, are all really the main points. Weight loss flows from those.

So, how am I feeling?

Frankly, not as awesome as I hoped. Yet. Yet!! I started in a very deep hole, dealing with health issues that are very complex and daunting. A miracle would have been nice, of course. But a good beginning is okay too. I heard from a friend of a friend online who said that she was recovering from migraines, and it took her three full months (during which she lost 30 pounds, as a minor detail!) for her to really feel beyond incredible. The Whole30 people themselves suggest that if you have medical issues, you should keep going for longer.

One set back I had is that last week I had a bad stomach flu. It was brief, and horrible, as they so often are. But being me, it’s taken much longer than a normal person to recover. I still am feeling sort of weak and semi-ill after that. I do not feel strong, not as strong as I would like. I’m still struggling to get through the day without needing to rest. My head is congested, too, and my stomach still feels kind of tender. Elias has been semi-sick also all week, variously having a sore throat, and sick tummy, etc., although he’s been going to school normally. I think he and I have the same thing, sort of a nagging little virus that’s taking it all down a peg. I even have low-grade fever and chills nibbling at me around the edges. So… that’s casting a little shadow over what should be a moment of true glory.

No worries. That too shall pass.

My plan at the moment is to change nothing, add nothing, alter nothing, for at least another ten days so that Isaac and I will finish together. After that, I’m honestly thinking of still staying the course until mid-March. We’re going to London at the end of March, and I’d like to take a couple weeks to experiment with reintroduction before we go (e.g., is dairy or gluten a problem? Are both fine? etc.) so that in London I can have high tea and fish and chips and so on with a clear sense of what that all means in terms of how I will feel afterwards.  And armed with that knowledge, enjoy the vacation to the fullest!

By then, too, maybe the tiger blood will really be coursing through my veins. (Isaac is doing great by the way. It’s his day 20. Yesterday he came home from school and announced: “The tiger blood kicked in right in the middle of dodge ball!”)

My “learnings” from this Whole30, if you’re thinking about doing it too. My advice:

1. Before you start, a couple months before would be ideal, get yourself this cookbook called “Well-Fed: Paleo Recipes for People Who Love to Eat” by Melissa Joulwan. Of all the resources I used during this experience, that was the most useful. Cook things out of it. Practice the “weekly cook up” a couple times, get a sense of what it all will entail. Then when you really begin, those first weeks will be less bewildering.
2. Get used to cooking extra of everything all the time. Food shopping and prep is your biggest challenge. I’ve finally gotten a handle on this. Don’t freeze everything raw the minute you take it out of the grocery bag. Cook it! Chop it! Last night I was making meatballs with red sauce, and while I was standing at the stove I browned a pound of extra ground beef with onions. No reason. Just because. Now it’s there and when I show up at the fridge  starving I will be able to just grab it. Similarly, when I’m chopping sweet peppers or onions, or whatever, I chop a couple more than I need. Who cares? you’ve got your knife in hand. Now, next time you need something, it’s ready to grab.
3. On a related note, invest in a lot of wonderful glass pyrex containers with plastic lids. You will need a million containers. Get nice ones. Target is your friend. They are not expensive and last forever.
4. Most of the time… this is a shocker… I don’t really care what I eat. this is the normal, workaday eating. Need food. Now. In my gullet. When I’m hungry, I will eat whatever’s handy. The key to the Whole30 is to make the right things handy. This morning I dropped the kids off at school and came home, hungry. I had no idea what I was going to eat. I opened the fridge and there were chicken nuggets (fools gold) I made a couple nights ago, and broccolini. Breakfast in three minutes. I didn’t plan it, but I was prepared. If you can see what I mean.
5. You will have food dreams. I had three. One involved a cousin’s wedding, where I showed up in towel! Yes, pretty mortifying, standing in all those wedding pictures in my towel! There was a tray of cupcakes and I was trying to get one, but the frosting (which I wanted most), kept falling off. Then someone showed up with a tray of raw suet and told me I should eat that! The second two were both about eating something (one was a cupcake, the other a chocolate thing with toffee inside) off the plan, and that I would have to reset to the beginning and how horrible that was! Both times I woke up upset, and only gradually realized that I hadn’t eaten anything.
6. The only way to kill the sugar dragon is to starve it. These cravings do go away. And the strangest part is that other things start tasting really sweet! Like sweet potatoes and berries. They just are amazingly sweet. I was eating a pear the other day that I found actually oppressively sweet and could not finish it. You can change your tastes! It’s so incredible, but it’s true. I actually don’t want a cupcake anymore.
7. That’s how they get you on track. You commit for thirty days. You figure: “I can do anything for thirty days.” You do it. And then when it ends, you’re different. You don’t want to fall face first into a box of donuts anymore. It’s… just… over.
8. The Whole30 is incredibly strict. That’s the whole point. You do it or you don’t do it. There’s no middle ground. Ben keeps telling me, “I’m pretty much doing your diet.” He’s great. He’s been so remarkably patient and kind through all this. He’s been incredibly supportive. But he’s not doing the Whole30. He drinks beer and wine every night. He has cut down on grains a lot, was never huge on dairy or sweets, never cared about legumes at all, he’s getting pretty paleo. But he might have a roll when he’s out for lunch. He’s not checking for carrageenan, nitrates, or MSG in anything I’m positive. And yet he’s awesome! He’s been doing push-ups– with a small child on his back– and has the body of a 25 year old. But he’s not doing the Whole30. You see my point? It’s a thing. With rules. They are hard-asses about it for a lot of solid reasons. Either drink the unsweetened herbal tea (I say this instead of “drink the kool-aid,” for obvious reasons) or don’t.
9. But that being said, DO. Do do it. It’s a great, great thing.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 Catherine Park

First let me sit in silent awe that I have not posted in two months. Too much going on I guess… namely Thanksgiving, Christmas, our 17th wedding anniversary (!!), New Year’s, test-solving a ton of crossword puzzles for Rex Parker, (who is putting together a book to raise money for Hurricane Sandy victims), and now… the Whole30, which has taken up 90% of my brain since January 1.

If you’re not familiar with this, it’s a sort of a 30-day diet challenge. You can read up on it here. It follows a Paleo format, and is very strict for the 30 days. That nets out to no sugar of any kind (including honey, agave, stevia, etc.), no dairy of any kind (except ghee, which is clarified butter and has no lactose or casein), no grains of any kind (whether gluten or non-gluten), no alcohol, no legumes, and no food additives (specifically MSG, nitrates and carrageenan). If you mess up, even on day 29, you need to reset to day 1. Thirty consecutive days are needed to make the magic happen.

Last spring, I started reading Minding My Mitochondria , and started trying to cure myself with food. I added a lot of green leafy things to my diet, although not coming near to the 9 cups a day recommended, and tried to cut down on the grains, sweets, and dairy. But as the year wore on I got onto the carb-go-round really badly. The fatigue! The crushing fatigue was my main problem. Sure, I still get dizzy from time to time (even as recently as yesterday), but the situation of being so exhausted I couldn’t stand up, yet needing to get up and get the kids from school, was a good formula for eating chocolate as an emergency fix. And then crashing, reaching for toast (even whole grain!) or brownies, or [add whatever sweet, starchy thing here]. And then crashing again. Repeat, repeat.

A year ago, Terry Wahls, the Mitochondria lady, said (well, her book said) I should quit this and that white sugar, white flour, lots of dairy, etc., was only making things worse. She said in fact that I should go Paleo… that eating like our ancestors would lead to improved health in countless ways. But did I listen and actually do what she said? No. I just added a lot of kale smoothies. Took grains out of dinner. But threw a turtle sundae on the side. Coupled with my on-going exercise prohibition, this added up to a lot of blubber. I mean– tons and tons of added weight. Which lead to more tiredness, as I tried to heave my beached-whale self up a flight of stairs. Without enough oxygen getting to my brain. While dizzy. Etc.

All in all it became painfully obvious. … MORE than painfully obvious… that I had to do something rather drastic. Something I never dreamed I could do: give up dairy and sweets and still live!

So sometime in the fall I was trying to deepen my relationship with Paleo eating, and I bought a couple new cookbooks. One of them, Well-Fed, described the Whole30 and had an introduction by the whole30 people, Melissa and Dallas Hartwig. I started cooking all these lovely things out of that cookbook and thinking… hm… could I really do this? Then I suppose around Thanksgiving I set my mind to it for sure. At the end of December I put a shout out on Facebook that was going to start the whole30 Jan 1., and would anyone like to do it too? I was just looking for one buddy. But I got a lot of interest, and it netted out to 3 friends actually doing it with me.

Yay! We set out Jan. 1 and have been cooking and eating like crazy since then. If you look on Facebook, you can find my page about it, and see the many wonderful things we’ve been cooking.

So, how’s it been?

One thing I could say about it is that up until now I was not in any condition to blog about it. The first period of brain fog was really hard. I felt like hell for at least a week. They call this a “carb hang-over.” Your poor body has to suddenly adapt to this unfamiliar thing: not getting energy from sugar. (And when I say sugar, I mean not only cookies, but also cereal, toast, crackers, mashed potatoes, whatever, and don’t tell me whole grain makes it okay.) It has to suddenly learn this new concept: get energy from fat. Which you have plenty of. And when, or if, you can finally tap it rather than adding to it, it’s like discovering that solar energy really has unlimited potential with not much downside. The Whole30 also makes you eat a lot of fat. If your turkey breast and roasted veggies doesn’t have enough, you must add half an avocado or put ghee on things to hit that minimum. Weird, right?

I have not hit the glory quite yet. The stage I’m in now is supposed to be “Tiger Blood!” that is, you feel incredible! You have so much energy! It’s a wonderful world! I’m not there yet. But as a friend pointed out to me, it’s going to take me longer to dig out because I started in a very deep hole with a lot of underlying health problems. But that being said, I can feel, I can sense, I know in some fundamental way that I am on the right track. I feel really, really different. I told Isaac that this is the “tiger blood” stage and he said, “Is that in contrast to your usual sloth blood?”

Why yes.

This is day 21 for me and the trend line is really good.

Meanwhile, Isaac has decided to join me on this quest. This evolved because his need and want for an Xbox 360S with Halo Reach has been the center of his being for at least a year. Ben issued a standing offer last summer, that if Isaac could master the times tables 1-10 that he would get at least the Xbox. (The Halo Reach is too violent and we’re not doing it.) But Isaac hasn’t been willing or able to do that. To him, that seems like an impossible mountain to climb, which is another topic entirely. (Yes, he’s officially a genius, and yes, he doesn’t know what 7 times 8 is. It’s a paradox, like Sherlock Holmes not knowing that Earth goes around the sun.) Anyway, while watching me do all this, somehow it evolved that we started conversing about whether he could ever do it. I mean, Isaac lives on carbs. He loves candy to a fault. And his day would begin with Purely O’s (like Cherrios, only more PC), go on to pizza at school, and end with mac and cheese. I’m always force-feeding him milk to get some semblance of protein into him, and if he eats a few green beans or a cucumber then that’s a good day. He’s also semi-vegetarian in that there are rare meats or poultry that he will eat, and no fish whatsoever, and a stray egg here or there.

So the concept of Isaac giving up grains and sugar and dairy seemed pretty incredible. I was definitely the ring-leader on it, but Ben agreed that it would be okay to try. I figured that if Isaac couldn’t make it, he might go back to trying to learn multiplication. Or, if he did make it, it would be a great learning experience re: how the things you eat make you feel. And if Isaac could learn, at age 10, really experience something that many Americans of all ages don’t know, that eating junk food makes you feel bad, and eating healthy food makes you feel good, then this would be a life lesson worth at least one Xbox!

Isaac and I wrote up a contract, and after much strife over the Halo problem, we both signed it. Because Isaac is a semi-vegetarian and I was worried about his protein intake, I took a couple items from the vegetarian whole30 list (edamame, plain full-fat grass-fed yogurt, and finally the coup de gras, no-sugar peanut butter). Because Isaac has such a sharp legal mind, I tried to make it air tight:

the official document

This has posed some challenges for me logistically. Now I have to figure out foods for me that are Whole30 compliant, as well as working this Venn diagram of foods that are Whole30 compliant that Isaac will actually eat. Because Elias is not doing it, this means making multiple menus per meal. Last week, getting through all those meals was a trial. I’m glad he started 11 days after me, though, because if I had been in the thick of the worst of the transition, my brain would never have been able to figure it out.

But here we are. Isaac is incredible. Another angle of the goodness of this is that he’s suddenly developed amazing self-control. I mean, saying no to cake! Passing up popcorn and root beer at the movies! Serving pizza to other kids at school without having any! Standing by while Elias stuffs his pie-hole with cupcakes at church! He’s been just really, really amazing. I hadn’t thought of the whole concept of having self-discipline and learning to delay gratification and things like that when we started, but those have turned out to be amazing side benefits. He’s on his day 10. The worst is behind him. We’re getting into a rhythm. He’s boldly trying things to see if they are possibly good. He’s eating… good…. food… He said, for instance, “Mom, when you’re not eating candy all the time, blueberries taste really sweet!!”

At which point I nearly fainted from joy. He gets it!!

I get it too!! It’s win-win. Tiger Blood has to be just around the corner for me. If Isaac hangs in there, I’ll go with him to his finish date, which will be my day 41, and we can finish strong together.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 Catherine Park

This morning, I was working on some writing for National Novel Writing Month and wanted to dig out an old journal about a trip to my grandmother’s house in Tickfaw, Louisiana. It took a while to track down because I had remembered it as being a summer trip and I couldn’t find the journal for summer 1989. Finally working backwards I realized I had the year right and the season wrong. It was actually fall. November to be exact. And then I found that the day in question was actually November 19, 1989. 23 years ago today, when I turned 23! This amazing numerological confluence struck me a so lovely that I needed to share it with you.

Imagine me and my mother in a tent, by flashlight, in the pouring rain: exhausted, filthy, covered with flea bites, spider bites, and cur-dog bites. We were engaged in the hopeless, hopeless project of trying to make my grandma’s house fit for human habitation, especially since she insisted on continuing to inhabit it. Also imagine us laughing so hard that our sides were hurting.

November 19, 1989

Happy Birthday! 23! Today I…

• Fell through the floor
• Broke my tooth and glued it back on with super glue
• Spent hours trying to make soup, build a fire, etc.
• Put tarps on the roof, climbed up there barefoot with grandma who is nimble as a goat and knows her way around roof and its holes much better than we do
• Slept in tent in pouring rain
• No showers, filthy, unwashed, etc.
• Overwhelming quantity of work
• sense of hopelessness
• Gigantic cockroaches and spiders, threat of alligators and snakes. Grandma says “gators will never catch you if you run in zig-zag pattern.” (Seems they are fast on the straight-away but slow on the corners?)
• Fleas in my hair, creeping and crawling

Mom and I will find good homes for the horrible worthless curs with this ad. Grandma says we can’t get rid of them because we need to “preserve the bloodlines”!!! :

“Wanted: Loving home for seven homely, mange-covered, scrawny, sickly, pregnant, flea-infested, poorly-socialized dogs with hookworm. $10 (or best offer) for complete set. Will not separate…. Great high school science project!”

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Catherine Park

Okay, so two days post-op. I am still rather sore and achy. I don’t feel full of vim and vigor. Ben is exhausted from being himself plus Mr. Mom. “Riding two horses with one ass” as he likes to say. But it went SO well. I mean, just as perfect as can be. Dr. Marchetta is my new hero. He’s the best guy in the whole world. He was right. (Dr. Cheryl suffered a stunning defeat in this round of Iron Doc.) He found a lot of crud in there. AND HE FIXED IT.

I couldn’t get him to say a stage of endometriosis, but he implied it was about stage 3, i.e., “Quite a lot.” He also said “Your ovaries were heavily involved, with a lot of scarring and two cysts.” Which means all that gunk could cause a lot of hormonal issues, and could generally make me feel horrible! Which is great! Because now it’s fixed!

Also, the crack team at the surgery place (I had this done at the Akron General Wellness Center in Montrose, where many of you may work out. They have surgeries by the ER on the other side.) did a great job dealing with my POTS and my fear of nausea. They tanked me up on fluid beforehand. When I came in, even sitting down, my BP was a wan 103/70. But after two bags of fluid it came up to a rosy 130/80 or so. Also, the anesthesiologist was so nice about my nausea concern. He came in and said, “We’re going to throw the kitchen sink at you.” They gave me two different IV nausea meds while I was still under, and then another pill to take at home. The result? ZERO NAUSEA!! Praise Jesus! I haven’t even felt queazy and am back on normal food as of last night.

There was one scary part, of course. That’s the brief moment when I walked into the OR  in my ridiculous gown and slippers and got onto this tiny cot. There was a bank of bright lights and lot of people with masks on looking down at me. I didn’t like the sight of these big holder things to put my legs in. It was starting to feel like an alien autopsy situation. It was also incredibly cold in there, and windy. Dr. Marchetta was actually wearing a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. The nurse said, “It’s supposed to be 67 degrees in here, because it keeps the bugs from growing.” And I said, “It feels more like 57” and Dr. Marchetta said, “Make that 27! And it’s not just the temperature of the air, it’s the velocity!” And I said, “You need winter scrubs, like some kind of thermal L.L.Bean scrubs….” (He was wearing short sleeves!) And he laughed and said, “You’re funny!” (I get extra funny when I’m scared.) I was just thinking that I really really wanted to run away from all this when the guy said, “I’m putting something in your IV now that will make you go to sleep. It will feel warm…”

And that’s the last thing I remember until they were waking me up. I woke up roughly, feeling panicked, and saying I couldn’t breathe. My chest felt so tight and this mask on my face seemed to be smothering me.

Man’s voice: “Your breathing is fine. Your oxygen is 100%.”

Me: “I can’t breathe…My stomach hurts…”

Woman’s voice: “In through your nose. Out through your mouth. That will help you not cough. In through your nose…”

Ben said when he first came to see me, I was crying. He asked why I was crying and I said I didn’t know, I just felt sad. I remember none of this. What I remember is that I was sitting up and reasonably fine when he came in, so he must’ve come in at another time too.

So now I’m sitting here with a tiny, sore incision in my belly button. There’s another tiny incision below that, but it doesn’t hurt at all. My back hurts and I feel quite tired. I still have Percocet, which is my friend. My bedroom is not at all tidy, but it’s beautifully sunny and I have a gorgeous silky black cat dozing by my feet. Cleaning people are down in the kitchen. Shortly I’ll trade with them, go downstairs where it’s clean already, and they will come and impose order on the chaos up here.

Dr. Marchetta called last night and said that by Monday I will feel back to normal, “Only you will feel much, much better!”

I am so excited and happy about the prospect! If I could physically jump for joy, I would do so at this moment.

Yay.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Catherine Park

You may want to avoid the following if you’re not a fan of the female reproductive system.

I’m going into surgery tomorrow to see if I have endometriosis. This is the thing where your uterine lining can grow in places other than where it belongs, like, say, on your kidneys. Weirder still, it can, you know, do the uterine lining process, swelling and bleeding on a regular basis, even though it’s latched on to some wholly inappropriate body part in distance regions of your abdomen. This seems very, very wrong, and I can see why it it could cause a mess of problems. Its hallmark is epic pain. I luckily don’t have that. I do, however, have epic bleeding. That’s what caused the ob/gyn to check into the possibilities, and to finally settle on this one as the most likely hypothesis.

I should add that Dr. Cheryl totally dismisses this option. She thinks this whole endometriosis quest is lame, and I don’t have that at all. I just have too much estrogen and we can treat that. So… we’ll see who wins the great diagnosis battle. [Strange thought: should we have a medical game show, sort of like Dr. Oz meets the Iron Chef, but instead of kitchen stadium it’s a doctor’s office and the two doctors have one hour to determine what is wrong with the patient…? “Okay, he’s drawing blood… what’s that Jim? Six vials!! What can he be testing for??” Seriously, I think this idea has a lot of potential.]

The only way to find out for sure whether you have this lovely thing, is to basically open the hood, take a flashlight, and have a look around. While they’re in there, if they do find something, they can then zap it or laser it or taser it, or whatever they do. I’m a little hazy on the finer points. It’s a one-hour, laparoscopic, outpatient procedure under general anesthesia. I should be done and home on the couch, where I belong, by mid-afternoon tomorrow.

And now an enumeration of my hopes and fears.

My hope, frankly, is that I have it big time. If I allowed myself to fantasize about the big reveal at the end of the procedure, my fantasy would be that the doctor comes in  all exhausted and weary, wipes his brow, and says, “It was the worst case of endometriosis I’ve ever seen! How this poor woman has been somewhat conducting her life… being a good mother to her children, and even occasionally making a nice dinner or doing some decent knitting (although woefully inadequate in pretty much all other spheres of existence) well, it’s just beyond me!! She’s a goddess!!” And then the critical coda to this statement: “AND I FIXED IT.” That’s a very, very important element of this fantasy.

I know that this seemingly strange hope will make perfect sense to my POTS peeps and my other buddies in the chronic illness community. We just so long for some specific thing that can be addressed and treated, as some sort of possible doorway out of the endless illness maze.

My fears, on the other hand….

Fear number 1: Something goes wrong, it turns from laparoscopic to open, and I end up with a big incision, a couple days in the hospital, and a six-week recovery. Chances of that happening: literally 1 in 1,000.

Fear number 2: They find nothing. Psyche! That was a fun exercise for no reason, and now you get to still have stitches and anesthesia goodness for no gain whatsoever. Chances: 1 in 10, maybe? Just guessing.

Fear number 3: They do find something, but it’s just a little bit here and there, no biggie, and they fix it, big whoop, but I then spend the next three days vomiting because of the anesthesia, and being in pain, and it’s sort of for naught. Chances: 1 in 5, maybe?

I had my gall bladder out some years ago and threw up for three straight days, so this last one has a special resonance to me. I talked to the pre-op nurse about it today and she swears up and down that I will get lots and lots of anti-nausea medication this time. Why the Clinic didn’t hook me up when they did the gall bladder I’ll never know. I kept calling them and pleading for succor and they kept just saying, “Oh, it’s just from the anesthesia!” And I was all, “I know what’s causing it… Will you please make it stop?” But no. They offered me literally thin gruel. … “Just drink some chicken broth when you can keep that down.”

Gah.

Speaking of nausea, I just attempted to eat way too many jelly beans. Yes, for medicinal purposes! There’s this famous nutritionist from the 1950s and 60s, Adele Davis, who says that the night before surgery you should eat one pound (!!) of jelly beans or gum drops, something full of sugar but low in fat, such that you will store glycogen in your liver and make it through the day of fasting and surgery better. Or something like that. My mom told me about it, and I looked it up on the internet. At least in the quote I found, it also said you’re supposed to have an enema the night before surgery too! Of course Ben thought this was quite funny, and made a point of saying “Oh sure… you want to follow her directions when she says to eat jelly beans, but when she says enema you just disregard her entirely!” But to his credit, he went out and bought me a pound of gourmet jelly beans. Although I’m the only one having surgery tomorrow, we all gorged on them to our heart’s content…. and all four of us still did not get through one pound.

Oh yes, in other news, I had a full day at the Clinic yesterday. It was first the Stress Echocardiogram and then the get-together with my Syncope dude, the big cardiologist who deals with POTS. Part one was pretty okay! It was a stress test combined with an ultrasound of the heart before and after exercising on a treadmill for like 7 minutes. I was all covered with electrodes and wires, and then spread with goo for the ultrasound, but the good news was that I survived pretty much unscathed. My blood pressure did not tank, and I did not get too dizzy to stand up (both of which happened in my previous stress test in September.) Better news than that, my heart itself is totally fine. It’s lovely actually. It was weird how they had the room set up, so that I was lying on my side facing away from the ultrasound man (I think he was Kenyan but I didn’t ask), but they had a mirror there, so I could see my heart beating on the reflection of his screen. I could see all the four chambers and the blue and red blood swishing in and out (they color it blue and red on the screen, which I think means the non-oxygenated and the oxygenated portions). And I actually got sort of misty eyed looking at it. I know this may sound strange, but it looked so beautiful. There it was, this incredibly strong, tireless organ, endlessly pumping, pumping, through thick and thin, night and day, to keep me alive. It was really a sweet and touching sight. Such a determined Little Engine That Could sort of organ. I’m really proud of my heart.

My thoughts about my uterus tonight are less sentimental. This thing has brought my two boys into the world, and for that I am really bottomlessly grateful. But otherwise it’s basically been a huge hassle since I was about 12 years old. It caused a huge amount of heartache and pain with all my miscarriages, and just about slew me with grief when we lost our first baby boy. It continues to be a nuisance to this day. The uterus is really quite a mixed bag for me. Extreme highs and lows of existence, and then just the monthly grind for three or four decades. I feel quite mixed about it. If it’s been trying to assimilate my other organs, and making the whole rest of me feel horrible, I will be really quite annoyed with it indeed.

I guess we’ll find out tomorrow. Stay tuned.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Catherine Park

It’s been a heckuva week in Bath, Ohio. I know that Hurricane Sandy really hammered the East Coast, and we are 500 miles away. I know that many people have lost their homes, been flooded out, and some have even died in this storm. So I have to count my blessings that we did not lose power for more than a couple minutes, and no major trees on our property went down and we are all warm, dry, safe and well.

Nonetheless, from what I can gather, things have been more messed up here than on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Cleveland got blasted with those wild Sandy-fed north winds off the lake. Trees were down all over the place and that meant lots of power out; something like 150,000 customers are still in the dark. Among those places without heat or light is in fact our school. We have not had school in session since Monday. Also, needless to say, the weather has been horrendous. And Ben had gone out to Chicago on Sunday night, and then got stranded there on Monday night when the Cleveland airport was closed. Tuesday morning he did make it home, but had to go almost directly to work. Then an elderly family friend died. So now he has funeral-related things to deal with.

The net result is me and the boys trapped in a house for days on end.

We just got word that school will be closed again tomorrow, too! And now, due to Halloween in the mix, tons of candy just got poured on the flames. I am thankful for RedBox, which has provided me with the Three Stooges video that now has tamed them. And, just at the worst possible moment, National Novel Writing Month starts today. It’s November 1 all the sudden! So words must happen, no matter what else goes on.

And… today was my big new doctor appointment since I got diagnosed with the MTHFR thing. The lady is called Dr. Cheryl, and she works in a little blue cottage in Richfield. Last week I filled out a 15-page new-patient form, and then ended up writing an additional 4-page essay to explain what the F*ck has been happening with my poor, totally messed up self. This lady is very different from the Cleveland Clinic and the whole round robin of medical craziness. Unlike all those highly specialized and brainy people at the Clinic, she grasps that the leg bone IS connected to the knee bone. I’m so tired of doctors that just only care about their one part of expertise. The brain guy doesn’t care about the heart, and the heart guy doesn’t care about the uterus, and the uterus guy doesn’t care about the stomach and so on. But I am actually ONE person, one entity, one sentient life form, and all these parts actually interact and affect each other. Each one does not exist in its own little island, severed from all the rest. All the more so with a weird background ailments like POTS and MTHFR.

Also, it was just so much more homey there. Instead of a collection of giant buildings extending for blocks in all directions (the hand building, the eye building, etc.) it’s a tiny charming– human-scale– cottage with flowers in front of it. Inside I was directed by “Grandpa Money” (a sweet old guy who volunteers -!!- there) into a bedroom with a big comfy chair in it and a mural on the wall. It had 1800s-era wood trim around the doors and the floor was very far from level. The mural was a seascape by a moderately skilled painter. (She got the light right, the clouds were pretty good, but the kites were flying the wrong direction, and the kite strings were as thick as a man’s arm.) All these are elements that endeared me to the place at once. Dr. Cheryl herself, a perky young woman with an enormous pregnant belly out to here, further made me feel that I was in a whole different kind of place. And… she personally has POTS. I can’t emphasize this enough. She is one of us!! She gets it!!

She went over my massive dossier and asked me to clarify this and that. We talked about various tests coming up, and ones I’ve already had, and ones I haven’t had that she wants to get now. We talked indeed for a full hour. I never got the sense that she had to go, or that I was one of ten patients waiting for her (I was the only one there), or that there was any particular pressure or rush about it. This is a stark contrast to other appointments where I’ve actually had to physically CHASE doctors down to get a few more critical pieces of information, and they are running away at full speed.

Okay, so what’s the bottom line? Well, the main thing is that I need to get these nutrients into my body in a way and a form that they can be utilized, despite my genetic issues. We need it to get into my body already methylated (whatever that means, I take it to be like “ready to use”) and to bypass the questionable digestive system. That means… gulp.. shots. I have to give myself shots. Okay, only twice a week for three months, not so bad, right? And a TINY needle. … But she did mention that it kinda burns. Luckily (?) the compounding pharmacy in Cleveland where they make this stuff is … you guessed it… without power. So this will be a few days or maybe even next week before I get my hands on it and get my head around the idea. I’ve never given myself a shot before. I guess you just sort of DO IT.  Also she gave me a (oral) supplement to help me get ready for and recover from my impending surgery on Nov 14, and I started taking that today.

For show and tell, I brought in literally a shopping bag of supplements from my cupboard. My mother gives them to me, and now and then I buy them when I’ve read something or other. They tend to accumulate. They drive Ben crazy. I put together a small baggie of what I’m actually taking now, and dragged in all the rest so she could tell me what to do with them. One by one, she patiently looked at them, read their ingredients and sorted them into groups. Some I could keep for the days when I can’t stand to do my shot. Others I should not take until after my surgery because they might make my bleeding worse. Others I won’t need. Only one actually alarmed her: niacin. She said I should throw it away! This apparently because it dilates your blood vessels, which is basically the last thing a POTS person needs.

We talked about the exercise problem. Yoga? I said. No, she said. Pilates? No. No, you could really pass out. She said I should get in a pool. Not a warm pool, nor a deep one. Not past my chest! Not swimming! Just walk in chest-deep water. The water will compress the blood vessels and make it easier to keep blood going up to my brain. If I don’t try to swim or go over my head I am unlikely to drown (my concern about swimming=passing out and quietly slipping under the water while the lifeguard is doing her nails), and with all that lovely pressure on my veins I will have plenty of oxygen in my brain! I will feel better while exercising that way. She also said that the Clinic has this (insane!!) inpatient rehab thing for people like me… and that it works well. Six weeks, inpatient!! Living at the hospital??! Gaah. No!! She could see I loathed this idea and said to just keep it in mind.

She also said that she doesn’t think I have endometriosis at all. It doesn’t hurt to check. But her thought it that it’s MTHFR plus too much estrogen, both of which she can treat. She also mentioned that menopause and POTS is hell on wheels, but that she can help manage it when the time comes. So I guess that’s something to look forward to!

And she thinks I should not try to get off the Cymbalta any time soon. It really does help with the symptoms for lots of people and lord knows it’s helped me. I’m at a comfortable cruising altitude of 30 mg a day. She said that if my husband thinks I’m too spacey, “Tell him to try going through the day with a constant head rush and see how he likes it!” Ah… so nice to be understood by one who’s actually lived it!!

So. Step one, is do the shots for the next three months and then see what happens after that. Maybe I will need to keep going on the shots, or maybe will be well enough to switch to normal-person oral supplements. She does think it will help me feel better. Maybe even much better, although I dare not hope too much.

Meanwhile… back at the Clinic: I have the stress echocardiogram coming up on November 12, with a cardiologist appt to follow the same day. Then the endometriosis thing on Nov 14. She pointed out that it’s much harder to recover from surgery with POTS than without, and to expect it to take a while longer than they say it will.

And then…? Onward. All in all I’m optimistic about this. I think this has been useful. I feel that we are getting closer, ever closer, to a real solution.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Catherine Park

Great news! I have a rare genetic disorder.

It’s called MTHFR gene mutation. If you google it, as I did, you will soon find yourself up to your neck in incredibly complicated information, like this helpful piece from Wikipedia:

Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) is an enzyme that in humans is encoded by the MTHFRgene.^[2] Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase catalyzes the conversion of 5,10-methylenetetrahydrofolate to 5-methyltetrahydrofolate, a cosubstrate for homocysteineremethylation to methionine. Genetic variation in this gene influences susceptibility to occlusive vascular disease, neural tube defects, colon cancer and acute leukemia, and mutations in this gene are associated with methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase deficiency.^[3][4]

See? Aren’t you glad we cleared that up? What’s that you say? Your biochemistry is a little rusty?

I have what they call heterozygous 677 (one bad half of the pair) and homozygous 1298 (both halves are bad). While it’s common to have at least one of these be mutated, having three out of the four is not common at all. The doctor who tested me for it is convinced it caused all my pregnancy problems in the past, including the placental abruption that led to the loss of our preemie Jacob in 2001, and the other five early miscarriages that I went through. The net total of 8 pregnancies for 2 healthy boys is what raised the issue in his mind when we first met. He thought I probably had the MTHFR gene mutation, and tested me for it, and he was right.

My first thought was “Why the F*** didn’t the Clinic find this already? They’ve tested me nine ways to Sunday.” But then it occurred to me, which I later confirmed, that when I was really in the thick of it was way, way back in 2001. Eleven years ago! Which is light years in terms of genetic science. I really think they just didn’t know about it back then.

This guy explains it pretty well:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBUCeulUoe0&feature=related

So… what’s it all mean? Well, that remains to be seen. So far, what I understand is that it makes me much more prone to blood clots, which can lead to pregnancy loss, and which also can lead to a higher risk for more serious things like stroke, pulmonary embolism, etc. And because my body cannot utilize folic acid in the normal way, this can create a deficiency effecting many or all body systems. It gets worse with age– hello?

What I find encouraging about this news is that it could be causing more or less everything to go to hell in a hand basket, including POTS, and lots of other crap, and — the best part– it’s treatable. There’s debate about what form of folic acid to take, and how much, and so on. But everyone agrees that your body can’t utilize folic acid the normal way, and that this can cause a lot of problems because that is needed in almost every function top to toe. My gyno said to take 4 mg of folic acid a day, plus baby aspirin to keep my blood thinner and clots at bay. Looking around online I’ve found several people who say that methylated folic acid is the way to go instead, but I’ll figure that out by trial and error if nothing else.

In the meantime, I have to say I’m kind of happy about it. This could be a game-changer.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Catherine Park

We just celebrated Isaac’s 10th birthday last weekend. He decided on a Pokemon theme to his party and wanted some relevant cake action. Like this! Um…

Charizard!!

I know that my owl cake has given me some cred as a cake goddess, but this is waaaaaay beyond me. However, I did think I could make some sort of poke-ball-type deal. Tastewise, Isaac was all about cherries and chocolate and whipping cream. I realized he had a black forest cake a restaurant one time and that was what he was thinking about.

So my challenge was to create a confection that looked like this on the outside:

While tasting like this on the inside:

After some googling, and perusal of my personal cookbook library, I decided that the key to this project was fondant. If you’re not familiar with this stuff, it’s more or less thick, hard play-do stuff that tastes somewhat toxic, dye-filled and sugary, and people use it to cover those ultra smooth wedding cakes and the like. You roll it out like pie crust and sort of wrap your cake in it. It comes in several colors, pre-mixed, and you don’t buy it at the grocery store. You buy it at JoAnn, which only serves to underscore the non-food, decorative-object feel of the stuff.

Obviously, at times like this Martha Stewart is your buddy. I watched a few fondant videos and read her recipe for black forest cake. Hers looked pretty fragile though, no leavening, and “serve immediately,” which I found worrisome. I decided to use her black cherry filling concept, but my own trusty devil’s food cake recipe, from Lucia Watson’s cookbook, that I’ve made about a hundred times. It’s durable. It never fails. But because we were having 10-12 kids and maybe as many adults, I decided to double it. I had 9″x 2″ cake pans (I think!) and made a double batch of cake batter, which split nicely into the two pans.

My next challenge was to slice these horizontally. What I really needed was something like this:

whoa!

This would’ve been very, very helpful! However I did not have this wonderful thing, which I totally need, and had to wing it. I did nab a little tip from Martha Stewart though. You cut a vertical notch in the cake before cutting it, so that afterwards it’s easier to line up your (naturally somewhat slanted) layers.

I did not remember to take a picture of this process. My entire brain was occupied by not letting the layers break or otherwise come to ruin. Nor did I get a picture of filling it. I put in what seemed an ample layer of whipping cream (Martha calls for Kirsh, but I just had normal vanilla extract and a little sugar in mine. ) Then layered on some of the somewhat sloppy cherry sauce per Martha Stewart. (It’s just dark frozen cherries, cooked with their juice in a simple syrup and cooled.) Then another layer of cake. And so on, up the stack until I had this towering sight before me:

Since the fondant is much more about looks than taste, I had struggled with the idea of putting something frosting-like under it. The directions say to put a layer of buttercream frosting under it. People online said you could do chocolate ganache. My friend Martha checked with a pastry chef who was opposed to putting anything under it at all for fear of slippage. But I decided to risk the ganache, which I knew would taste awesome even if it did slip. At this stage, it looked like this:

looks pretty slippery, yes?

Then, while grappling with the fondant situation, I chilled the cake. This set the ganache so that it was quite firm and stable and ready for the coup de gras. Avast ye fondant!

Yes, it rolls out like stiff pie crust. You need a lot of muscle to roll it. It was sort of a work out for me. You dust it with powdered sugar as you go, and here a Rollpat(r) does help. Then you roll it up on your rolling pin to transport it to the cake, and very gentle unroll it over the top.

Add the next color…

Add the black stripe, and then trim the bottom edge nicely….

Another thing I didn’t realize I needed until I needed it: a whole set of graduated round cookie cutters. The dot on the poke ball can be achieved by placing a white circle of fondant on top of a slightly larger black circle of fondant. But this required ransacking the cupboards for glasses/cups/lids/whatever that would be the perfect sizes. Not easy!! Finally attained with a juice glass cutting the black and the top of a plastic water bottle for the white. Phew!

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Just need a few pokemon toys for the kids to take home as party favors, a few candles, and voila!!

I think the birthday boy was pleased.

And enormous as it was, it all got eaten up!

Now, before I go, let me share my learnings (people do say that, cringe):

• When dealing with several colors of fondant, start with the lightest and go towards the darker colors. Why? Because your rolling pin, work surface, and hands will be besmirched with the previous colors, as I learned when I found little red fingerprints on my white fondant.
• Clean up all the chocolate ganache slop before you go near the fondant. This was a mistake.
• Speaking of ganache, get that stuff REALLY smooth. Otherwise the lumps will show through, sort of like putting a quilt over an unmade bed.
• Put way more whipping cream between the layers, or better yet, make something with a little tensile strength, like cream cheese frosting. I was not pleased that the whipping cream sort of disappeared between the layers, because it’s mostly air and it got crushed.
• Don’t bother making even a quickie Zekrom costume for your child. He will take it off in the first five minutes, thus annoying you while also semi-embarrassing all his Pokemon-dressed guests.
• Get a cake slicer and right-sized cookie cutters.
• Party on! You only turn ten once!

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Catherine Park

So… my triumphant arrival to the lowest rung of the fitness ladder was in fact short-lived. A scant two weeks into my debut as a monitor-wearing stationary recumbent biker, I was … what’s the word? “Kicked out” is too strong. “Asked to leave” is not quite accurate. Maybe “sent home until further notice” would be the best way to put it.

This must’ve been around September 25, Elias’s 6th birthday. [Insert gratuitous incredibly cute 6-year-old photo here.]

I keep thinking the kid must've peaked, but amazingly he just gets cuter. I mean, read his text! See his missing tooth!

It was a very fun weekend, with the shared birthday party of Grandpa Max and Elias, turning 65 and 6 respectively, and Mom and Max visiting to celebrate. I made another owl cake, per request, and also a pretty good carrot sheet cake for Max, with all 65 candles actually on it.  (I’m having technical difficulties, but will post some photos soon.)

We had a great weekend! …And maybe I overdid it a bit. That Sunday night, while very, very tired, I fell in the shower. Now, Ben will tell you I simply slipped like a normal person trying to reach dental floss that was basically out of reach. Maybe so. But in trying to figure out how I ended up with my head by the faucet and a scrape on my arm and an impressive bruise on my calf, I’m sort of at a loss. Was there a one-second gap in my consciousness? Or did I just slip and fall in a heap? I can’t really say.

The next morning, I woke up feeling more or less like death warmed over, but I am NOT a QUITTER!! So I put on my fitness togs, got the kids dressed and fed and to school, and dragged my battered carcass up to Cleveland. Against all odds, I was on time, in my heart monitor, ready to have my BP taken at 10:30, exactly as I was supposed to be. The exercise physiologist asked how I was doing, and I told her I was not doing great and … confessed that I had fallen the night before. This stopped her in her tracks. She asked for details. Her face grew more and more serious. Then she said, “I’m sorry but you can’t exercise today. You have to get in touch with your cardiologist and get his approval before you can come back.” I said, “Okay, well I’ll see you Wednesday then.” I could see she thought this was highly unlikely…

I felt both relieved and disappointed as I headed home that morning. I only wanted to crawl into bed and now I could do so! They won’t let me exercise so now I don’t have to! Hurrah! And on the other hand I was thinking, “I just got kicked off the bottom rung of the fitness ladder and now my goals are slipping farther and farther away…” a depressing thought. I called the cardiologist that day and left a message with his secretary.

A few days went by. I rested up, sort of happy that I was off the hook for the time being. I called again. A few more days went by. Then a week. I called again. Finally I called for the third time, a full ten days later and really insisted that someone needs to #)($*)( call me back! For realz! An hour or so later, the nurse called me back with a snippy, “The doctor has approved you to return to cardiac rehab.” Oh! Okay. So I got out my incredibly full calendar and tried to figure out how I would get back in the saddle the following week.

Then, a short time after that, the Big Man himself called me!! THE head cardiologist of the Syncope Clinic. In person. He said, in effect, “Wait, what?” I explained what had happened as clearly and candidly as I could. I fell. I was reaching for something and probably just slipped. “Did you have to go to the hospital? Did your family call 911?” he asked. “No, no… it was nothing like that. My husband helped me up and I was okay.”

(All the while Ben has insisted that this is MUCH ado about nothing. People fall in showers all the time!)

The doctor rummaged through my files a bit and realized that my Stress Test Hell should’ve been followed up upon in the first place– your BP is not supposed to plummet like that, I guess. I had just thought it was a bone fide POTS thing. And a Stress Echocardiogram that he ordered ages ago, and that everyone (myself included) forgot about, never happened. So… I need to do the stress echo, see him again, and meanwhile NO EXERCISING!!!! He was very clear on this point. “We just can’t have this,” he explained.

So this puts me on this disabled list until at least November 12, when I will see him again.

Meanwhile, a whole other body part is coming into play. I won’t go into the grizzly details, but it seems that I may have endometriosis. I am really pulling for this one, because if so, it’s fixable, and it could be causing all sorts of problems! Like dizziness and fatigue. Please, everyone send me your endometriosis horror stories– I mean how totally SICK you were and then how you were cured when they found it and got it out of there!

So on November 14, I need to have this procedure under general anesthesia. I’m more worried about the anesthesia than the procedure itself. I have to be under for 45 minutes to an hour. It’s laparoscopic, so only small cuts, but exploratory, so who knows what the hell they may find in there. They search around in your whole abdomen for trouble. I sort of hope there’s uterine tissue growing all over the place and this is why I don’t feel so good. If it’s internally bleeding all the time, that would help explain my anemia problem, and so on. But I don’t want it to be so bad that they have to switch over to an open procedure and I end up with a large abdominal incision, as happened to a friend of mine. What I don’t really want is a “Meh,” sort of result. Like, Yeah, there was a little bit here and there but no biggie. That would be disappointing! (I live in upside down world, so this makes sense to me.) It would be great if they could fix my hiatal/esophageal hernia while they are in there, but no. They claim it’s a whole different sort of doctor and a whole different thing. (I asked!)

As an aside, I love this new gyno I have. He likes things to be attractive. He actually cares! The whole place is full of interior design elements, fancy chairs, orchids, and new age music. When he handed me the brochure about my procedure, he took a moment to rant about the horrible graphic design. “This is a national organization,” he said. “I mean, can’t they do better than this? And why RED of all colors??” And when he came in to talk to me after my pelvic ultrasound, he announced, “I have scoopage!” I just love him. Someday when I can drink again, he would be a great guy to go to happy hour with.

So… Looks like mid-November will be another pivot point for me. Meanwhile, lots of varsity momming going on. We just had another major birthday party, which involved an epic cake I will post about soon. And then of course there’s Halloween to contend with!

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 Catherine Park

As so often is the case, an extraordinary turn of events began with something utterly mundane: I was out of Prilosec.

This morning, we managed to get everyone dressed and fed and in the car for church a little bit earlier than usual, so Ben took the prettier route through the valley. On the way, I realized that my stomach was starting to hurt. Faced with the prospect of sitting through service with severe heartburn, I asked Ben if we could stop along the way and get me some Tums.

I assumed he’d stop at a gas station, but instead he pulled into a very disreputable looking convenience store. His thinking, he told me later, was that this way he wouldn’t have to get across a difficult intersection (if you’re from Akron, you’ll know the one– where there’s the sculpture of the Indian carrying his canoe) and back. He could just pull in. I thought, “Really? Here?” But since we were in a hurry, I stepped out of the car.

The place was plastered all over with beer and lottery signs, especially ugly in the bright clear sunshine. It was a few minutes after 9:00 a.m., and when I first walked in it seemed completely deserted. There was no one behind the counter. I wandered briefly among the aisles of liquor. The walls were lined with glass coolers of liquor. Behind the counter was the cigarette department. They had a wide selection of condoms. The only non-liquor/cigarette/condom area had a few gestures towards toilet paper and dish soap. I couldn’t see anything approaching Tums. “Hello?” I said. No reply. Then behind the counter I spied a small child, sitting at a computer with her back to me. She was a little Indian girl, with silky black bobbed hair. She was dressed in hot pink leggings and a matching t-shirt, and had a red dot in the center of her forehead. I said, “Is your mom or dad here?” She said nothing but got up and ran away.

In a few minutes a lovely Indian woman bustled in carrying an armload of paper towel rolls. “Hi,” I said. “Do you have any Tums?” She smiled and said yes and led me to them. I picked up a couple rolls and paid for them. Then turned to leave. As I turned, a very large black woman came into the store. She had a smooth round face and coils of multi-colored hair, red, gold, and black, pulled into a thick pony tail. I was trying to get around her to leave, but she stopped me. “Are you on your way to church?” she asked. Clearly she could tell by my clothes. Immediately my guard went up. I was in the wrong place, her place not mine. I did not belong here. She was going to ask me for something. It was going to be some situation. She was out of gas and needed money. I braced myself for trouble and answered, “Yes.”

“You have to wait,” she said urgently. “I need to get change. I need to give you some money.” This startled me. She had to give me money? I waited a couple minutes while she got change from the cashier. I expected maybe that she was changing a five and would give me a couple bucks, but she turned around and pressed two twenties into my hand. “Oh!” I exclaimed.

“Listen,” she said. “I need you to take this money, and give it to your church. I need your church to pray for me.”

“Oh!” I said again.

She took a deep breath. “My daughter was killed in a car accident.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said. Immediately I wanted to hug her, mother to mother.

“And my husband, who is only 48, just had a major stroke.”

“Oh, oh no…” I said.

“I need you to take this money, and give it to your church for me, and ask them to pray. I’m Jody Middleton. Jody Middleton and my husband is Reginald. Ask them to pray for us.”

“I will,” I said. “I will do that for you.” I said this and took the money rolled up in my palm and stepped back out into the sunlight.

When I got in the car, I told Ben and the boys all about it. Ben said, “You have to tell Polly. Maybe we’ll be early enough.” Polly is our Deacon, and she says the prayers for individuals in the middle of the service. As soon as we pulled up, the boys, normally resistant to church, both leapt out of the car on an urgent mission to find Polly. I was slightly behind them and they came running back, “We’re in time! Polly is still here!” Polly, and sweet grandmotherly woman, was waiting in her long white robes with the choir and people carrying crosses and candles, waiting to proceed into the church. We had just a moment before service would begin. I went up to her and told her what had happened. “I’ll do it,” she said. “Just write her name down for me.”

I started to doubt whether the husband’s name was Reginald or not, and just wrote “Jody Middleton and the Middleton Family.”

As we sat in the pew, I couldn’t concentrate on the service at all. I just kept thinking of Jody Middleton and how she stopped me. I kept thinking about what it meant, and why she reached out to me. I felt humbled that she chose me, and that she trusted me with her vulnerability, her need, and her $40. I felt inadequate to the task. She didn’t know that I really don’t believe in God, per se, and I only go to church to be a team-player in the family. I go to church so my kids will have something to respond to, so that they will have a certain cultural literacy that comes from knowing the stories in the Bible. I go to church because Ben and I have a deal– he has to eat organic food and recycle; I have to go to Episcopal services. But she thought that I was going to church because it meant something. She thought I was in contact with God and could get him a message for her. She didn’t care what church I went to– she didn’t ask. She just saw me and thought I could provide her with a thread or a lifeline of some kind in her time of need, and in a wild grand gesture, she asked for help.

Then the sermon broke into my thoughts for a moment. Amjad (our wonderful priest from Pakistan) was talking about the Wednesday night meetings. He was saying, “No matter your income… the color of your skin… your educational level or your sophistication level….” I looked around the church at a lot of sophisticated, well-educated, mostly white, mostly affluent people. Would Jody Middleton ever feel comfortable here? Or would she feel as out of place as I did in that convenience store? But at that very moment, he was specifically saying she was welcome. She should come and join us. …. and I suddenly saw myself as part of that “us.”

Then I had a sinking feeling, something I know from a childhood on public assistance, that tomorrow is the first of the month, that she just got her check, and that this was a huge expenditure for her. That by the end of the month the $40 would seem impossibly extravagant. That she would be searching under her couch cushions for cigarette money. I kept thinking, “She doesn’t even know what church it is.”  I felt a strange urgency to make sure she got her money’s worth.

Right now the Flower Guild is selling calendars to raise money. Last week I got frowned at for not buying one, and said I’d do it this week. I didn’t really want the calendar, though. The flowers in church are always beautiful, but the photos in the calendar does not do them justice. While I sat there mulling over Jody Middleton during the service it occurred to me that I could buy the calendar and give it to her. Then she would get something tangible for her money, and I could help the Flower Guild without having to actually own the calendar. Also, this would tell her what church her message went to. But how to get it to her? I wondered whether I could find her in the online white pages, or whether I could get a message to her at the convenience store. Should I put a sign up saying, “Jody Middleton, see cashier for package”? But then everyone would claim to be Jody Middleton… ? Was she just passing through, or did she go there all the time? I turned this problem over in my mind while also writing a note on the back of the donation envelope. “From Jody Middleton, who gave me this money and asked for prayers.”

Ben told me after the service that I should go and see the Intercessory Prayer people, who gather to pray for specific things. I found them, and began to tell them my story. Then something strange happened: I started to cry. I just began telling them about Jody Middleton, and her daughter’s death and her husband’s stroke, and how she had given me the money, and I found that tears were just rolling down my cheeks. They listened to this, and took my hands. We formed a circle of four people and began to pray. “Dear Lord,” this woman to my right began. “Please help Jody Middleton cope with the loss of her beloved daughter, and help her father [sic] regain his health….” We stood there holding hands in silence for a while. The next woman began, “Dear Lord, thank you for helping Jody find Catherine in the store this morning, and seeing a light in her, and trusting her to take this message to you. Please send her light and love in her time of need.” Tears were pouring down my cheeks, and even snot running down, over my lips by this time. But since people were holding both of my hands I just had to ignore it. I couldn’t understand exactly why I was so moved. But I felt like the four of us were holding hands around a column of light.

When it was done everyone handed me Kleenex. They asked more details about which exact store it was, and what it was like there, and what Jody was like, and all about the little Indian girl alone behind the counter. I told them my plan for the calendar, and they thought it was a good idea. Then I went to find Ben, who had taken the kids up to Sunday school, and couldn’t find him, and went out to sit on a bench and collect myself.

I worried about where I would get an envelope for the calendar, and whether I should write a note, and what I should say. Finally I found a little card with the church’s address on it, and just wrote, “The people of St. Paul’s Episcopal in Akron prayed for you and your family today.” I hesitated about whether to sign my name or not. Finally I just added, “Catherine.”

When Ben turned up, having bought the calendar and obtained an envelope for it, it seemed like great luck.

We decided to just try bringing it back to the convenience store. I figured the Indian lady would still be there, and she would know what to do. And this proved to be true. When I went into the store, I asked, “You know that lady who gave me money to say prayers for her?” She said yes. “Can I leave something for her? Does she come here often?”

“Yes, she is coming here each day morning,” she replied in her beautiful accent.

“Well, give her this for me tomorrow, then, will you?” I asked. She smiled and said yes. I could tell she liked this story, and liked being a part of this odd intersection in her little store.

I have been thinking about this all day. I have been thinking that since Jody Middleton saw me as a possible connection to God, I had to see myself that way in order to fulfill the task she entrusted to me. Because she felt that church, any church, would help her with her trouble, I had to see church as more than just a community recreation center/choral concert hall/book club obsessed with one book. I had to imbue it with actual meaning.

I feel like this story is not over. I wonder what will happen next. Will she like the calendar? Will she show up at church one day and recognize me? Will we become great friends? Will this intersection of our lives become something long-lasting and important? Will we fondly recall this sunny Sunday morning when I stepped into her world looking for Tums? Has this experience begun some sort of important spiritual awakening for me? Will she keep her calendar on her wall and take comfort from it? Will this renew her faith in the world?

So, pray for Jody Middleton. She needs prayers. And who knows how praying for her may change you.

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