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Sunday, September 28, 2008

Healing

Healing isn’t linear, as I was reminded on Friday.  I’d been getting better every day since the surgery, with small milestones marking the progress.  But that all changed on Friday and the reality that healing is not always day after day of moving forward, came back to me.  I knew it, but I had forgotten it.  Healing and pain are like that.  We forget the details until we experience them again, and then we say to ourselves, “ahh, I knew this, but I had forgotten it.  It’s all come back to me now.”

There have been a few times in my life when I’ve felt it necessary to leave the reservation.  You have no intention of doing that at the start; just the reverse, you have every intention of following all the rules and doing exactly what has been laid out for you to do.  It works at first and you’re rewarded by following those rules, doing what is recommended, and being a team player (or whatever it is called to “do as you’re told,” “follow label instructions carefully,” and “batteries not included.").

And then you wake up on the fourth day and progress didn’t occur like it had the three previous days.  Just the reverse seemed to occur.  I had about four days of reserve and those reserves had been expended.

I knew that I couldn’t handle artificial sweeteners.  I knew that I got nauseas when I drank skim milk.  For some reason, however, I thought this time would be different, so I approached the post-surgery diet anew.  But it wasn’t some innocent anew of flowers with bunnies hoping through a green meadow.  It was denial of what I knew.  I did it anyway.

This happened to me earlier in the year, after I’d gotten the tests and other x-rays that showed that I had ulcers.  I took the bag of samples from the gastroenterologist, filled the prescriptions at the pharmacy, and came home with bottles and boxes of pills that were supposed to make me better.  But after a few weeks, just the reverse was occurring.  I was feeling worse.  Much worse.

So I stopped them all.  It was a safe decision, considering my condition.  It wouldn’t have been had I been on heart medications or was diagnosed with diabetes, and was in denial of those diagnosis.  No, I was battling the same battles I’d been fighting my whole life:  My body doesn’t work like everyone else’s and what might work for everyone else, doesn’t work for me.  I had to find a combination of drugs, food, and behavior that would work for me and make me better, with the long term goal of having the source of the problem fixed through surgery.

I quite literally woke up on Friday and smelled the coffee, and the aroma of it made me nauseous, and that set my alarm bells to blaring.

The smell of coffee has always been my canary.  It’s odd, I realize, but it’s the truth.  If coffee smells bad to me then I know something is going wrong--that I’m doing it wrong.  If coffee smells like an angel’s perfume, then all is well.  On Friday, coffee smelled like Satan’s soiled underwear.

I was weak, tired, depressed, and was in a spiral not toward healing, but to something else, and there wasn’t anyone that was going to get me out of that spiral.

I stopped the pain medicine, even though I was in for a lot of pain without it, but treating pain with medicines can sometimes be like turning off the brake warning light in your car.  Turning off warning lights doesn’t solve the problem, it only masks it.  I had to feel whatever I was feeling so I would know what to do, even if it was painful to do it.

“You are a finely tuned machine” my mother used to say to me when I was a child.  It would occur frequently, when I’d do something or eat something that others could tolerate quite easily, but I could not.  It would happen after I made the mistake of going on a carnival ride, and felt sick for three full days afterwards.  It would happen when I would over-indulge in teenage junk foods.  I would feel terrible and there was nothing but a few days of jet quality fuel and expensive maintenance that was going to overcome it.

My mother and I went to Europe for the first time when I was 13 years old.  The first two weeks of our month-long trip was with a tour group, with planned meals and bed times.  I hated to admit it, but I’d never felt better in my life.  I would have sold my mother’s soul to the devil for a cheeseburger and a root beer, but the reality was that the fresh cooked, real food made me feel like a million bucks.  It took being away from my home turf, away from life as usual, and forced to eat the food I was served.  I can’t eat crap and feel good.  The diet of an American teenager (especially at that time) was all crap, all the time.

At about that same time I had been experiencing emotional issues.  Being 13 will do that.  The moodiness I was used to feeling by that time also disappeared with a healthier diet.  I was happy, healthy, and I hated the reasons for it.  It was all about healthy food and balanced behavior.

The interesting thing, however, is that when we use terms today like “healthy food,” images of tofu with ground sprouts comes to mind: bland combinations of green slime and whey.  It is no such thing.  Healthy food is what your body needs to be healthy, and all of us are different.  We have different genetic codes, and different ancestral eating patterns, and we need to eat what our ancestors ate to be healthy.

One of the other things I observed on that European trip was that English people weren’t fat, but they ate French Fries.  How could that be, I wondered, when everyone knew that chips were the scourge of the earth.  There were young women (thin women) going to lunch and ordering nothing but a plate of chips.  Where was the balance obtained by also ordering the burger?

And that’s my theory why Americans are fat.  We feel guilty ordering a plate of chips for lunch.  We’ve had the food pyramid shoved down our collective throats for so long that we think it is equivalent in wisdom to the Ten Commandments.  The rest of the world didn’t buy in to that nonsense (until recently, and then they got fat, too).

If you want a plate of chips, have the plate of chips.  Don’t try to make it healthy or balanced by eating a cheeseburger or salad with it.  Just have the damn chips!  It becomes part of a daily negotiation, that goes on for a period of days, before it resets.  If you have the chips for lunch, then you have to make up for the missing foods in the next several meals… so you have a salad for dinner and a meat the next morning, getting a balanced diet in a period of days and a dozen meals, not all in one meal.  It’s too much food to eat a balanced diet every meal, and that’s why we get fat.

Even Kim figured it out.  If I get grumpy and depressed, give me a salad.  Don’t ask me.  Don’t question how I’m feeling, just put the salad in front of me.  Within two hours all the anxiety and gloominess will be gone.

Food should taste good.  Anyone who says otherwise is an idiot.  Having a plate of fried potatoes is not some evil concoction, to be avoided forever.  That’s where this strange, learned guilt comes in.  But compounding the high fat and calories of a plate of fried potatoes, by adding other foods that are better for you, only means you’re consuming MORE calories and MORE fat, in an effort to consume less.  That makes no sense, yet it is championed as the healthy way of eating, and has been since the food pyramid came into being, and since that time, we’ve all gotten fatter.

As I said, food is supposed to taste good, and not surprising, food that tastes good is also good for you.

Now at this point, someone from the peanut gallery will throw out the “but blue box macaroni and cheese is not good for you.” Exactly, and it doesn’t taste good either.  It might taste familiar, and be a simple taste the fills the belly, but it doesn’t taste good.  It has emotions around it that make it satisfying, but not for every meal, and it doesn’t actually taste good.

That’s why teaching your children to eat is just as important as teaching them to read or to write.  It doesn’t come to them naturally.  Left to their own devices, they’d eat nothing but blue-box macaroni and fast food. 

They need to eat good food that tastes good, so they get used to and recognize it.

Children should be served expensive steak so they know what it is, and can recognize its flavor, texture, and smell and develop a liking for it, instead of the fast food equivalent.

Sitting around a table sharing a perfectly rotisseried chicken, with a side dish of hummus or garlic sauce, and a half dozen pita breads, is learning how to eat properly… with the chicken juices running down your lips, and with the sauce and juice commingling on your fingers.  It’s one of the oldest, simplest combinations (and every culture has it, with only minor changes in the presentation).  Have that meal and then offer a kid the fast food version.  They won’t want it.  It will taste bad… and it will also make them feel sick.

When we got home from a European trip with the kids we stopped at one of the local fast food joints on the way home.  Kim’s son got deathly ill.  He was retching and had diarrhea within 30 minutes of eating.  It was so bad, we thought he wouldn’t be able to go on trip number two, which began in two days.  Because of that risk, he did exactly as he was told, “eat nothing.” Despite the fact that he was hungry, he did exactly as he was told.  After two days, whatever toxins and poisons he’d gotten in the fast food had left his body, and eating a single banana before boarding the next fight was an instant cure.

That’s what happens to us when we are out of the country for a few weeks and return to eat fast food crap.  Your body becomes acclimated to good food, real food, and it loses its tolerance for anything else.  The same thing happens, only not as dramatic, when we eat out.  At home, I cook real food, with quality ingredients.  It didn’t take too many years for the kids to figure out that most out food is horrible, and makes them feel horrible… but home cooking was different.  It wasn’t different because it was cooked at home.  It was different because I chose quality ingredients and didn’t treat the kid’s bodies as if they were economy cars, needing only synthetic oils or low-octane fuels. 

“It just isn’t as good” the kids will say, when we go to an ordinary restaurant.  If we’re going to eat things that I cook, then there is no reason to go out, as it will always taste terrible.  Only go out for things you can’t get a home--exotic dishes that are too complicated (or different) to fit into our regular diet and choices or because you’re in a hurry.

But back to me…

I had been eating synthetic foods.  “Protein shakes” were recommended, but the ingredients are made from manufacturing foods, to take all the food out of them.  By the time you’ve gotten the protein out of whatever source you’re getting it from, added 50 other chemicals to it to hide the taste or provide other nutrients, then add the artificial sweeteners to make it taste palatable, what you end up with is poison in a glass, not literally, but cumulatively.  You can’t eat that stuff and get better.  You might be able to survive on it (if you’re able to shut down, tune out, and ignore your body screaming in agony), but you wouldn’t thrive on it.

I was supposed to do this for three weeks?  I wouldn’t live through it.  Maybe other people could, but not me.  I could already feel myself slipping off the cliff.  Two more weeks of this and I’d be a goner, or wished I was.  I also had to get back to work on Monday, and I was not making progress that would allow me to do that, or even consider it.  I knew that the office would be supportive and not want me to work if I wasn’t ready to, but I also felt like I had a duty and an obligation to get better, so I could work.

I started listening, and listening really hard.  My body was trying to have a conversation with me, telling me what it needed, but I’d been ignoring it.  Now it was time to listen.  “Salt” it said, loud and clear. “Salt?  You want salt?” I thought, thinking something had been lost in the translation.  “SALT!” my body said to me again, only louder.  “SALT, SALT, SALT!” it said, until I finally agreed, if only to get it to shut up.  That’s a bit wacky, but OK, I thought, and pored a few grains of salt into the palm of my hand, and ate them by sticking a wet finger into it and then on my tongue.  I repeated it a few times (because my body was still screaming) and within 30 minutes my nausea was cut in half.  “OK, what else?” I asked my body.

“WE NEED PROTEIN!” it said next, “but none of that fake crap you’ve been trying to bamboozle us with.”

I had been craving milk toast. I hadn’t eaten milk toast since I was nine years old.  It was something my mother would make us if we were sick--poaching an egg in milk and then scooping it up with a little of the hot milk, over crispy buttered toast.  I didn’t want the egg, but I wanted the milk and toast part.  I hadn’t thought of that food for decades, yet there it was, SCREAMING at me.

And this is where listening to your body can get tricky.  I couldn’t eat toast.  Well, I could, but it wouldn’t be a good idea.  I had to figure out what it was in the milk toast that made my body call out for it… applying a little logic, it was the simple sugars and proteins of the milk, combined with the salty butter on the toast.  Grits!  I could substitute grits.  I sent a messenger to by body’s spokesman and offered grits as an alternative.  “How would that work?” I asked, making sure I had my body’s full cooperation before offering a substitute.  “Yes, send grits” was the response.

So I did that… I ate about an eighth of a cup of grits, and started to feel better still.  I repeated this for the last 48 hours, listening very carefully, and coming up with compromises that I could handle, but still listening to what my body needed.

Kim went to the store last night and bought me a dozen or so bottles of baby food.  He bought the ones for six month olds, that have been steamed and filtered.  There’s nothing artificial about that process.  Steaming and sieving is a perfectly natural thing.  (Despite folks thinking that baby food is bad, when it is amazingly pure and healthy.) He came home and handed me the bag and I went through each bottle, thinking about what it would be like, and asking my body if that would be a good thing.  We had a resounding “yes!” on the sweet potato chicken.  I was able to eat about half the jar, before I got the “full” signal and stopped.  A few hours later, I ate about an ounce of potato, boiled in about 3 ounces of milk (I saved the leftovers for today). 

By midnight last night I was hurting, badly, but I was feeling better.  I didn’t want to eat things not on the list and have any side effects masked by the pain medicine, but I had been careful, listened attentively, and had had nothing but a positive result, so pain medicine was my reward.  That allowed me to relax enough to sleep.  This morning I felt better, a lot better, and the swelling, nausea, and pain was reduced dramatically.

“Why don’t they put baby food on the list?” daughter asked when she got home last evening, worried about me, and concerned that I was not following the rules.  She’d been through a week of “protein shakes” and had similarly rejected them after 3 days, and chose “water” as the only palatable substitute, but her surgery had the protein shake diet for only a week.  I was facing three weeks of it, and “water” wouldn’t work for three weeks.  She saw that the color had returned to my face, that I was no longer green/yellow colored and sleepy, and was getting better instead of worse.  I had no answer, really, except to say that the protein shakes must work for other people, but they don’t work for us.

It’s scary and sometimes dangerous to reject the status quo, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else.  Listening to your body is tricky and if you haven’t spent a lifetime doing it, you may not understand the language, and post-surgery wouldn’t be the time to start.

It worked for me though.

When I woke up I wanted one thing, and one thing only: Coffee.  And when it was brewing it smelled marvelous.

It was then I realized that I wasn’t going to die.  I was going to live… with every meaning of that word.

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