Up & Down the Scale

 I lurched out of bed this morning in a frantic race to get to the toilet; my stomach had been unsettled all night. Straight to the shower for a thorough washup & there went today’s plans for any sort of ride - BTDT!

Probable causes: lapses in dietary judgment topped off by yesterday’s Braum’s cheeseburger. Doors seem to be closing off to me - Chick-Fil-A, Mickey D’s, now Braum’s. Of course it’s “good riddance”, all that fast food crap is no bueno… 

Z let V back home under the humanitarian flag of illness - staying out of it (of course) w/only one ironic comment about this being the “in sickness” part of his vows. Z called me Friday night to report that poor Adela (V’s grandma) had been hospitalized with a UTI & pneumonia. Like a good little drone**, I headed across town yesterday, planning to visit her in the hospital, only to find that she had been discharged! Thankfully, it was not very far out of the way so I just proceeded on to Andy & Adela’s house to deliver my flowers & fruit, & a small care pkg of brisket which P had smoked… I dropped by Z’s to deliver his last belated birthday gift: an AI art-replica book of our dear friend Charles; I thought it was something special. “The power of advertising”, I suppose.

** I consider Andy & Adela family members now, no matter how things turn out between Z & V. Adela called me last night to thank me kindly for the brisket; she said it was wonderful! (which it was, even though I could take no particular credit for that: you should’ve seen all the hopeful doggy eyes when P was carving it up, looking for scraps!)

Z expressed an interest in attending the Buddhist temple - I said I would be glad to accompany him, but I didn’t hear anything from him this morning. I made P a poached-eggs-on-toast Father’s Day brunch which he seem to appreciate. Thankfully my own GI tract seems to have settled down. I read Mayim Bialik’s miserable account of her experience with GLP-1’s & count myself lucky to be part of that black-box warning (medullary thyroid cancer). It brought back echoes of when I was misdiagnosed at age 25: part of me envisioned becoming an ethereal waif on chemotherapy. Yeah, thanks but I’d rather be alive! While diarrhea is one of the hallmarks of my disease, I blame my mishaps on dietary indiscretions & my own souvenir of childbirth, a third-degree perineal tear…

“Weeks after I took that single shot, I found myself frantically pulling off the 405—to my law-abiding son’s horror—to lock myself in a convenience store bathroom for an indeterminate amount of time. “