The news I never, ever wanted to hear

It has taken me eight days, but now I'm ready to say that my mother does have Pancreatic Cancer.  I started a caring bridge blog  for her, for those of you who would like to leave positive, encouraging messages. 

My father will be checking my mother into the Cancer Treatment Center of America in Newnan, Georgia on the 24th.  That was the first opening they had.  We feel like she has the best chance there.

I wasn't going to share the blog for another week or two, when we knew a little more...i.e. had a stage and specific type of cancer.  Right now we are almost sure it is Adenocarcinoma of the Pancreas, but we're still awaiting biopsy results from the lab.  But I talked to my mother today and she was down, and I decided that she needs lots of love and support right now.  She needs all the encouragement and well wishes we can give her. 

My emotions have been all over the place for the past week.  I feel very guilty that my mother has been taking care of me all this time, when I should have been taking care of her and taking HER to the doctor. 

And I won't even get into the anger and frustration we feel over why the stupid doctor didn't take the tumor out of her pancreas when he found in two years ago, instead of saying it wasn't cancer and not even monitoring it in any way, and leaving her to suffer for two years, and leaving it to grow and wrap around her mesenteric vein and into her liver.  I'll leave that anger and hatred and bitterness for another day.  Today I will be positive and encouraging, because that is what she needs right now.

Happy Mother's Day to Dianne Brown Enslen...the prettiest, sweetest mother and grandmother in all the world.  We love you, Mama!

''God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.'' - Rudyard Kipling

My mother and father are in a hospital room at UAB right now, waiting for the doctor to come in and tell them whether or not my mother has Pancreatic Cancer.  It's frustrating, but all we can do is wait...

I was gonna just write about artificial dyes and such in food, but then I went off on a tangent...

I just started reading a new book called What's Eating Your Kids? by Kelly Dorman.  I'm still in the foreword, but already I have found a quote that is profound to me...probably because it is written by a doctor, and in my experience, I have found it's very rare to hear a doctor offer up a mea culpa for themself or for other doctors in general.  Dr. Richard E. Layton says, "Doctors...are better at treating disease than looking for its underlying cause...we're well trained in the science-but not the art-of medicine.  In my opinion, when a medical problem is subjective and there are no lab tests to confirm a diagnosis, many patients receive substandard care."  Amen to that!  That has definitely been the case with me and my mother...and I would say that even after we got lab results confirming our diagnoses, we received substandard care.

My sister-in-law recommended this book.  She and I have discussed how our children have a reaction to artificial dyes in food.  I had never noticed it until a few years ago when I took my grandmother, Skyler, and Sibley to the mall in Montgomery.  We went to my favorite place for a sweet treat, The Cookie Company.  Sibley, who was three or four at the time, picked out a frosted cookie that had lots of different color frosting.  A few minutes after she ate it, she started pitching fits here, there, and everywhere.  I couldn't figure out why, but then my grandmother told me it was the dye in the frosting.  She said she always felt funny and wierd after eating anything with artificial red dye, and that she had noticed the same thing in her children and grandchildren.

After that I started paying attention and noticed that my Grandmama was absolutely right.  I mentioned it to Jenny and she noticed the same thing in Lucas. 

Growing up in my family, our food was never limited in any way.  We never went hungry, we never were told we couldn't eat any more of a certain thing, we were never forbidden to eat sweets, and we were never forbidden to add butter, salt, or sugar to anything.  We have sweet tooths and there were always cakes and donuts around the kitchen.  We usually had birthday cake for breakfast, mostly because breakfast was the one time during the day that we were all together at home.  And I think it was good that we were allowed to eat whatever we wanted, because I have noticed that children of parents who are very strict about their child's diet will often times rebel as soon as they are out of their parent's sight. At a church breakfast a couple of years ago there was one such mother, and the second she left her sons ran to the donut table and started scarfing them down as quickly as they could.

But we also ate a lot of healthy things at our house.  And we were all pretty healthy and fit, so there was really never a need for my parents to modify our diets.  People don't realize that a lot of Southern cooking is very healthy.  Southern food gets a bad rap, I've noticed.  People have a very tiny sliver of a sampling of Southern cuisine and they generalize and think all Southern food is prepared in the same way. 

Well, I am here to tell you that it isn't!  Southern food is as large and varied as the Southern people themselves.  Consider all the different words, accents, habits, architectural styles, religions, and ethnic backgrounds that exist within the Southern culture, all the way from Virginia to Missouri to East Texas.  I think it is important not to generalize about Southern people...accent-wise, culture-wise, and most certainly food-wise.

For one thing, we eat lots and lots of fresh fruits and vegetables.  In fact, I think we eat more fresh fruits and vegetables than anywhere else in the United States, or at least we used to when more Southerners had gardens to rely on.  Lots of summer nights for supper, we will have just garden vegetables and no meat. 

The growing season in the South is very long, so fresh fruits and vegetables are abundant almost year round, depending on where you are exactly.  The Southern soil is so rich and it makes our food taste so much better.  You can tell just by looking at tomatoes in the grocery store at home which ones are Southern grown or not.  They are darker, because our soil is so dark and full of decomposing plants and animals because, again, plant and animal life is so much more abundant in the South due to the climate and the abundance of water. 

I have traveled a good deal in my life, all over the United States, and I can honestly say that I have never tasted a peach as good as an Alabama peach out of my parent's old peach orchard, or had a grape as full-flavored as a muscadine off our family vine, or had a berry as rich and tangy as the wild blackberries that grow on our family land.  (When my daddy would find a wild blackberry patch, we wouldn't see him for days unless he was handing us a bucket and pressing us into picking service.) 

And, I know this will offend some of my Western friends, but the Arizona pecans are a joke.  The pecan trees are small, dark, and scraggly, and the pecans thereof are too.  And the water in the West is terrible.  I know it isn't yall's fault, but it is hard on everything...hard on food, drinks, plants, dishes, my hair, and definitely my skin!

Another thing about the Southern traditional family meal is that it often includes fresh fish or wild caught game.  Southerners love to fish and hunt, and we prepare our own meat, or at least we used to -  more than we do now.  When my daddy was a child, he would sometimes go out with his gun, kill a squirrel, clean it, and take it in for my grandparents to cook for family dinner. 

Often times, Southern people have their own chickens, therefore they have fresh eggs and they aren't afraid to ring a chicken's neck, pluck it, and cook it up for a special meal.  (And can I just say here that while it is trendy to have chickens these days, we Southerners raised chickens when it wasn't cool.  Okay?)  As I type this, I am remembering my late grandfather tell me one day, "I just made Chicken n' Dumplins and guess where I got the chicken!".  (I didn't have to guess because he had made it clear that he didn't like our free range chickens free ranging in his yard.)  Anyway, in addition to chickens, we usually raise our own hogs and often our own cattle too. 

Wild game, like duck, deer, dove, quail, and turkeys, are abundant, and one of them is always in season.  In addition, in the Deep South, there is an alligator season in most states.  And in the more isolated areas, such as in the hollers of the Blue Ridge Mountains or the brackish swamps of Southern Louisiana, it is not uncommon to have possum or turtle for a meal.

But back to the fish.  Aside from all the fresh fish in the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean, and the South's countless rivers, lakes and streams, Southern people will often dig a hole to make their own fish pond.  (Yes, it rains enough there that if you dig any kind of hole, it will quickly fill up with water all on its own.)  And I don't mean your run of the mill koi pond.  I mean a big pond, like half an acre big.  And we stock our ponds with our favorite fish...usually catfish, as well as other varieties.  Then the ponds also attract large frog populations, which means frog legs are readily available for those who aren't afraid to gig frogs.  Personally, I've never tried frog legs, but my father used to go frog gigging and he will tell you in a heartbeat that frog legs are delicious!

While I'm on the subject, I just have to mention one more thing that will probably make my Western friends and family members mad...Sorry "you guys."  But everyday all around me in Arizona, and in Utah and Nevada when I lived in those states, I see animals living in deplorable conditions.  I see horses, cows, and sheep that are couped up in 10x10 pens, with no shade to lie under when the beating sun is on their backs and the temperature is upwards of 110 degrees.  They have no water to drink, no grass to eat, and their fur is nasty from lying in the dirt and in their own filth all the time. I often saw, in the areas outside of Las Vegas, many cows huddled together, vying for the shade of a billboard - the only shade in their enclosure.

And don't even get me started on the dairies in Arizona. The cattle live in overcrowded dirt pens, and it is clear that these pens are unsanitary, because they stink to high heaven! And they don't stink like Alfalfa or oats.  They stink like death and decay. I had never known a dairy to stink until I moved out West.  I've been to many dairies in Alabama, and none of them stank. 

I understand that a plethora of wild trees, grasses, and groundcovers don't grow naturally here in the desert like they do in the South, and that the Bureau of Land Management owns so much property in the West that private lots and tracts of land are usually tiny compared to those of the South, but there is no excuse for subjecting animals to those conditions.  If you can't provide proper room, shade, food, and water, then you shouldn't own animals!

So, by now, you have probably gotten the point that Southern people eat a wide variety of food, most of it fresh, or at least we used to.  Sadly, I've noticed the more "developed" we get, the less fresh food we eat.  There seems more and more to be a stigma attached to growing your own food, like buying store-bought food is better for you, when in fact just the opposite is true.

I guess people associate growing their own food with maybe the "country" or "backwoods" lifestyles of their grandparents, because we have let the rest of the nation give us a complex about being "country" or, God forbid, even "redneck."  To a certain extent, all of us Southerners are self-conscious, whether we realize it or not, and all of us are more reliant on store-bought food than we used to be.  I mean, just look at how many things I told you in the past few paragraphs that my father did, but that I never have, like frog-gigging or killing a squirrel and bringing it home for family supper.  But I don't want us to forget our roots, and I want those of us who have never left the South to know that we have it good there.  It makes me sad to see old family farms disappear and give way to subdivisions.

I don't mean to say that all Southern food is healthy.  We do fry a lot of our food and we do love our buttermilk biscuits, pies, cakes, peanut brittle, and praline pecans. Also, one bad thing about the conditions in the South is that while such conditions ensure an abundant variety of plants and animals, those conditions also ensure a large and diverse insect population.

Insect populations are good and are part of the natural balance, and how would we Southerners go to sleep in the summertime if not for the lullaby duet of the frogs and crickets, but it is hard to accept the bugs so much when a plague of boll weevils descends down on a crop, or on a more recent, personal level, a population of aphids takes up residence in one's garden.  And so most Southern farms, large or small, have to rely on some kind of pest control.  Crop duster pilots in the South usually make a pretty good living.  And in the South, just as in the rest of the country now, I think pesticides as well as herbicides are over used.  What is the answer to this problem?  I don't exactly know.  There are some "natural" ways to curb pests and weeds, but those don't always work.

So this brings me back to my original intent for this post, which is to say that often times there are "bad" ingredients in our foods.  By "bad" I mean man-made artificial things like pesticides, preservatives, and artificial sweeteners and dyes, that can harm our bodies.  Personally, I can't eat any artificial sweeteners.  They're bad for everybody, but for me they almost instantly cause peptic ulcers, and they cause horrible stomach pains and intestinal cramps...like after one serving.  And I want to make an effort to eat healthier, and especially to feed my family healthier. 

What finally pushed me over the brink was the other morning when Sadie was the sweetest, smartest child in Walgreens.  We had such a nice time.  We were waiting for one of my prescriptions, and we walked around and she would see something interesting, check it out, ask me questions about it, and move on to the next thing.  Then I bought us some junk food (Mountain Dew and a candy bar) and by the time we got home, I swear that child had regressed a year.  She refused to "use her words" or even physically support herself, and instead whined and made me carry or hold her.  I had had enough and ordered the book.

Another thing about eating healthier is that it would help me with my autoimmune issues.  I talked to my sister-in-law, who has Lupus, the other day and she is doing a cleanse and giving up dairy and gluten.  I do wish I had her will power, but I don't.  I've almost taken all dairy out of my diet though, and I have noticed a difference in my joint pain.  I don't think that dairy is a bad thing and I LOVE dairy products, so this is pretty hard for me.  But for people with severe autoimmune diseases like mine, like Lupus, and like Multiple Sclerosis, dairy is hard for our body to accept and it makes our symptoms more severe. 

Skyler is so intolerant to dairy.  It instantly makes her so sick.  It is like poison to her.  (Unfortunately, before I had her, I was also lactose intolerant, so I see her lactose intolerance and frequent intestinal and stomach pains as a symptom of my disease in her.  And it is getting worse instead of better.)

Next I'm going to try to eliminate gluten, which will also be hard because gluten is in everything and gluten is delicious!  I LOVE carbs!  But, like dairy, gluten can be hard on our bodies too.  I know both dairy and gluten can really negatively affect people with autoimmune diseases.  I think Skyler is also gluten intolerant to a certain degree, although not near as much as she is lactose intolerant.  I even had her tested for Celiac Disease, but they said it was negative.  Melissa is teaching me, though, that Skyler could still be gluten intolerant to a certain degree and have a negative Celiac Disease test result.  So we will just experiment and see if we do better without the gluten.  It can't hurt us, right?

And last but not least, I am ashamed to say that I am SO addicted to sugar!  I've always had a sweet tooth and especially a weakness for chocolate, which I now think is related to my chronic Mycrocytic Anemia.  At any rate, part of it is that I am so tired and weak all the time now too.  My foot surgeries and laying around for three months really didn't help things. 

I so badly wanted to get into shape for Alabama and the beach and my girls this summer, but I haven't been able to at all.  I know I have legitimate excuses, but that doesn't make me feel any better about myself in a bathing suit.  I really do WANT to exercise, but I just physically CAN'T do it!  I try.  I get jealous of people who can.  I used to love to walk and do yoga and pilates and occasionally try to jog, but these days I can literally hardly make it up the stairs.  By the time I get to the top, I am completely out of breath.

I hate feeling like this.  I want to feel good and have energy again.  I know I will never be well.  I know my disease is progressive and I can steadily see it getting worse, but if eating and drinking healthier gives me any relief at all, then I think it will be worth it.  And it can't hurt if it benefits my family and makes them healthier in the process.

And, can I just say that Bryant has turned over a new leaf - healthwise - all on his own, I might add.  They added a nice gym to his office building, and he has been working out every day except for Sunday for the past few weeks now.  And he's been eating better and he's dang near stopped drinking soda too.  I'm so proud of him.  He looks better and feels better.

P.S.  I feel like I was too rough on Arizona, and maybe Utah and Nevada too.  Don't get me wrong.  I love Arizona, and a little less Utah and Nevada, but I like them too.  Arizona is a beautiful state and the people here are very nice.  It's just different from what I grew up around.  Everything's different...the people, the food, the flora, the fauna, etc.  But I do like it here!  I really do.  There are lots of great things about Arizona, and that's why my family and I stay here.  So please don't be offended or get your feelings hurt, my dear Arizona friends, and my native Arizonan husband. :-)

Yesterday I went to the Pain Management Doctor and got a Splanchnic (Spleenic) Nerve Block.  I can't tell you how excited about this I was, as my spleen has literally hurt me everyday for the past 5.5 years.  Last week I went and got a Trigeminal Nerve Block on the left side of my face and so far it has been great!  Next week I will get a Trigeminal Nerve Block on the right side of my face.

Last week when I went in, I had them give me anesthesia, but it was hardly anything and it hurt so bad!  As you can imagine, huge needles stuck deep into your face are very painful.  So I was not looking forward to huge needles in my spine for my nerve block yesterday, but I discussed it with the nurse anesthetist when we saw each other and boy did he give me enough this time!  He gave me more than enough, but I won't complain.  More than enough was way better than not enough.  Whoa!  I was high!  I don't remember much about the procedure or even getting dressed afterwards.

It turned out to be such a blessing too because I had to go to the dentist after my nerve block yesterday to get two crowns.  I'm really sick of having my mouth worked on.  I'm sick of spending hours on end in the dentist's and/or endodontist's chair.  I'm sick of the pain.  I'm sick of the tooth pain and I'm sick of all of the painful root canals I have to endure on what seems like a monthly basis now.  So having the extra Demerol in my system turned out to be a great thing becuase it relaxed me for the dentist appointment, and of course it helped with the pain too.

Then last night I got the strangest sensation.  My neck and arm started hurting, just like they always do when my spleen swells, but this time my spleen wasn't hurting.  And my spleen wasn't hurting this morning either, so apparantly it worked!

Happy 11th birthday, Sibley!

We love you so much!

Yesterday we had a fun family day for Sibley's birthday.  We checked the girls out early and went to my appointments.  Then we looked at new trucks and dreamed about buying one.  After that, we went to Carrabba's and had dinner.  After supper, we went home and I gave Sibley make-up tips and such, with the new make-up she got from Skyler for her birthday.  Sadie got her a nice beach towel that she had said she liked at Walmart.  Bryant and I got her a camera, but we felt bad when she opened it and it wasn't the one she wanted.  So I ordered the one she wanted from Walmart.com and sprung for 1 day shipping so that she will get it today and we will just take the other one back to Target.