Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

[Expect multiple posts about this over the next days and weeks, but I'm going to put more than one thing in a post, rather than make a couple of dozen short posts.]

My mother's cause of death was metastatic lung cancer; she'd been short of breath for a while but kept insisting nothing was really wrong. Then she fainted on her way to see her doctor on April 14, and her carer and one of her good friends decided to take her to the emergency room instead.

I wish I'd traveled sooner, but last Wednesday Mom told me that I shouldn't come right away, but wait until she was home from the hospital to visit because hospitals are boring. At that point they knew it was cancer, but were talking in terms of weeks or months, and what treatments to consider. Saturday morning (4/19) my brother said we should get there as soon as possible, and we were on a red-eye flight to London that evening. By the time I got there, my mother was a lot weaker, and not up for much in the way of conversation, but she was happy to see me, Adrian, and Cattitude. On the 21st the palliative care team said we should think about whether to send her home or to hospice. Mom wanted to go home, but said that she wanted whichever would get her out of the hospital sooner. Tuesday they told us "24 hours" and that she was too sick to be taken home or to a hospice facility. She died at 2:30 Wednesday morning, with my brother and his partner Linza sitting with her.

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Sitting shiva is supposed to be people coming to comfort the mourners. That's part of what happened last night, and it was valuable, but Mom's stepson Ralph asked if Mark or I would be willing to sit on Sunday as well, for the same of my mother's friends from March of the Living (a Holocaust memorial that Mom had been participating in since 2012) could pay a call, and I didn't feel up to that. I wanted to be home, in my own bed, and have my friends comfort me, not listen to more people I've never met tell me how wonderful my mother was. The group had a memorial service for her Wednesday night in Cracow, which was before the funeral.

My mother referred to Holocaust education as her "third career"; she volunteered once to talk about her and her family's experience, and the next time they needed a speaker they asked her again, and she saw work that needed doing and put a lot of time and attention into it. [Put in a link to one of the online obituaries?]

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I'm leaning on Adrian for guidance on how some of this can/should work, given that this needs to work for me, her, and Cattitude. Formally, my brother and I are the mourners, but Cattitude and Adrian both love and miss my mother, and she loved them. (Apparently several people who heard her talk about the three of us said things like "Eve was very...open-minded," which is true but misses that my mother loved them both.)

Things were looking significantly worse this morning, so the three of us are going to London tonight on a red-eye.

I may not be reading much, or I may be spamming everyone's reading pages.

Apparently the reason I hadn't heard from either her or my brother yesterday is that she fainted, went to the emergency room instead of her doctor's office, and then waited hours to be seen.

A CT scan found lung cancer, in both lungs. They're still waiting to talk to an oncologist, and my brother is on his way to London now. The three of us will be going to London in a few days, possibly as soon as Thursday, or maybe Saturday. My brother has a long layover in Charlotte, and is going to spend part of it looking at airline tickets for us, possibly using my mother's frequent flier miles for one or more tickets.

I spent some time this morning looking up travel-related things that we may not need, but will do no harm, and wondering about Oyster cards is better than doomscrolling. I also called my doctor's office and asked whether there were limits on where the patient can be for a telemedicine appointment. The receptionist said she thought that technically, I have to be in Massachusetts; we agreed that I can call back if I need to postpone that.

My gut was bothering me earlier, which is almost certainly from anxiety, but still has me a little nervous about this trip. (It's been just over a week since I saw the GI doctor.)

The advice the GI doctor gave me on Monday seems to have done the job: my gut has been behaving since the visit, which is five days so far:

The doctor told me was to take the imodium (anti-diarrheal) twice a day whether or not I have symptoms, and start taking psyllium (metamucil). I was surprised, because psyllium is generally referred to a laxative; I suspect that's why Carmen didn't think of it. Assuming I'm still fine on Monday, I'll be sending her a MyChart message

I've taken one/day for five days, which seems to be enough. The package instructions are not to take it within two hours before or after other medication, because it can interfere with absorbtion. I'm already taking other medication on something resembling a schedule, which means this one has to be at or a little after 6 o'clock, unless I want to fiddle with the timing on something else. The schedule includes "right after I wake up" and "after breakfast." )

A couple of notes on Consider the Fork, by Bee Wilson, which I read a couple of weeks ago. This started as a belated reply to anne's comment, but I want to post it where other people might see it. (Apologies for any fuzziness, it's past my bedtime.)


I liked it. There's some overlap with the book I read a while ago about the history of refrigeration, but mostly the emphasis here is different. Despite the title, the author starts by talking about wooden spoons, and that they come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Having started there, the book ends by discussing some kitchen tools that are younger than most people realize, such as good vegetable peelers.

As acelightning2 alluded to, the Chinese approach, where food is either cut up into small pieces before cooking, or cooked and then cut up in the kitchen, means diners aren't holding anything pointier than a pair of chopsticks.

Something that stuck in my mind: one 19th-century home ice cream maker made ice cream in only a few minutes, faster than any of the ice cream makers you can buy today. A few of these machines still exist, but their owners aren't using them: it turns out that the zinc-lined bowl leaches toxic zinc into the ice cream.

For people living in the United States: Bona Fide Masks has sent out email saying they will not be raising the prices of the Powecom KN95 masks they import from China, and gave a discount code, SPRING25, good for 25% off through April 20th.

Separately, I just ordered a bunch of tea, because I expect the price to go up, and realized after placing the order that while we think of the Formosa oolong as Chinese tea (rather than Indian or Japanese), Formosa is another name for Taiwan, so those ridiculously high tariffs may not apply.

Adrian and I coincidentally both had appointments with new specialists today, a few hours apart and in the same building. So she came with me to my appointment with the gastroenterologist, and then I went with her to see a neurologist.

We were each pleased with our respective doctors.

The gastroenterologist agrees with Carmen that my current problems are probably functional, but she wants me to have a colonoscopy to rule out other possibilities. ( insurance companies, feh )

In the meantime, she told me to start taking Imodium (anti-diarrheal) twice a day, rather than waiting until I have symptoms; she noted that I've been using it almost every day (which is worse than it had been a month ago). I was tracking it to avoid exceeding the recommended daily dosage, but it's convenient to be able to answer "how often are you using that drug?" by handing the doctor my phone.

She also told me to start taking psyllium husk powder (Metamucil), which hadn't occurred to me because people talk about it as a laxative. I'm starting with one pill a day, and took the first dose this afternoon.

Also, while I was waiting to see Dr. Moore the pulmonology office called to say they need to reschedule my next appointment with Dr. Koster, because she'll be covering the emergency room on the day I was going to see her. So, a couple of weeks later, and the only available appointment was in the morning: 8:45 CT scan, followed by seeing the doctor.

I have achieved an appointment with a gastroenterologist! Apparently I called Mount Auburn at exactly the right time this morning: they had a cancellation, so I will be seeing someone Monday.

Consider the Fork: a history of how we cook and eat, by Bee Wilson

Somebody's Secrets, by L. J. Breedlove (sequel to Everybody Lies)

currently reading:

Nobody Cares, by L. J. Breedlove

Cattitude and I had pizza tonight, delivered by a new-to-us pizzeria, Pino's in Cleveland Circle.

I picked up a slice of pizza, folded it in half, took a bite, said that it was good, and added "this is the pizza of my people": tomato sauce, mozzarella, toppings (bacon and roast red peppers), on a (flour) crust thin enough to fold.

The sauce was a little too sweet, but we'll probably order from them again, the next time Cattitude and I want pizza and Adrian isn't home.

(It wasn't as good as the best New Haven pizza, but that's a high standard.)