It's shameless self-promotion time. Well, promoting my husband, but if he's my better half then that would mean this is still self-promotion.
It's National Mobility Awareness Month, and to help promote a better understanding of mobility issues and solutions, the National Mobility Equipment Dealers Association is having a contest to celebrate Local Heroes and awarding mobility-adapted vehicles as grand prizes! I nominated my personal hero, my husband, and if you follow the link below you can read why he's my Local Hero, why I want to help lessen his load, and cast your daily vote to help make him a grand prize winner!
http://www.mobilityawarenessmonth.com/entrant/chris-carleton-olathe-ks/
Don't forget, you can vote once every 24 hours, so please return to his page and vote each day. Only the top 10% of entries by votes will get reviewed by the judging panel for a grand prize.
Today's episode of The Mobility-Challenged Gourmet features restaurant-quality Cheese Quesadillas with sour cream and fire-roasted tomato and corn salsa. Delicious!
For this tasty item I utilized a variety of mobility skills and tricks. It required some bending to get the griddle from the under-oven drawer, as well as some brief standing sessions gathering ingredients from the fridge. It's important during this stage to remember your energy efficiency priorities: make as few trips as possible, but never carry more than you can safely hold and still maintain your balance. Since the cheese and the tortilla packages were both fairly flat, I carried them together, then went back for the salsa and sour cream.
Next, I brought a fairly comfy office chair into the kitchen. I assembled and grilled the quesadillas sitting down - always remember safety when cooking! In front of a hot stove is not the place to be standing around and lose your balance, as there is nothing safe on that stove top for you to grab onto to steady yourself. Sometimes I stand for a moment to get the proper leverage to flip the tortilla or check the color it's getting, but always with the chair right behind me so that I can just sit if there's a problem, without having to grab or touch anything with my hands.
Presentation tip: a pizza cutting wheel will give you those beautifully clean quesadilla cuts without tearing up your tortilla or smearing cheese all over a knife. Nothing really sticks to the pizza wheel, and often all it needs after cutting quesadillas is a wipe down with a damp paper towel - saves on clean-up energy! Here's how the toasty tortillas looked before I dressed them in my favorite condiments:
Speaking of clean-up, that is certainly an aspect of cooking that can't be ignored. Now, I have a husband in my life who has generously offered to clean up the kitchen after any cooking attempts I feel well enough to accomplish, but if you're on your own you will want to budget your time and energy to allow for clean-up as well as cooking. Consider your total cleaning needs when you are planning your meal, and how best to achieve them. You might need to rest after eating, and return to the kitchen later in the day with refreshed energy to clean, and in some cases planning pain management in advance will help you get through both your cooking and your clean-up more comfortably.
I hope you've enjoyed these tips for disabled cooking, and that you will always find ways to safely push your horizons and experience the things you love to do in the way that's best-suited to your abilities. Happy cooking, and better yet, happy eating!
I'm not very good at waiting. This will come as no shock to those of you who know me personally, but for those who don't I must confess to not always being the model of patience and tranquility. Hubby and I like to claim that he has my share of patience, by way of excusing my lack and explaining his abundance. Right now I am stuck waiting for surgery to finally be rid of this extra large kidney stone.
Last week we saw the large stone specializing urologist, and were scheduled for extraction on Jan. 30, which seems so very far away. Especially since the ureter stent they placed to help drain the kidney affected by the stone causes a lot of bladder irritation and pain on evacuating. I've finished my course of aggressive antibiotics, so there's only the phenazopyridine to fight the discomfort. I'm diligently fighting off a cold, constantly hacking and coughing and blowing my nose so it can't settle into my chest. There's not much else I can do to try to be ready for surgery.
But there's plenty to help me pass the time in between. Like seeing my endocrinologist last week, and being thrilled to confirm that my blood sugars have been in great control, my A1c value decreased from the high sixes to 6.3, and getting permission to drop from four glucose checks a day to two. It's fantastic to get some good news for a change.
A trend we will hopefully continue Monday, when I see my oncologist for those all important blood tests, that will, I'm sure, continue to show NO signs of any dangerous changes to my tumor or the rest of my system. The lab will also be running some tests ordered by my endocrinologist to keep an eye on my somewhat questionable thyroid hormone levels. Let's hope that turns out to be a non-issue.
Meanwhile the kids are all doing excellent in school, all A's and B's, so we took them out to celebrate their report cards last night, and to spend some of their gift money on the toys of their choice. The weather took a break from sub-zero wind chills to make that a pleasant afternoon, and I never forget to be grateful that I can still go and do those types of things with my family. If I'm going to spend a couple more weeks waiting for surgery, at least they will be good weeks.
It's been a hectic end to 2013, what with this whole kidney business threatening to keep me hospitalized in late December and almost ruin yet another special day with my neverending medical crises. Fortunately, I got out in time for Christmas, and also had New Year's at home.
Now we are kicking off 2014 with our game faces on. Monday is my pre-surgical consult with a urologist specializing in very large stones, followed later that day by my pre-surgical anesthesia consult, so that everything will be in order for whatever date they set my kidney stone removal to be. Wednesday brings routine Endocrinology check-ups for both hubby and me, and the week after that is my six month Oncology follow-up with those all important lab draws to check for non-specific tumor markers and other traces of potential problems in my blood. Next up we'll need to schedule the entire family's eye exams that we're more than a year late for, and then see about finally getting us all in to visit the dentist again, two things that were allowed to lapse in the face of more urgent issues and lack of time and energy to get them done.
People are always making lots of resolutions this time of year, usually about their health - eating right, exercising more, losing the magic number of pounds they think will make them happy inside their skin. After seeing the way my oversized body has weathered the shitstorm of problems thrown at it the past three years, I'm inclined to not make any resolutions about my size anymore. Clearly my shape is not going to change much, and if it continues to survive every hurdle it faces, this body suits me just fine.
Nope, my resolutions have less to do with body changes and more to do with horizons and possibilities. I would like to again be able to handle car travel and hotel stays, enabling much-needed trips to California to visit my hometown and family. I'd like to cautiously invest a little money in small improvements to this house, so that we can once again attempt to sell it and relocate to a single-story, handicap-friendly home. I'd like to see my family visit more of the fun and educational attractions our city has to offer, more often, even if outings with my big power chair are physically exhausting and tedious to plan. The memories are worth it.
I hope you set your sights on interesting horizons in 2014, and that the coming year brings your goals and dreams within reach. Never settle for less than your best, and always strive to surround yourself with people who uplift you, not tear you down. And may we all find ourselves healthy, satisfied, and still full of hope once again when this year is done.
I have a very contentious relationship with my heart. It likes to do weird, fluttery things once in a while, but never when I have someone listening to hear them. It likes to skip a beat sometimes, it seems to me, but never when I'm laying down connected to ECG sensors. It likes to go faster than necessary, periodically, leaving me wondering where the fire is.
When I developed a blood vessel tumor in my spine, my heart liked to beat nice and hard there, a throbbing reminder of the constant pain. This is your heartbeat. This is your heartbeat from inside the tumor that wants to cripple and kill you.
Lately, with bladder and kidney infections complicating an enormous 10mm kidney stone that nearly made my whole system septic, I've had some really terrible headaches. Headaches where my heartbeat pounds away in the center of my frontal cortex. Where every throbbing, eye-clenching, forehead-cradling beat screams an alarm in my soul. Thudding, drumbeat pain. Feeling my heartbeat from the inside of my body, this time from inside my brain, just like how I feel it from inside the tumor in my back.
Just
Like
The
Tumor
Now you begin to understand the terror in our eyes when these headaches hit and my husband and I look at each other, and do not say what is not allowed to be. I'm scared and cry, and he holds me, and knows my fear. I just want to get better. I just want to get past this freak show and move on. I just want to keep going.
The headaches seem to improve as the infections are treated with antibiotics. We hope they go away soon. Maybe then we won't worry.
Maybe.
