The Importance of a Great Diet Dr. Pepper

Help!  

Me as the Town Crazy Cat Lady
surprising Lisa at work on Halloween

 So. If you or a loved one is going through any type of terminal illness currently, you've probably already realized how overwhelming this all can be. My advice to you? Take a break. Ask for help. Scream for help if you need to get someone's attention. People are not mind-readers. If you don't ask, how are they supposed to know? Sometimes people have family they can rely on and others have friends. Relying on them too often can make the patient and primary caregiver feel like they're being a burden. Nobody likes to feel like a burden. The best thing you can do is start researching. Start making phone calls and asking questions. Don't worry about "bothering" people. This is a life, not a recommendation for a good restaurant. They won't mind. Just do it already.
I've heard people say that once a hospice organization is called in that the patient gives up or just passes very quickly after that. According to my friend Lisa who works for hospice in another county, that's the perception because people wait so late to ask for hospice care. She told me that studies have shown that the earlier hospice is called, the longer a patient usually lives and with a higher quality of life. Hospice isn't just a volunteer who comes to sit with the patient for an hour or two a week. It's a whole team of nurses, social workers, and chaplains as well as countless people we'll probably never meet, all working to keep the patient happy, comfortable and with any and every need met 24/7. One phone call is all we would have to make if we needed anything. At that point, the team would go into action to take care of whatever or contact whomever we needed. So if you're a caregiver, don't wait until you're ready to have a nervous breakdown yourself to ask for help. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength. It's knowing that you can't possibly do it all and that Google maybe isn't your best resource for things like this. (No offense, Google. You know I love you.) They called a local hospice about two weeks ago and I just can't tell you the difference it's already made in all of our lives, not just Judy's.

Still, Have Fun   

Judy and I in @1982

In case you missed it, Unk & Judy have always been very fun-loving people. They've traveled the world and made friends every step of the way. Many they've lost touch with over the years but all remain treasured memories that they often talk about to this day. Reminiscing is very important, especially if there are good memories. Fun, however, is absolutely essential. 

Last weekend, I decided that owning one pair of Spring pajamas just wasn't enough. I had recently purchased them after deciding that my holey tee shirts and sleep shorts just weren't appropriate for my weekend jaunts to their house. I liked the set I had recently bought so I headed back to buy another set, maybe in a larger size since mine seemed to have shrunk in the dryer just a little. I got back to their house and paraded through the living room where Judy was sitting on the couch and Unk in his chair, me doing my worst catwalk modeling in my new PJs and singing the "Miss America" theme song to try to take their minds off of illness for a few seconds. They smiled indulgently and remarked that they really liked them in pink, a little like you would humor a 4-year-old showing you the flower he just picked. I then sat down in the big leather chair in the middle of the room to talk with Judy while I drank my perfect, slightly frozen bottle of diet Dr. Pepper and she ate a snack. (No comments about the evils of sodas, please. I'm allergic to coffee. You do the math.) I was absentmindedly watching the heavy traffic pass by their house (they live on one of the busiest roads in town) and admiring the daffodils that were already appearing in their front yard. When she finished eating, she handed me her beautiful china plate to take to the kitchen. I stood up with her plate in one hand and my diet Dr. Pepper in the other and turned to walk into the kitchen. That's when it happened. Just as I passed Unk's chair, my pajama bottoms slipped right to the floor. Judy and I both burst out laughing as I duck-walked the rest of the way past Unk and into the kitchen, sat the plate and soda on the kitchen table and pulled up my pants. As I turned around, red-faced with tears of laughter starting, I noticed it. The front door had been completely open for the whole show! We laughed harder at that and then even harder still at Unk sitting there, face nose to screen with his iPad like a blind man trying to watch the moon landing, the perfect gentleman, not even letting on that he knew anything out of the ordinary had just happened. She and I were howling. Someone asked me, "Why didn't you drop something and grab your pants??" I replied, "Because I wasn't about to break her china and you just don't waste a perfectly iced diet Dr. Pepper." 

Today's Recipe 

The Perfectly Iced Diet Dr. Pepper:

The key to my heart is not flowers.
 It's a bouquet of diet Dr. Pepper.
Don't judge me.

• One 16.9 ounce diet Dr. Pepper

1. Crack the seal on that bottle of deliciousness
2. Drink 10%
3. Screw the top back on securely and place in freezer
4. Leave it for about 20-30 minutes, depending on your freezer temperature and longer if the bottle wasn't already in the refrigerator
5. Three hours later when you finally remember it, go take it out of the freezer and let it thaw. It'll happen. Believe me.

• Step number 2 is vitally important. The most important thing I remember from Mrs. Abernathy's 11th-grade chemistry class is that water expands about 9% when it freezes. Sorry Ms. Ab, but that's really what I consider the most important information you ever gave me. I use that every single day. 

Meet Unk & Judy

Unk, Scooby Doo & Judy  

Judy

Growing old is a privilege not granted to everyone. As I get older, the term, "old" has become relative. At 10, I thought 25 was old. Now that I'm 50, 70 doesn't seem all that old at all. That being said, I have a set of friends that I've known since I was 12. We met at the beach where we both had mobile homes in an oceanfront mobile home park in Emerald Isle, NC.  It was one of those places where the middle class could afford to own a weekend getaway spot without paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for their own cottage. "The trailer," as we called it was big and comfortable. It was 70 ft of home away from home getaway happiness, ocean breezes, and fresh seafood dinners.

After the 2 hour drive every Friday after my mom got off of work, the first thing I did was to check to see which of my friends were down for the weekend. My first stop was always Unk & Judy's. Although they were older than us and married, they had no kids of their own and always acted glad to see us. Unk seemed to us a big teenager himself, always willing to hang out on the beach or go swimming with any of us that asked him. While our mothers sunbathed, fished or read their books on the couch or sundeck, we were off swimming or at the pier house playing Foosball or feeding quarters to the jukebox. We weren't happy unless Foreigner or Journey was blaring. It was a wonderful way to grow up.

Eventually, we aged and life happened. The mobile home park was sold and demolished after a couple of hurricanes took out the pier. The last time I saw Unk & Judy was at the shower for my 2nd baby. That baby will be 21 in May. I can still picture Judy at that shower, stretched out on the couch having just been to a doctor's appointment at Duke to have her heart checkup. Although I knew there were issues with her heart, I was too overwhelmed with my own life to do more than add her to my list of people to worry about at night.

Fast forward to almost 20 years later. Thanks to the magic of Facebook, Unk & Judy and I have reconnected. I've lived in 4 other cities in 2 different states since I last saw them. The husband is now an ex and the kids are in college. The parents are gone and I'm trying to start over back in my old hometown, finally getting to plot my own path in life, broke but finally happy. That was around two years ago.

Divine Intervention

Some things just seem to be divine intervention. Ever had something work out that you think is just too perfect to be a coincidence? Through a few Messenger conversations, I learned that Judy's heart problems have become more critical. She's now had to start severely restricting her salt intake. Besides all of the morning weight checks, blood sugar checks and keeping up with all the medications she has to take, now there's this added diet focus. A type 2 diabetic for years, she's accustomed to carb counting but being insulin-dependent, she could eat normally albeit in moderation. Ever noticed how much salt is in your food? It's a LOT. FDA guidelines for middle-aged and older adults suggest just 1,500 mg of sodium a day. I checked the ham biscuit at a popular fast food place nearby: 2,222 mg of salt in one country ham biscuit. Try keeping up with how much you get in one day. In one meal. The average person would be shocked. They wouldn't change anything but they'd be shocked nonetheless. Judy doesn't have that luxury. A few scant pounds of fluid retention could be life and death at this point.

I mentioned divine intervention because here's my dear friend trying to deal with her heart condition, her diabetes, and some pretty tough diet stuff and I suddenly come back into the picture. I've been a type 1 diabetic since I was 12, the same Summer I met Unk & Judy. I've had more visits with dietitians than anyone else she knows. To top that? I just happen to have a job with a huge company in their Universities division, feeding college students at a local college. My job is a combination of marketing, customer service, and administration. I've spent hours perusing the company database of recipes, mostly looking for new menu items to feature to ensure that the students don't get bored with the same dishes and trying to promote our healthier menu options. My company's healthy line has less fat, salt, carbs... you get the idea. They had some very talented and famous chefs come up with these healthy but delicious meals. These aren't rice cakes and cottage cheese diet foods. When we've featured these items at our Chef's Table, the line has wrapped around the station to get seconds. No, this isn't going to turn into a commercial for my company but you will see several recipes from that line. Eight or nine hundred hungry college students a day can't be wrong. Most of our students have pretty sophisticated palates. If it's not tasty, they're not eating it.

Trial & Error

I'm not a doctor or a nutritionist but I've known many excellent ones. My parents made sure of that from the beginning. I can't imagine having to do this and I'm certainly not going to let one of my friends feel their way through this when I know I can help. So, I've rolled up my sleeves and have gotten to work. Unk is there for her but as he's in perfect health, he can't quite empathize like I can. So every weekend I make the 40-minute drive to their house to do the grocery shopping and cook as many dishes as I can fit into the weekend.  We spend time discussing menu choices and insulin adjustments between conversations about old times. We've had some missteps and have had to make some adjustments but we're getting there, slowly but surely. Judy is hard on herself when she forgets something important but I try to remind her that none of us are perfect and we have to chalk mistakes up to our learning curve and move forward, better armed than before. We began with cutting out every grain of salt possible. If a recipe calls for it, we simply omit it. I spend ages in the grocery store aisles, reading nutrition labels searching for the lowest carb and salt choice on the shelf. "No added salt" does not mean low salt or salt-free, for instance. So, every recipe I list is made with the lowest sodium ingredients I could find and any table salt is omitted completely. Yes, it's that important.

Our First Healthy Recipe

Since Judy can't have salt, she had already begun experimenting with different salt-free seasonings. This one has enough flavor that it doesn't really need any substitute for the salt.
The chicken itself we grilled in a mixture of:
*1/4 cup lime juice
*2 dashes of cumin
*1 tsp minced garlic
*2 turns of fresh ground pepper
*1 teaspoon of minced chipotle peppers in adobo.
The black beans were cooked from dried but could've easily been rinsed beans from a can. I was feeling ambitious that day.

The salsa cruda was a mixture of:
*1/2 cup of frozen corn
*1 jalapeno pepper (seeded)
*1/2 cup of drained diced tomatoes
*1/2 of a small red onion
*fresh ground black pepper
*a scant bunch of cilantro (Seriously, you either love the stuff or you hate it. We compromised and just used a little.)
*1/8 cup of lime juice.
Everything gets diced, minced and tossed together. No cooking required for the salsa, just keep it refrigerated if you make it ahead of time. Yum!

The dipping sauce is simply:
*non-fat Greek yogurt
*a little fresh cilantro
*chili powder
I eyeballed the amounts but made way too much. Good thing it's a great snack dip for raw veggies, too. Keep that refrigerated as well. When I had everything ready, I sprayed a little EVOO (Extra Virgin Olive Oil) in a non-stick frying pan and put in my quesadilla wrap. Then on one half,  I scattered my diced chicken, black beans, and cheese. I topped that with my salsa cruda and folded the other half of my tortilla over the ingredients. After just enough time to brown that side over med heat, I carefully flipped it to brown the other side. Plate it and add a dollop of dipping yogurt. Voila! 

 Chicken & Black Bean Quesadilla with Yogurt Dipping Sauce

Here I am with my quesadilla and here's a link if you want to see what a professional cook's quesadilla looks like...
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/198017714849352640/