For my entire life, I’ve had a nagging feeling that if only I could find a way to give myself a more creative imagination, I would be dangerously productive of art, music, prose, poetry, and science. The problem, as near as I could diagnose, was a lack of time for unfettered (what the hell does “unfettered” mean? Lemme pull up some online dictionary here...OK, it means to “release from fetters” [duh]…and “fetters” are “a chain or shackle placed on the feet”…making the analogy, I think, acceptable if not fully apposite… (and “apposite” means “suitable, well adapted, pertinent, relevant, apt”…) (and “apt” means...SLAP!! WHACK!!...thanks, I…I needed that. I’m better now. Really. Better…) thinking.
Well, now I actually have the time for unfettered thinking that I’ve craved for much of my adult life.
And it turns out I was right. Or, at least, partially right. I have indeed improved my creativity, in a shocking variety of ways. However, now my OTHER overarching intellectual deficiency, which I’ve also struggled for a lifetime to (unsuccessfully) overcome, kicks in. I have such a pitiful lack of skills or talent in any and all expressive media that I am unable to convert my freshly liberated and expansive creativity into any useful product.
Sigh. You think, from reading waiting-room brochures, magazines, and books, uplifting tales about how having advanced-stage cancer and coming two breaths from death is “the best thing that can happen to you”, that you’re actually going to be a different, better person when you stagger out of the Stargate, bloody and wounded. Different…better… .
But the sad truth, like so many things in life, is mundane. You’re actually the same person you were on the other side of the galaxy. Wounded. Bloody. But the same.
Dammit.
But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here because I don’t think people are sufficiently worried about that rock on Mars that suddenly appeared, two weeks later, in a spot that lacked said rock in an earlier photo. Of course, there’s the usual bloated panic from the “chariots of the gods” people. You can entertain yourself for hours with their detailed deconstruction of this and other photos from the Mars landers at http://www.thelivingmoon.com/46_mike_singh/index.html .
But this “now you see it” rock photo has some actual disturbing aspects. First, those rover vehicles move very slowly, their wheels turn at a creeping pace. Making the NASA technical explanation—that somehow the rover drop-kicked that chunk onto the boulder in the photo frame—completely untenable. Also, if you look at the “before” photo, you see a tidy little triangular sculpting on the boulder. A sculpting that, in the “after” photo, fits the drop-kicked fragment perfectly, like a muffin nestling into the pocket of a nonstick muffin baking pan. Which leaves us with only scary and completely untenable explanations for the incident.
But that’s not why…oh, wait, yes, that is why we’re here. I saw Dr. S, my “palliative care” specialist. Dr. S’ task is to find a way for my present self to slip comfortably into an acceptable quality-of-life slot out here in the universe at large. Dr. S is in an uncomfortable professional position. He had no input to the treatment plans and implementation that yielded my current, uncomfortable status. Now he’s charged with making a Tab A (me) fit into a Slot B (niche in the functioning biosphere) restroactively and with a limited tool kit.
Basically, his toolkit consists of drugs. If he can find a pharmaceutical regime that balances the diverse psychological and physical impairments left in the wake of my disease and treatment against the physical and intellectual parameters that define an acceptable quality-of-life for me, he will have done his job.
It’s a struggle. My “new normal”, as surgeon Dr. H calls it, is inherently uncomfortable and constraining. Drugs capable of massaging my physical being into at least a marginal functional status all have side effects ranging from dreary to dangerous. But we’re getting there. After months of experimentation with the wacky array of pharmaceuticals nominally applicable to one or more of my chronic symptoms, we seem to have hit on a viable tactical solution.
In the morning, I take a heavy dose of dilaudid to suppress nagging soreness in my head and neck, an antinausea tablet that, coupled with a dose of THC, lets me ingest sufficient calories, and just enough dry-out drugs like Benadryl to let me function but not put me to sleep. In the evening, I take a much larger diversity and dose of dry-out drugs so I don’t drown in my sleep, and the anti-depressant and anti-anxiety drugs that let me maintain my personality at some level of productive functioning. I also take melatonin, which I’ve been doing routinely now for 15 years and a second dose of THC. This suite of medicaments allows me to relax and sleep soundly despite having to prop myself up to near-vertical so the copious mucous produced in my oral cavity and throat slip mostly down my gastrointestinal tract and not my airway.
This regimen makes me quite comfortable, and allows me to be productive. Of course, it does NOT make me more imaginative or creative. I’m afraid those impairments can only be mitigated the old-fashioned way, via intense and hard work.
So there it is. I’m alive, I have drugs that allow me to be functional, and I’m not grossly uncomfortable. Given the massive devastation wrought by radiation and surgery, that’s about the best I can expect.
Hopefully it will let me live long enough to see the photo of that Mars rock picking itself up and waving at the camera on the rover. A worthy objective for my rather constrained life.
Remember that I love you all. Remember to let the remarkable experience of living wash into your consciousness a couple times a day. And most of all, rock on. Just because we can!
When I was a kid, I had chronic asthma. The annoying day-to-day breathing impairment was frequently superseded by acute and intense breakdown of my respiratory hardware. These attacks were vicious. They kept me out of school for three to five days per. I struggled with the physical manifestations—extreme shortness of breath, coughing fits that inflamed my throat until it bled, inability to take any posture other than bolt upright, exhaustion, insomnia, dehydration, nausea.
I also endured psychological nightmares. The shortness of breath got so extreme that it triggered claustrophobia. Waves of panic hit the beaches of my psyche and crushed the fragile walls of my mortality. In the throes of an asthma attack, my entire being was focused on breathing. Every breath was an event. Every breath took intense focused effort. Respiration is so fundamental that evolution made it a priority process that operates subconsciously. It was bizarre, and exhausting, to have to think to breathe.
Doctor G, the family doctor, was an Armenian immigrant, probably trained in the Soviet Union. He told my parents there was little he could do to forestall asthma attacks and that it wasn’t even worth trying until the cats to which I was clearly allergic were barred from the house.
This wasn’t in the cards. For my entire childhood and beyond, the cottage in Pompton Lakes was home to usually one, but sometimes up to half a dozen or more, felines. Cat dander certainly fueled my asthma. But Doc G and my folks were all heavy smokers. It never occurred to any of them that perhaps tobacco smoke was a factor contributing to my degraded respiratory health.
Repeated near-death experiences associated with the odor and flavor of tobacco smoke were powerful Pavlovian triggers. Just the thought of smoking was sufficient to make me nauseous. There was never any risk that I would be a smoker.
The deeply ingrained stimulus/response function pertained to marijuana. I was unable to even contemplate smoking grass. I had no moral or intellectual problems with recreational marijuana use. It was just something beyond the abilities of my physiology.
Eventually, in graduate school, I ran into people who took pity on me and made brownies laced with marijuana for me. I had a lot of fun, and probably gained substantial weight in that period of my life. The appetite-stimulating effect of marijuana is strong, and the presence of a pan of brownies sort of closed the circle in a mildly hallucinogenic positive feedback loop.
A bunch of us left Gloucester Point one night, heading for the movie theater in Newport News. On the way out, I grabbed a big handful of freshly prepared magic brownies. Gobbled them on the ride. We saw Kubrick’s Vietnam War horror drama Full Metal Jacket. About the time the frustrated grunt smears his brains across the toilet tiles, I barfed. Apparently my grasp of brownies exceeded my physiological tolerance for the psychoactive compounds in the mix. My corner of the theater truly stank. Fortunately, there were few other moviegoers that night. And I suspect most of them were engaged in their own digestive tract battles with alcohol, marijuana, or worse.
So now as an aged and haggard cancer survival, I have my own renewable prescription for tetrahydrocannabinol, primary psychoactive component of the sap in marijuana plants. My THC is manufactured chemically, of course. But it’s still THC. Radiation oncologist Dr N decided I am the model candidate for the pharmaceutical efficacy of THC. I need an appetite to allow me to force in sufficient UN emergency rations to fuel my ongoing recovery. I need help suppressing chronic nausea. And I need assistance to battle the depression that followed the cancer treatments onto the landing beaches of my physiology…am I stretching this metaphor beyond its useful scope? I suspect so… .
Anyway. I’m in sort of recovery no-man’s land. I’m getting stronger. I don’t have much residual pain. I can get around to shop, see doctors, and I’m enjoying cooking when I get the opportunity. On the other hand, I continue to produce disgusting quantities of mucous in my battered oral cavity and throat. In fact, the differential between the thin salivary secretions in my mouth and the thick, syrupy gunk in my throat is increasing. The throat stuff is really, really unpleasant and hard to deal with. I have frequent coughing fits, and constantly leak goo from my mouth and tracheostomy infrastructure. I was getting excited about the possibility of returning to work, but clearly I cannot operate in a position requiring me to interact with others on a regular basis. The mucous production is not only discomfiting to me. It is a health threat to others, and one that I cannot control effectively.
So, I’m more comfortable in some ways, yet I have ongoing issues that render me unable to function in the real world. Sigh. It could be worse, I suppose. I have time now to read, write, think, and produce eclectic and idiosyncratic works of art. I’m actually beginning to find ways to make guitar instrumental music that works despite my primitive musicianship. All things considered, my life is not bad.
And that’s the real key. “Life”. I have it. Under circumstances that could very well have taken it from me. So…party on, all! If I could select one take-home message to give to all of you, it is this. Don’t let the process of living become something you do by rote. Pause periodically to actually think about a breath. Appreciate each breath for its life-giving properties. Enjoy each moment that you can. There’s only a thin line between being here and being gone. Take the opportunities to experience and learn from the little things of life that are usually under your radar. Someday we’re all going to have to shut down our radar stations and take leave of ourselves.
But hopefully no time soon. My love to all of you. Rock on. And on and on, while you have the opportunity to do so!
When I went to China twice in the early 1990s, I spent a lot of time hiking around local neighborhoods in cities, and visiting (via auto and foot) isolated villages in the countryside. At the time, I noted that even in the most impoverished places, where huts improvised from cardboard, fiberglass, and corrugated sheet metal fed onto streets lined with closet-sized shops and one, two, or no-table restaurants, there was always a focal point, a gathering place, a pub, or shop, or lean-to that had a television (always), and a computer (sometimes).
Of course, even in my most casual western clothes, I stood out like a DEA agent at a Dead concert in Golden Gate Park. But people were invariably genuinely friendly and welcoming. Often, I’d get pulled deeper into densely populated side alleys, mud footpaths between pasted-together one-room shacks and ramshackle two or three story apartment houses. I got to observe, intimately and at close range, the grinding poverty. And the spirit—often expressed in honest and cynical humor—of the locals. But something nagged at me regarding those shared-resource television sets and computers.
Same pattern—septic neighborhoods with islands of electronic connectivity—pertained as I had opportunities to explore the middle east, Pacific islands, and the Caribbean.
Eventually, the source of my discomfit occurred to me. These people—thousands and thousands of them, in cities and rural villages around the world, live in intense poverty. And at the same time, they see, on CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and via AOL and Yahoo, how the rest of us live. Their screens showed the hygienic, comfortable, easy, safe life that we in the temperate zones of the developed world live.
And this bothered me. Why, I have wondered for more than 20 years, don’t the impoverished billions in the developing world tropics rise up, grabbing bottled water, knives, and shovels on their way out of dodge, and pour into our world? What was holding back tsunamis of poor people from sub-Saharan Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Southwest Asia, China, and Latin America? Why were we in the clean, healthy, wealthy expanses of Europe and North America not engaged in desperate battles with southern masses intent on putting our heads atop spikes in killing fields stretched from California to Montreal to London to Berlin to Moscow and Sydney?
It remains, to me, a conundrum. Three billion people struggling to survive in the impoverished tropics, watching us eat, drink, and play on TV and computer screens, ought to, it seems to me, be sharpening up those shovels, cleaning the residual heaps of Kalashnikovs (did I mention that Mikhail Kalashnikov died recently? He did, and he died knowing that weapons of his design have killed more human beings than any other. Although that design is so simple and so robust that it can be—and is—replicated in hand-tool workshops around the equator. At the same time, high-end versions are valued in the most sophisticated weapons circles. Cross-reference the first movie RED, where John Malkovitch explores Bruce Willis’ weapons stash and breathes admiringly “a Swedish K…”) left in the wake of ubiquitous civil conflict, with intent to kill.
There are many parameters that could trigger such a mass mobilization. Nutrition—the basics of sufficient quality and quantity of food—is among the most likely. It is obvious to anyone living in poverty that every single individual on-screen for CNN, the BBC, and Al Jazeera have plenty to eat and do not lack for potable water. And it is also obvious that the audience for round-the-clock international news feeds have plenty to eat and abundant safe water. Basically, it is obvious that there are places where people do not have to deal with mud streets, improvised housing, festering water, rats, tainted (biologically and chemically) food, scarce food.
So if I project a little, I can imagine myself inhabiting a plywood and corrugated fiberglass shack in a hot, wet, septic hell hole, maybe on the fringe of the enormous garbage dump serving Cairo, say, or maybe Mumbai where similar improvised dwellings are crushed together around a single, shallow water table well. And what I imagine next is that I’d really rather be inhabiting a dwelling in whatever slab of real estate Wolf Blitzer and Christiane Amanpour call home.
Then I imagine that I’ve sharpened up a shovel just in case and I’m hoofing it down the mountain of festering trash in the Cairo city dump and heading for Paris or Amsterdam or Berlin. And I imagine that when I get there, it is indeed the tidy, orderly, sanitary, place of my dreams, packed with shops and restaurants purveying food, water, unadulterated beverage alcohol, and all manner of goods from clothing to big screen TVs. And I imagine myself and the many hundreds of others that took up shovels to walk with me as I passed their hovels will kick some overweight wealthy ass and take some healthy hygienic names.
In the real world, it turns out that my sociological daydreams are beginning to play out. Israel is embroiled in a controversy involving several thousand residents of various African nations who became environmental refugees and walked from the hellish slums of their origin to the shining ecologic and economic heaven of a modern functioning state.
Nutrition is a powerful motivator. And lack of nutrition is a powerful constraint. I’m just finishing a detailed account of the World War Two battle for what was then Stalingrad between the Russian defenders and the German invaders, where nutrient deficiencies hastened the awful nightmare of the doomed German soldiers.
And nutrition is a big deal in the aftermath of cancer diagnosis and treatment. Especially so when the cancer wars were fought on battlefields of the mouth and throat, critical infrastructure for feeding and hydrating.
In my case, the food-related functions of component parts of my head and neck have been obliterated. I am unable to eat or drink via the pathways my corpus is evolved for.
And this is a problem. From a number of perspectives. For me, a lifelong cook and food person, not being able to eat is a depressing condition. I’m only now, well along in my recovery (such as it is), regaining the pleasures of cooking for families and friends. And of course, lacking the ability to safely taste what I’m preparing, my cuisine is getting a little erratic.
More problematic are struggles with the plumbing that stands in for a functional oral cavity, and with the medically concocted “food” that I ingest via said plumbing. I take a high-calorie, carefully formulated for complete nutrition, liquid. I dump it into a tube that opens in my stomach via a 60 ml syringe and some aquarium pump tubing.
The “food” comes in 250 ml cartons. To maintain my weight (an imperative for recovery—if I’m not getting maintenance calories, I can’t heal and my immune system will under-perform, dangerous for a body prone to sprouting cancerous cells spontanteously), I need to pack in 7 cartons of the liquid food. But here’s the problem. Seven of these things dumped into my stomach is a hefty challenge for my digestive tract. When I do manage to get all 7 boxes into my gut, it tends to just sit there, acting grumpy. I get acid reflux (lacking the epiglottis, stomach acid regularly rises into my battered oral cavity). I get nauseous (and I’ve run out of Zofran, peerless anti-nausea drug, and we haven’t been able to reach the doctor to get a refill dropped on the nearest pharmacy). I feel sluggish. And having to fight the nausea is exhausting.
I’ve been working with the dietician assigned to my case to try to find some way for me to ingest and retain (that is, to not vomit it right back up) the calories I need to function. We tried a high-calorie additive. That didn’t work. We tried different ways to space out pouring the seven cartons down the pipe. Now I’ve got several boxes of supplemental extremely high calorie liquid food. If I can keep a couple cartons of the latter down per day, along with four or five cartons of “regular” food, I might be able to recover some weight.
But today, I felt good in the morning. I packed in all seven cartons of food over the course of 3 or 4 hours. Then, when I mobilized to head for the grocery store to get stuff to cook for supper, I had to fight the urge to vomit. And I had to fight that battle all day. I’m still feeling bloated and nauseous now at midnight. I took the seventh food pack around three in the afternoon.
So, I gotta find a way to come to grips with my digestive system and get it to accept sufficient calories on a daily basis. This is a very uncomfortable process. When I’m having a bad day, I can hardly look at a carton of “food” without gagging. When I’m having a good day, and I dump in the full ration to take advantage of same, I get tummy aches and chronic nausea.
Sigh. I’m sure I’ll work this out. Since the alternative is to slowly starve to death, which engenders a host of discomfiting symptoms, I expect I’ll battle the U.N. emergency rations to a standstill.
It just might not be pretty when I get there. And it certainly won’t be comfortable. But, given the alternatives, this is again something I can live with. Trading gastrointestinal discomfort for being alive is a bargain deal. I’ll work it out. And I promise to stop whining about food…umm…let me rephrase that. I’ll do my best to stop whining about food.
And enjoy the things that make life worth living, from picking a guitar, to cooking for the family, to reading, writing, listening to music, watching movies, photographing birds, and riding along with my children as they blossom into the adult world.
Thanks for being here, everybody. My love to you all. Be here next week for another installment of this cancer-driven confessional soap opera. And take this lesson to heart: enjoy every bite of food and every sip of beverage that you take. If you should find yourself unfortunate enough to be stumbling down this path behind me, you’ll need the memories of those steaks, fish, shellfish, fruit, vegetables, and grain products to keep yourself sane!
Those of you with delicate constitutions may want to indulge in a big slug of Scotch or Bourbon before diving into this week’s entry. It’s going to be a bit…well…slimy.
“Biofilms” were all the rage in academia in the 1990s, and in today’s world of genetic and molecular engineering continue to be hot hype. I’m proud to say that a regular reader of this column—Frank J, lifelong resident of northern New Jersey and peerless entrepreneurial engineer—pioneered biofilm research in his undergraduate years in quaint and/or historic Piscataway, New Jersey.
The general importance of biofilms—thin membranes stretched over environmental surfaces, owned and operated by bacteria but encompassing a large measure of extracellular material (mucilaginous proteins, free enzymes, other structural molecules), bound up with an ecosystem’s worth of protozoans, algae, nematodes, tardigrades, yeasts, fungi, and other biological flotsam and jetsam—shouldn’t have been a surprise. It is really only a scalar difference between biofilms and the key structural manifestation of macroscopic ecosystems, edges or ecotones. Edges have ecological significance way out of proportion to their spatial extant. This is because edges are loci of activity at the interface of different ecosystem types, encompassing the goings-on of each of the adjacent systems while operating as a third, emergent system of its own distinction.
Think of a common ecotone. Something you pass by every day on your evening jog or morning walk. For example, the sharp structural interface of a meadow and a woodlot. The edge filters the movement of organisms—meadow or forest specialists do not pass the edge, functioning most efficiently in their “pure” habitat. Some animals—deer, rabbits, woodchucks, foxes, many birds—exploit the linear nature of the edge as a primary pathway for movement and foraging. Many animals and plants are evolutionarily specialized for existence in ecotones, jacking up the biodiversity. Productivity is high in the ecotone relative to the adjacent habitat types—there is more sunlight than under the forest canopy, and the nutrient-rich, high-carbon litter and soil horizons (themselves another form of ecotone) of the forest spill out into the more austere soils of the meadow.
With scale in mind, other biofilms are of enormous physiological importance. Your skin, for example. A rich ecosystem, fueled by epidermal cells and their extracellular exudates, a mosaic of dry, waxy, oily, and keratinaceous substrates inhabited by a shocking number and diversity of bacteria, protozoa, nematodes, mites and other biological hangers-on.
And your mucous membranes. The critical interface between organs and spaces (“lumina”), think throat, windpipe, sinuses, stomach, intestines, lungs, pericardium. And, in some cancer patients (me, for example), the turf over which the long-term wars for comfort, quality of life, and even survival are being fought.
At the moment, my residual health contretemps have to do primarily with mucous membranes. Two rounds of radiation and chemotherapy, and a series of surgical interventions have left my sinuses, oral cavity, and throat in a shambles. From a functional perspective, the most crippling outcome is the destruction of my epiglottis. If you will remember back to high school or introductory college biology, the epiglottis is an odd little structure. It serves as a valve, moving to cut access to the gastrointestinal tract (GIT) when you breathe, and reciprocally, to cut off your airway when you swallow.
These are important functions. Foreign solids or liquids sliding down the trachea, through the bronchi, and into the lungs are bad things. The outcome of gunk reaching the lungs is a form of pneumonia. That tater tot you inhaled, for example, will inflame the air-exchange surfaces of the lung and trigger an evolutionarily intricate, but none-too-effective, physiological response. The lung tissues produce enormous volumes of mucous (a mostly-protein goop) in an attempt to keep the blob of shredded potato mobile. Cilia lining the airway in great waving meadows try to crowd-surf the bolus of golden brown and delicious convenience food back up the bronchi, into the airway, and, with an assist from the epiglottis, dump it into the opening of the throat so it can be handled properly by the GIT.
My epiglottis happened to be directly in the line-of-fire of the radiation beams. It fried, becoming completely dysfunctional. It’s still present, and it makes a valiant effort to do its job, but all it can muster is to flap impotently and irritate adjoining tissues. So now, stuff in my mouth slides down the void where my tongue used to be and splits about 50 : 50, half running into my gut, and half into my lungs. When the dietician did a swallowing study, she found that blob of ice cream put into my mouth perched on the twisted wreckage of my epiglottis, then split, half to lungs, half to gut. The half teaspoonful of goop wreaked havoc. I spent several days with pneumonia-like symptoms before the hard-working cilia could crowd-surf the goop back up and out.
After excising the cancerous tissues from my mouth and throat, the surgeons reconstructed a baroque sort of ad hoc infrastructure intended to provide me with at least a modicum of functionality. The basic idea was paste up an engineered functional equivalent of the moving parts they hacked out. In earlier posts, we talked about the failed attempt to sculpt a quasi tongue from a slab of muscle harvested from my left thigh. While they couldn’t save my poor epiglottis, they needed to provide some separation so that stuff originating in my mouth wouldn’t pour en masse into my lungs.
I’m unclear about the present physical structure of my mouth and throat, despite the best attempts by Drs. H and N (the latter being the reconstruction expert) to explain it to me. But I do know that there is a slab of epidermis from my left arm, complete with its hairs, exposed in my oral cavity, supported by a hunk of muscle tissue from my torso. And that the salivary and mucous glands in my oral cavity and upper throat region were of necessity damaged by the surgery.
Presently my body is doing its best to work with the aftermath of the surgical battles. Salivary glands in my oral cavity came back online some weeks ago, and they are producing great quantities of thin saliva. Mucous glands deeper in the throat recovered sufficiently to pump out a thick and sticky goo rather akin to mucilage glue (for those of you born after say, 1975, mucilage glue was a syrup made of animal proteins originating in massive industrial retorts where carcasses of farm animals, slaughterhouse leftovers, veterinary flotsam, road kills and other sources of animal bodies were boiled under pressure. The (no doubt horrifying) residue was further treated to yield a glue used in schools, offices, homes...anyplace where items had to be stuck together. It has since been largely replaced by more sophisticated (and less disgusting) materials). From conversations with Dr. H, I gather that the hairy patch of arm skin in my throat is attempting to bootstrap itself, rather clumsily, into a functional mucous membrane. An artifact of that conversion process is the production of yet more thick sticky mucous.
Anyway. I spend a lot of time working to keep my throat clear of all this gunk. I go through rolls of paper towels at the rate of 2 or 3 per day. I have discovered that heat—very warm air in the room, and packing a heating pad against my chest—facilitates my efforts to keep from drowning in my own slime. I take rather heavy doses of over the counter products designed to constrain mucous production. One of the weirdly unexpected benefits of opiates (or at least dilaudid, which is what I have) is that they contribute to drying things out (the doctors are befuddled when I explain this to them. Apparently nobody has ever reported this effect before). I have a medical vacuum pump system intended to assist me in keeping my airway clear. I’ve never had to use it. I find that a strong cough generally does the job. I gather that in this, I am unusual. The doctors say that people in my condition are generally dependent on the vacuum punk. I guess I’m just lucky.
Mucous management is now an important part of my day. It is as disgusting as it sounds. But. It’s mucous management. It’s not, as it could easily have been, managing more dire problems. This I can do.
And this I can live with. Wounded and dysfunctional as I am, I am learning to deal with my “new normal” physiology. And with not being able to talk. And with the intricacies and logistical difficulties of having a hole punched in my throat and body producing slime at a rate that would make me a credible competitor in a slime-off with a hagfish. I am far from strong and functional. But I’m alive. I’m recovered enough to enjoy cooking again (for others, obviously. I need to have lots of tasters around if I’m working on anything complicated). I don’t know how much I’ll be able to do—I remain weak and nauseous. But I know I’m really happy to be here to find out!
My love to you all. I hope you all had fabulous winter holidays, and are looking forward to a great year as 2014 (can you believe it?) plays out. I certainly know I did, and I am.
Talk to you next week. Thanks, everybody!
