For those of you who were wondering if I was alive, I am... I'm trying to get used to sleeping with a machine that puffs air up my nostrils. (Which has been taking away my sleep, which in turn makes me hurt more and be tired.) The hope is such that it will, eventually, improve my health. I shall explain more in another post.
Right now, I'm excited about having had pizza on Valentine's Day!
Having delivery pizza may not seem like the most romantic Valentine's date, but for us, it was the ultimate luxury... A few companies like Bob's Red Mill and Ener-G make gluten-free pizza crust mix/pre-made shells, but GF delivery pizzas are still few and far in between. I once went to pick up a GF + egg-free pizza at a restaurant near Kirkland, but the crust tasted like cardboard, and I felt crushed. :( (It also didn't help that I was bringing it to attend a gourmet pizza-baking party.)
Still, I was cautiously optimistic, because things that say "gluten-free" could still have dairy or eggs in them. Usually eggs are the culprit.
So I wrote in to their website to inquire. To my delight, the GF crust they make is dairy- and egg-free! This was music to my ears.
They don't offer any vegan (i.e. dairy-free) cheese alternative, but the company rep told me the pizzas would still be good without cheese (with just the sauce).
So we took the plunge. We were so glad we did -- it was the best tasting gluten-free, egg-free crust we've tasted to date! AND we can get the pizzas delivered!
I used to be a bit of a pizza snob and didn't exactly jump to order delivery pizzas in the past, but two years of deprivation can do wonders...
I may be able to compete in the "least frequently updated blog" contest, but I haven't forgotten I have a blog! These couple of months have been slightly rough... partially due to the cold weather. (You hear a lot of fibromyalgia sufferers talking about wanting to move to Hawaii around this time of year in Seattle.)
Nonetheless, I'm filled with hopes for the new year. I learned a lot more about myself in the past year, and I can't help but be grateful for all the great things I have in my life.
My ever-so-supportive husband and I still get along famously after two years of marriage, as we both type away on our laptops at the table by our bay window. Both my family and his family have been so loving and supportive, I couldn't have asked for more. We have wonderful friends whom we'd love to see more of any day. Our cats are so loving and sweet it makes me want to cry (OK, maybe I'm a bit woozy from pain medication, but it's true). I'm getting great medical care and am finding out all sorts of new things. And we're becoming an uncle and aunt both in Japan and the U.S.! How cool is that?
Well, enough with my blabbering. What I wanted to say most of all:
I'm wishing YOU, who's reading this blog, a happy, healthy, delicious new year! (The word "delicious" came about because I had one of the most amazing meals last night -- more on this later.)
I love you all.
-A
We can all use a little boost in our life -- y'all have given me a boost! Thank you.
I'm just not good at sitting still and healing myself...
After months of dealing with spotty tonsils and flared-up mono, I was finally feeling up to taking up a role in our Toastmasters meeting -- i.e. I was dying to go out and do something. (Never mind it took an IV/massage/acupuncture/qi-gong blitz on Wed/Thurs/Friday.)
Well, the ending result is a bleeding throat. Doh! So much for dreaming maybe I'd be able to catch a chat with a friend over tea some time soon. (I guess I still could -- I just have to be a really good listener and not so much a chatter. Or I need a chalkboard.)
I talked to my doc last week, and we'll do another 3-month round of chelation therapy to rid of more mercury/heavy metal in my body (I was taking a little break to rest my kidney), and we'd try double-dosing immunoglobulin shots this time along with the anti-viral IVs in an attempt to boost my immune system.
So the saga continues... I guess the fact I can be up and typing is an improvement from a month ago, though. :-)
-A
P.S. A thought: Maybe I should enroll in some miming classes, so I can learn to communicate without talking.
What a night. (Pinching myself to make sure it's true.) The next president will undoubtedly have one tough job ahead of him, but we picked the right guy for the job!
Excited crowd at Grant Park in Chicago.
Way to go, America. Thank you, to all those who voted, and worked so hard to get out those votes (like our friend Eve)!
-A
P.S. It's nice to see Colorado turn blue! Thanks to Maine, too, for giving all its 4 electoral votes to Pres. Obama :-)
This is significant, because The Economist (while unabashedly pro-free trade) is a naturally skeptical (thus thoughtful) magazine, so it argues both sides of the equation. It freely expresses its doubts for both candidates and points out a better choice. It's also significant because it means the decision makes sense from the econimical, political, and security standpoint, not just from the ideological standpoint.
"America should take a chance and make Barack Obama the next leader of the free world... He has earned it."
I’m barely making my once-a-month post… My friend Mick left me a comment on my last post (which had to do with the fall festival): “Please post a new page before a 'snow festival' starts.”
Ha ha, very funny. Hey, at least it’s not time for the cherry blossom festival yet! So would you forgive me?
A couple of days ago, I found my second piece of gray hair. For the first one, which I think I found a few months back, I had this visceral reaction to pluck it, although they say you shouldn’t do that. I realize a lot of folks get gray at a younger age, so I shouldn’t gripe about it, but it was so shiny and silver among my brown/black hair it shocked me a little bit. Yes, I plucked it again. I blame this one on the election season.
(You know you’re being too obsessive when you’re incessantly checking Google News & cnn.com & politico.com & FiveThirtyEight.com on top of your regular NPR programming, and you’ve read one too many article on slate.com and The New Yorker magazine. I usually don't mind my limited exposure to The New Yorker to be at my Bostonian therapist’s office -- although their endorsement for Obama presidency was one of the most eloquent prior to Gen. Colin Powell's, which also referenced a beautiful, haunting picture in the magazine. The “election season” has gone on for waaaay too long, and the suspense is killing me. I'm bad at sitting still... as I'm too sick to volunteer, I’d like to go into a cryogenic freeze chamber and come out Wednesday morning.)
I always hoped to age gracefully. We live in a culture that’s obsessed with youth, but I always believed with age came wisdom, and along that reasoning, that aging must be a good thing.
Except I don’t feel particularly wiser, than, say, when I started becoming sick about two years ago. For that matter, I don’t feel particularly older, either. Having been sick and spending much of my time in bed and various clinics has felt a little bit like having been in a glass box -- like the one depicted by mimes. I’m in there, and my life is paused, while I watch everyone else outside, living their lives and moving. Friends have had babies, loved ones passed on, and here I am, kind of in the same place, in the same old glass box.
Behold: squirrel mime.
Of course I’m probably feeling like this because I’m writing this with my left hand while getting my nth (who can keep the count?) anti-viral IV, which I’ve been getting weekly. Since this summer my lovely & chronic Epstein-Barr viral infection (a.k.a. mono) seems to have flared up, with accompanying tonsillitis to boot. I don’t know if my Vancouver jaunt was premature, or if it was the combination of that with other summer activities, but according to the key witness (a.k.a. husband), “It was a steady downward spiral for a while there,” a bit like Sarah Palin’s approval rating.
Fortunately, not my throat... The Wiki picture of tonsillitis. Yikes! My white spots are much smaller now, thank you.
My white blood cell count is now in the low end of acceptable range, but not high enough to fight off my infections, and my natural killer cell count is… well, let’s just say they apparently barely exist.
I also got my most recent mercury test result back, and the news is mixed. It’s gone down a little bit from before (yay), yet it’s still twice as high as the upper limit of normal range (boo). And I have high levels of lead and tin (why?!). Having been a good student most of my life, getting back bad test results feels like failure, like I’m not a good patient or something.
I know I shouldn’t feel that way. Although I still get low fever every time I move around a little bit, I’m definitely doing a little better than I was in September. I can drive myself to my appointments instead of taking a cab. So who knows, maybe soon, my glass box can turn into a mosquito net, from which I can step out.
In the meantime, I need to gain back some weight. (I used to have a roommate in high school who weighed something like 95 pounds at 5'7", and she was always complaining she couldn’t find clothes that fit. I was a little chubby back then and I thought she was a bitch for complaining about such things -- 20 years later, I feel her pain. Hey, maybe I am becoming wiser. This illness is teaching me empathy!) If you’re in the area and want to go grab some prime rib shabu shabu or BBQ ribs (sorry, my vegetarian friends! Sometimes a girl needs pure fat before winter), give me a holler. If you’re not in the area but want to help boost my natural killer cell count, go vote for Barack Obama (just kidding… well, not really).
Time flies. It's that time of the year again - Japanese Fall Festival (a.k.a. AkiMatsuri) is coming up this weekend (Sept 6, 7)! I can't believe it's been a year already.
An astute reader such as yourself probably noticed that this is my first post in a long time -- and that it probably means I hadn't been feeling well.
Ding-ding-ding-ding! You are correct! Sorry, I don't have a prize.
Okay, I'll admit now that taking that trip to Vancouver might have been a bit much. I'm still recovering from it, and that combined with the renewed anti-viral therapy combined with the mercury chelation therapy with DMSA, I've been feeling like I have mono squared.
Then there was a confluence of wonderful family visits -- my parents, Daniel's parents, Daniel's brother Brent and his always wonderful wife Kathy -- all of whom I wanted to spend more time with, but much of my summer was spent in bed, spiced up with few outings. :-/ It was wonderful seeing everyone, though, and I'm so grateful they came to Seattle, we got to be with them, and our parents were all so helpful and easy-going. (Thank you for all the goodiesyou brought back from the farmers market! Sorry I couldn't go with you -- I'm still enjoying the currant jam and ikura, though!)
So the summer is almost gone, and I'm hoping all the feverish, dizzy, painful days are somehow helping me get over my chronic infections. We'll have to see. It's always dark before the end of the tunnel... right?
I'll take a break from the anti-viral therapy this week, in the hopes that would help me have enough energy to carry out my volunteer duties. I'd be interpreting the lecture to be given by the special guest from Japan, and I'm hoping I'll have some leftover energy to sell the festival T-shirts to raise funds for the organization. This year's T-shirts are really cute! (Daniel did a rockin' job, I think. It features the same cute Darumas seen on the poster above.)
