SpicyIdeas

Diverticulitis Dining Diet

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I’m on a battlefield.  Bombs are going off. I’m in a trench filled with mud and stink.  My socks are wet.  Another bomb explodes overhead. I duck and cover my head. I’m sweating like a red lentil in boiling water. Then out of nowhere – I need to poop, but not in this intestinal muck.  The battle is over.  I have scars. A new day.

Diet is right up there with the other biggies – exercise, sleep and alcohol use. Diet jumped to list top after 3 diverticulitis attacks (two months apart). On these occasions, I woke up at 2am with retching gut pain and the sweats. I felt like I had a flu and food poisoning combination. When I tried to pee, slight pain (inflamed colon pressing against my bladder). After the first attack, I went to the doc who said it was diverticulitis, not uncommon for a man of your age (64 – knocking on the senior citizen’s door). He gave me some nasty antibiotic pills – Ciprofloxacin (very harsh) and Metronidazole ten days on this shit, literally.

Now, the first 24 hours are brutal, but 24 hours later, I’m out running 10k. What the?  On to Dr. Google and his assistant Dr. YouTube – the resounding and agreeable result, drum roll please. You need to switch to a high fibre diet. Ok, can’t hurt, right? My diet is already very good.  More beans please.   The advice was slowly increase fibre.  Did eye? Nope. The gut was yelling at me for the first few weeks, but I pooped on.

My dietary changes were – psyllium husk fibre every morning (in my blueberry, banana, high protein almond milk and plain yogurt smoothie), beans at lunch (added to my avocado, cheese and egg on sour dough toast). In the evening some high fibre veggies – potatoes, sprouts or beans (roasted chickpeas ever the ready). With these minor additions,  I am getting close to 30 grams of fibre every day. Poops are awesome. I can always tell a good ‘ol fibre poop (no description here, but you’ll know). I also decreased red meat to maybe twice a month (lean sirloin only) and I stopped alcohol consumption (I dunno if it helps, but it doesn’t hurt).  And finally, probiotic Kombucha, every afternoon at 2.

So far, so good. I’m coming on three months and nothing but good poops and evening bean farts (sorry honey). What have I learnt from the experience? One needs to eat what agrees with them (and this changes with age). I changed my diet for medical reasons. Even if I wasn’t scared of impending attacks, adding more fibre to a diet is a great idea. I feel great and really that’s all that matters. Right.

Good Night Irene

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I had a dream we were sipping whisky neat. I threw the glass in the campfire. Darkness surrounded me.  I heard a noise in the bush. Out came a giant Scottish dude named Balvenie. He shouted in an accent I couldn’t decipher.  I got up and ran, fear over my shoulder.  I woke up in the middle of the night sweating. Panting. The next morning, I looked at my watch. Dr. Garmin yelled at me  with a 34-sleep score. Holy shit. Not good. I need to get better.

Now, I’ve always been a great sleeper. I can sleep anywhere – at a movie, concert even while driving (not too often). Sleep is very important right up there with the other two biggies, exercise and diet. But with the invention of smart watches, monitoring is both a blessing and a curse.   How can you not take an interest in your sleep? The device is either yelling at me or stroking me with positivity.

However, how accurate are sleep monitoring watches? When you get a sleep score of 93, they are the greatest invention to man. A 34 score and they are shit. From what I’ve read, watches are very good at monitoring how long you’ve slept and that’s about it. Deep sleep and REM, not so much. I was getting such poor scores on my Garmin (average 82), that I decided to funnel the data into Apple health.  She (you beautiful gem) regularly  gives me a 97-100 score every night, so uplifting. Garmin is nothing more that a scolding old bitty who enjoys picking the wings off flies . Constant low scores surely affects your sleep. We all want a 100 percent right? The highest I’ve ever gotten is 93. Once.

With all these poor scores, I decided to try and enhance my sleep score. First magnesium bisglycinate. Made me sleepy before bed, but if you stop taking it,  your body needs time to readjust. It’s like taking a sleeping pill. Once you use, you become dependant and I don’t want to become dependant on anything, except warm socks in the winter. I tried it for two weeks. No change. Then Gabapentin, another sleep inducing medication.  Same – no change and hard to come off.  Blue filter glasses (I use a reader every night). Nope. In fact for the first week, my score was worse. So none of this shit works – what does work?  Going to bed at the same time. Routine is king. And I’m happy with Apple scores.

Does Garmin really matter – you old cantankerous dick? How do you feel when you put your feet on the floor? Five years ago, I didn’t have a sleep monitoring watch and I felt fine. In fact, I think my sleep has gotten worse (for a time) from the constant nagging and negative Garmin reports. I know more than one person who turns the Garmin sleep data off completely. Switching to the more positive Apple is an eye closer for sure.

Sleep is great. I have a routine and I stick to it. I also make sure my bedroom is cool and dark. And no alcohol. If there’s one good report for Garmin, it’s how shitty your sleep is with even one glass of wine too close to bed. I wonder how many people, like me, who have given up booze after damning sleep reports.  The giant nasty Scottish dude is still chasing me, but good luck trying to catch me.

Alzheimer’s Aware

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I listened to a great podcast (Dan Harris – Ten Percent Happier) yesterday on Alzheimer’s – my biggest scare. I can’t imagine having your life slip away into an empty sunny field where nothing is familiar. Everyone you know is gone. Now I don’t want to say a dark hole because you’re not dead. You are alive physically, just in an unknown world, on a new planet so to speak. You can see the flowers, the waving grass and the sunshine, but you don’t know the names of the people who pass you by. You feel the warm sun on your face, and it feels good, but where and with whom you have shared this experience is beyond your present grasp.

The guest, neuroscientist Lisa Genova, made the disease more human (she has many TED talks). And it’s good to know that only two percent of all cases of Alzheimer’s are genetic. The disease really comes down to lifestyle and the big three: sleep, diet and exercise.  She also calmed my fears. I can’t think how many times I’ve forgotten where I parked my car, but, according to the scientist, it’s not that you forget where you parked (everyone does), it’s when you can’t remember getting to the mall or what your car looks like (Phew!!).  She has many comforting suggestions. Write shit down.  Lists are fine and it’s OK to Google shit. Young folks do all the time, so why struggle. No one needs to power through forgetfulness. The stress is worse.

Now the lifestyle choices, first sleep. You need to get your seven to nine per night because when you get a good night’s rest it clears your brain of a chemical that erodes your hippocampus – the area where our memories reside. She also stated it’s OK to get up and pee in the night (can I have another Phew!); it doesn’t have to be completely uninterrupted sleep.  Even when I was twenty, I never got a complete sleep unless accompanied by too many beers or sixteen-hour waiter shifts.

The diet recommendation is, of course, the Mediterranean (for the umpteenth time) – lots of veggies and a reduced amount of red meat. I’m already on this, but I could use less red meat and more fish in my diet. I also need to watch the pasta, rice and potatoes –  refined carbs not a good idea.  Eat more whole grain.

The exercise suggestion is at least twenty minutes of moderate activity or fifteen minutes vigorous per day. Just go outside for less than half an hour and walk like you’re late for work and boom you’re done.

However, the brain needs work, so enhance this by learning something new; another important aspect of keeping the brain in tip top shape. Learn new things – it keeps the brain sharp and creates new pathways – rewire baby.  For example, try a new sport like cross country skiing or go for a run or walk in a new place. Today on my run, I made sure I took notice of new people I see on my run. Not a new place, but new people. She also suggests team sports, the socializing while on a court or rink helps the brain keep in shape.

Nothing prevents the disease one-hundred percent, but be aware or beware. Now  I gotta walk to the store as if chased by the coppers or a T-Rex. I need blueberries and plain yogourt.

More Information:

 

 

A Letter to America

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Maybe it’s time for a little reminder, America before you march cross the 49th parallel. I’ll say one thing for trump, he’s brought this country together like never before. Even the Quebecois are championing Canada.  Do you know how hard that is? We’ve  been trying to get the French onboard for 157 years. Here’s a a little reminder from Margaret Atwood, a Canadian treasure.

Dear America: This is a difficult letter to write, because I’m no longer sure who you are. Some of you may be having the same trouble. I thought I knew you: We’d become well acquainted over the past 55 years. You were the Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck comic books I read in the late 1940s. You were the radio shows — Jack Benny, Our Miss Brooks.You were the music I sang and danced to: the Andrews Sisters, Ella Fitzgerald, the Platters, Elvis. You were a ton of fun.

You wrote some of my favourite books. You created Huckleberry Finn, and Hawkeye, and Beth and Jo in Little Women, courageous in their different ways. Later, you were my beloved Thoreau, father of environmentalism, witness to individual conscience; and Walt Whitman, singer of the great Republic; and Emily Dickinson, keeper of the private soul. You were Hammett and Chandler, heroic walkers of mean streets; even later, you were the amazing trio, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, who traced the dark labyrinths of your hidden heart. You were Sinclair Lewis and Arthur Miller, who, with their own American idealism, went after the sham in you, because they thought you could do better. You were Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, you were Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo, you were Lillian Gish in Night of the Hunter. You stood up for freedom, honesty and justice; you protected the innocent. I believed most of that. I think you did, too. It seemed true at the time.

You put God on the money, though, even then. You had a way of thinking that the things of Caesar were the same as the things of God: that gave you self-confidence. You have always wanted to be a city upon a hill, a light to all nations, and for a while you were. Give me your tired, your poor, you sang, and for a while you meant it. We’ve always been close, you and us. History, that old entangler, has twisted us together since the early 17th century. Some of us used to be you; some of us want to be you; some of you used to be us. You are not only our neighbours: In many cases — mine, for instance — you are also our blood relations, our colleagues, and our personal friends. But although we’ve had a ringside seat, we’ve never understood you completely, up here north of the 49th parallel.

We’re like Romanized Gauls — look like Romans, dress like Romans, but aren’t Romans —  peering over the wall at the real Romans. What are they doing? Why? What are they doing now? Why is the haruspex eyeballing the sheep’s liver? Why is the soothsayer wholesaling the Bewares?

Perhaps that’s been my difficulty in writing you this letter: I’m not sure I know what’s really going on. Anyway, you have a huge posse of experienced entrail-sifters who do nothing but analyze your every vein and lobe. What can I tell you about yourself that you don’t already know?

This might be the reason for my hesitation: embarrassment, brought on by a becoming modesty. But it is more likely to be embarrassment of another sort. When my grandmother — from a New England background — was confronted with an unsavoury topic, she would change the subject and gaze out the window. And that is my own inclination: Mind your own business.

But I’ll take the plunge, because your business is no longer merely your business. To paraphrase Marley’s Ghost, who figured it out too late, mankind is your business. And vice versa: When the Jolly Green Giant goes on the rampage, many lesser plants and animals get trampled underfoot. As for us, you’re our biggest trading partner: We know perfectly well that if you go down the plug-hole, we’re going with you. We have every reason to wish you well.

You’re gutting the Constitution. Already your home can be entered without your knowledge or permission, you can be snatched away and incarcerated without cause, your mail can be spied on, your private records searched. Why isn’t this a recipe for widespread business theft, political intimidation, and fraud? I know you’ve been told all this is for your own safety and protection, but think about it for a minute. Anyway, when did you get so scared? You didn’t used to be easily frightened.

You’re running up a record level of debt. Keep spending at this rate and pretty soon you won’t be able to afford any big military adventures. Either that or you’ll go the way of the USSR: lots of tanks, but no air conditioning. That will make folks very cross. They’ll be even crosser when they can’t take a shower because your short-sighted bulldozing of environmental protections has dirtied most of the water and dried up the rest. Then things will get hot and dirty indeed.

You’re torching the American economy. How soon before the answer to that will be, not to produce anything yourselves, but to grab stuff other people produce, at gunboat-diplomacy prices? Is the world going to consist of a few megarich King Midases, with the rest being serfs, both inside and outside your country? Will the biggest business sector in the United States be the prison system? Let’s hope not.

If you proceed much further down the slippery slope, people around the world will stop admiring the good things about you. They’ll decide that your city upon the hill is a slum and your democracy is a sham, and therefore you have no business trying to impose your sullied vision on them. They’ll think you’ve abandoned the rule of law. They’ll think you’ve fouled your own nest.

The British used to have a myth about King Arthur. He wasn’t dead, but sleeping in a cave, it was said; in the country’s hour of greatest peril, he would return. You, too, have great spirits of the past you may call upon: men and women of courage, of conscience, of prescience. Summon them now, to stand with you, to inspire you, to defend the best in you. You need them.

The letter was posted in The Globe and Mail on, 28 March 2003.  The letter was penned while  George W Bush as president. Man he looks good now, eh? I removed the paragraph about the Iraqi war, but we’re in another war, n’est-ce pas?

Bookstore

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A couple of nights ago, I was in this bookstore. Slate grey roof and ceiling with dark mahogany shelves stacked with scattered tomes, big and small. I have a reading list, but I can’t see the titles on the page. I scan the shelves trying to find matching titles. Paper shaking in my wet fingers. I walk over to a table stacked with books like a three-D puzzle. I look under the table and resting on top of a broken wooden crate is a copy of Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. The spine is broken. The book rests in two pieces.  I’m not sure the novel is on my list, but I’m glad I found it. I leave it hoping to come back.

I move around the bookstore checking my list with words I can’t see. Behind me I hear a famous voice, but I can’t see the face. The man is yelling at someone in the distance behind a closed door. He is upset the other person is closing the bookstore. It’s doing well, he says, so why close it. The female voice says, because it’s time. The raspy voice mutters incoherency as I hear his footsteps move away.  A door opens with the tinkle of a bell and then closes without a sound. No faces, only sounds.

I pull a book off the shelf. I can’t read the title, but on the cover is a dark woman, dressed in regal purple with gold trim. Her hair beehive style adorned with sparkling geometrical figures like a castle tower with golden windows. Her beautiful head crowned in gold and rubies.  I know her, but her name falters.  I look ahead. She is standing stair top between two dark wooden posts, carved with intricate male heads-  dark, shiny and bald. The Queen touches the figures and raises her eyes.

I am no longer in the bookstore. I follow dignity down the stairs. She glides. Her feet don’t touch wood. My bare feet feel the hard, slick wood as I move behind her. When she reaches the bottom, she turns and goes into a magnificent room, filled with ancient books.

The room is dark but  graceful – rich cherry wood, a piano covered in books.   Maps adorn the walls – yellow and crisp and ready to fall into pieces. I see a large golden globe in the centre of the library and a statue of a famous man.  The women turns and hands me a book. It’s very heavy, bound in leather and on the cover a map with river indentations and rising mountains. Both are cold to touch.

I take the book and walk out of the room. I go up the stairs and I walk until I’m back in the bookstore. I know exactly where the book goes. I put it on a shelf. The book glows golden. Anyone who enters will see the book and they will know.

Robert Alexander Montgomery

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I woke up this morning and I couldn’t get Robert Alexander Montgomery out of my head. I don’t know how he got there, but he did. Rob as we called him was a great friend I worked with at large hotel, many, many years ago. My first real job after high school. Rob took me under his wing. The dude always wore a three-piece to work and he was only eighteen. He taught me how to dress and act in a business environment.

We only spent a couple of years hanging out, driving around in his metallic green Olds 442 and man the beast flew like snot. On our days off we’d travel down to his parent’s cabin, at a lake an hour or two out of town. We’d hang or go water skiing. One time we hung out with a very famous folk group who were playing at the hotel. I introduced them to my parents who were fans. Got me in high esteem. My son hanging with a nearly defunct folk group.

Rob and I lost contact. However, one day I got a call from a mutual friend who told me he died in a freakish accident. He was racing from one end of a restaurant to the other with a tray held high; he slipped, fell through a glass window and hit the ground fifteen metres below. He didn’t stand a chance. I thought the phone call was a joke and never believed it until woke up with Robert Alexander Montgomery in my head forty-four years later. I did the research.

The first information I found was on Ancestry: Robert Alexander Montgomery born 23 Jul 1959,  passed away on 14 Apr 1979 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.  I had to dig more. I went to a newspaper database and found the very sad article in the Edmonton Journal.  Dead at nineteen. Racing without shoes. Wow, it’s true.

It was nineteen-seventy-nine. How would I know the truth? There wasn’t an internet or social media I could check back then. No way to confirm anything. You either believed someone or you didn’t. Information came from newspapers, TV or radio and if you didn’t catch the story on the day it happened, there’d be no way of finding out the truth unless you went to a library (in those days I had no idea what was in a library besides shhhhhh). I let it slide, thinking it can’t be true (maybe I just didn’t want to believe).

Then I was thinking.  A simple Google search  of my friend’s horrific death brought up nothing.  Has Robert Alexander Montgomery faded into nothing? Is his memory gone except in the eyes of his family?  If you can’t Google someone, does that mean they don’t exist. Do we discard pre-Google death unless it’s something so horrific it’s burned into a thousand minds?

Hopefully,  if I put this article out there Robert Alexander Montgomery moves into this century and Rob is not forgotten. Happy Birthday Pal.

Lest We Forget

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I woke up this morning, looked out the window to silence and cold. Where are the school buses and the people going to work? And then I slapped myself in the head. How could I?

 I pulled a cup of warm java to my lips and read about a dude getting gunned down in the street, “bullets riddled his back and he fell into the street.”  A little too harsh first thing in the morning, so let’s read something else.  I open my other book and was faced with a dude jumping off a cliff in alcohol induced frivolity. Divers found his body stuck in three feet of mud.  The idea of death brought me to  soldiers sitting in stinking,  wet and cold mud trenches. Then to other heroes blowing on their fingers to keep the cold off as they sat in a frozen fox hole surrounded by newly fallen snow. Warm fingers equal  warm triggers.  And the fear. Not knowing if today was your last day on earth.

The reading passages weren’t  a coincidence. Someone was knocking on my dull brain reminding me of the  many men  who died for our democracy, for our freedom. Deaths that allow me to sit in a comfortable chair, sip a warm beverage and read whatever I like.  I was walking with my niece  in the mall a few days ago. I bought a poppy from a vet and put money into his bucket. An action I should’ve done weeks ago.  As we walked away,  she asked, “Why did you give him money? It’s not like anyone cares.” Ok, so after the shock,  I picked my jaw up off the floor and said, “How’s your German? Because no victory in the war and you’re speaking German. And the colour of your eyes? Ah, the work camp for you.”

I’m also a bit worried because this year I kept forgetting. In the past, this memorable day was an occasion  – go to a service, walk around the row of crosses. (I just looked at my watch and missed the 11/11/11.  I’ll get the last 11 – 11 minutes. I stop.   A moment of silence, just in time.)  This year the occasion nearly slipped by. It took me a few minutes in this morning to remember it was Remembrance Day. It took me so long to get my poppy on, just a few days ago. In fact, yesterday, when I walked to my car I saw my poppy had fallen off. It lay in the snow almost buried. Again, not a coincidence.

Yes, I almost forgot it was Remembrance Day, leading me to another thought. My mother-in-law is ninety-three years old. She was a teenager during the Nazi occupation of Belgium. Using her age as a guide, how many World War Two vets are left?  With my blank out memory and my young niece’s who cares attitude, how long will it be before the Wars and the men who died for freedom are forgotten. It’ll be a very sad day when  “Lest we Forget” becomes a reality.