Field Trip to Philly

Last week I had my last visit to the hospital for three months.  It was just time for a scan to make sure my radioactive self was getting back to normal.  Mr. Lime, Isaac, and I decided to make a day of it since the appointment was early in the morning and we had the rest of the day.  I took Boom-boom along.

Our first stop was at Reading Terminal Market for a bite to eat.  This place makes me all sorts of happy.  Where else will you find Amish families selling baked goods, preserves, and fresh meats across an aisle from a sushi chef?  There's obviously an abundance of Pennsylvania German foods but there's a wide variety of other ethnic cuisines available as well.  Organic produce, quality breads, and be still my heart, CHEESES!  There were multiple cheese stands but Mr. Lime and I fell in with the artisanal crew who let us sample several cheeses.  After weeks of no dairy I splurged on some very expensive and very delicious cheese as a way to celebrate the end of my treatment.  Excuse me a moment while I savor the memory.....mmmmmm....


My other way to celebrate was to go to the Mütter Museum in order to see a multitude of medical oddities.  During the course of my treatment it was discovered that my thyroid was quite unusual....like one of four in the last century unusual...so I thought going to see other medical weirdness would be an appropriately warped way to celebrate the end of treatment.  It's not set up as some sort of side show exploiting folks with afflictions but was established as a manner of augmenting and furthering the education of physicians.  I also thought Isaac, whose favorite subject is anatomy and physiology, could be lured to a family outing if he got to see jars of gangrenous limbs and preserved body parts.  We also beheld such wonders as an enlarged human colon which looked like it couldn't possibly fit in a creature smaller than an elephant, an ovarian cyst the size of two soccer balls, a 7'6" skeleton, and a vast collection of skulls.  There was also an interesting exhibit drawing correlations between possible origins of folk tales as related in Grimm's Fairy Tales and human deformities.  I quite enjoyed that part. The museum does not permit photography.  Those of you with more sensitive constitutions may thank me now.  Those of you interested should definitely make it a stop if you ever get to Philadelphia.



After the museum we still had time to wander because we had paid an exorbitant parking fee and I intended to get some degree of its value out of it.  We walked around the city with Boom-boom, much to Isaac's chagrin.  He hates when I have my camera because I make too many stops.  Mr. Lime has learned to accept it.  In fact, we noticed this reflection of one building in the surface of another at the same time and he wanted to make sure I didn't miss it.

 We made it to City Hall after several blocks of wandering.  I had to visit Billy Penn.  I wanted to take a picture of one of us shaking a fist here so I could say we CAN fight city hall but no volunteers were forth-coming.















Across from City Hall is a sculpture park with this work "Government of the People" by Jacques Lipchitz.  It's a messy business, not unlike the sausage-making in the market, eh?

Nearby is Love Park with the famous logo.

Across the way the road leads to the Art Museum, one of my favorite places.

Eventually we headed home passing the Pennsylvania Railroad.  Monopoly anyone?

Finally, one of the other things I adore about Philadelphia is the proximity of old to new.  I'd never want to see the beautiful old architecture completely demolished and removed but time does march on and new things come along.

As my life moves on from here I want to remember to keep the best parts of my old self and ways as I move on in what I am considering a new start with new chances and as I try to make the most of that.

Rockin' the Radioactivity (or A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Nuke)

I am officially quarantined as radioactive.  The good news it's only a couple of days and on Sunday I can both go out in public and eat with out restrictions.  I intend to have an eclair the size of my forearm and a perfectly made grilled cheese sandwich and hard pretzels....and...I digress.

In the meantime I still have a couple of days of exile through which to amuse myself.  I've been working on play lists of music which obviously include this for the classic rock lovers among us and this for those preferring more current tunes.  One friend called me Hot Blooded.  My cousin asked if I was now a Glow Worm.  Another friend offered Great Balls of Fire.  After being ushered to a room with what I presume was a lead lined container, watching a small vial be extracted from it by a gloved technician who then handed it to me to swallow the contents I returned to my family singing, "This little (radioactive) light of mine, I'm gonna let is shine."  I need some more suggestions from all of you.

Pondering music and some of my limitations and side effects, both potentially real and fun to imagine, has led to what I consider to be some good names for rock bands.  For my amusement and, I hope, yours I suggest the following:

Atomic Burp (I have this weird sensation in my throat and digestive system, not intolerable but I am kind of wishing I could just belch to relieve it.  TMI?  Sorry, you may prefer to skip ahead a bit if eructation is disturbing.)

Snot Rockets (We all know what they are but since my dose of nuclear materials I am told the most dangerous thing about me is anything my body secretes or excretes so my snot rockets would have a special potency.  You've been warned.  It's only going to get worse from here on out.)

Spit Glow (Unfortunately this sounds more like a sad 70s era soft rock group than anything I'd want to listen to.)

Nuclear Piss (I'm told my urine is what will be the most radioactive.)

Hot Vomit (I was told by the nuclear safety officer before being discharged that if I puked within 4 hours of receiving my dose I'd need to contact them so they could help decontaminate the area in which I hurl. Isn't that special?)


So, what are your thoughts as to music I ought to be playing or names of rock bands I could form?

Adventures in Low-Iodine Life (or Theo Take Me Away!)

As you know, the first night of the diet Calypso brought home forbidden desserts.  There have been other "fun" moments.

A few days later she brought me penne a la vodka.  Also forbidden due to the butter and cream involved, though I can have all the booze I want on this diet and may soon start drinking heavily.

I decided to keep busy by going through old magazines to get rid of.  May I just say Cooking Light is the new porn when on a restrictive diet.

The next morning I woke up in a cold sweat because I thought I'd sabotaged my treatment after dreaming of eating salty french fries topped with crumbled bacon followed by peaches covered with a very buttery streusel.  It was the yummiest nightmare I've ever had though.

Lest you think Calypso is the only family member hoping to be choked with dry matzo crackers (which are permissible to me) allow me to correct you.  During the planning stages of the menu I asked Mr. Lime and Isaac for dinner recipes they were hungry for in terms of trying to figure out whether or not they were recipes I could easily adapt.  After Mr. Lime suggested about a dozen things with dairy as the main component I asked him if he had been present during the extended instruction the doctor gave about this diet.  He admitted he had zoned out intentionally "because it was too complicated."

The tacos in question with hella good pico

Then Diana came home to visit for the weekend.  She and Isaac decided they wanted to go out to eat rather than stay home and partake in low iodine food....this after I gave them the last of the black bean tacos with pico de gallo I had made for dinner the night before...the tacos that took me ridiculous amounts of effort to prepare thus leaving me none for lunch the next day.  My darling children went to a restaurant where I could not hope to find something suitable to eat.  Then Diana came buzzing back into the house and asked for money out of MY wallet to finish paying their bill because Isaac took his wallet but not money and she had some cash but not enough and had left her debit card at home (how convenient).  Let me get this right, you're going to eat the last of the food I can safely eat, then go out to a place where I can't possibly eat, THEN ask for MY money to pay for part of it?  She nodded sheepishly.  You so owe me, kid.


This past weekend we had unexpected house guests.  They were dear friends from Trinidad we hadn't seen in many years so we welcomed the chance to see them even though the circumstances leading to their extended stay were, shall we say, less than optimal and the original hosts for them need to be flogged.  They brought along with them their own dietary restrictions in the form of a diabetic and a celiac patient.  Yes, I managed to cook tasty meals which met EVERYONE'S requirements...And then we had a 10 hour power outage so we went out to eat.  My dietary low point came when I sat with everyone at the restaurant as various table mates ate eggs, pancakes, and buttered toast.  My plate contained applesauce and fried potatoes with nothing but pepper because that's all the menu had that met my requirements.  Trust me, I read the entire menu.  NOTHING else would have been permissible.  It was depressing.

Now I've done a fair bit of complaining about food in this post but it's to set you up to understand my happiness over the one bit of dietary joy I have been able to indulge in during this period of frustration.  I mentioned before that I have found exactly one brand of chocolate bar I am allowed to enjoy because it contains no dairy and no soy lecithin.  Read your labels.  Soy lecithin is in every other freaking brand of chocolate I've looked at and I've looked at a LOT of chocolate.  Maybe there are some other brands out there but if so they aren't available in my area.

So I bought myself some bars of Theo chocolate to sustain myself for the weeks of deprivation while I prepare to nuke any remaining cancer cells and burn them into oblivion so cancer is a thing that I will hereafter refer to in the past tense.  I've had Theo before and it's yummy stuff.  I was also aware that it was non-GMO (because I don't need my chocolate to have some weird gene splicing going on and exposing me to other crazy health risks, cancer is quite enough, thanks), organic (ditto the previous comment), fair-trade (so I don't have to worry that some little kid in Africa was slaving away involuntarily rather than going to school so I can get my cacao fix), and as chocolate goes it's pretty low in sugar (so you can eat the dark varieties and tell yourself it's health food...trust me...I've read all sorts of studies about the benefits of dark chocolate).  It made me happy that an ethical and tasty product was still available during my dietary exile from the land of yum.  It made me happy enough that I left a comment on the company website telling them how much I appreciated this bit of joy their product allows me.

This is the part where they won me as a loyal customer for the rest of what I intend to be a long life.  Within a day I received separate emails from two different employees telling me how much they appreciated my message and how glad they were I was a satisfied customer.  They were personal notes which included the offer of some coupons to keep my stash supplied AND kind wishes for my well-being.   A few days later the coupons arrived, not with a form letter but with a nice old-fashioned, hand-written, personal letter. Check it out.  So Tiffany, Becca, and anyone else from Theo, if you're reading, thanks again for being an all around terrific company which provides a great product and treats its customers well.

For the sake of my friends and loyal readers here, who have seen a reference to a particular actor being covered in a particular confection innumerable times, I guess the next question is....do you guys have any pull with Hugh Jackman?  Could you convince him to show up at my house wearing some melted Theo? No?  Ok, well I'm off to savor a bit of 85% dark and some daydreams...