Confession Tuesday

Dear Reader,

It's been a week! I week since I told you how I almost buried Stanley Kunitz before his time and now, what have I done in a week? Not much reader. These are sins for the innocent. Confessions rated G.

Let's begin--

1) If you were to drive by my street last night at 8 pm, you would have seen my in my blue velour PJ bottoms, a long john top and red crocs carrying 2 blue recycle bins with a cat scratcher balanced on top. And you would have felt bad for me when the cat scracher house fell and began to roll away. You would have felt bad or you would have laughed.


2) My biggest disappointment this week was that I went to have lunch with two friends and the bakery we eat at was closed and I was heartbroken I didn't get to have my Milano sandwich and more so--Esther's Orange Cake and I was so disappointed and if this was my biggest disappointment of the week then I'm doing quite fine (perhaps a little spoiled, but quite fine.)


3) On Sunday I made dinner for my family. This is a confession because I do approx. 5 % of the cooking in the family. When I cook it's a big production (because I have little idea to what I'm doing). But I made halibut with avacado, tomato, corn, and basil relish.

After having a child, I felt quite guilty for not knowing how to cook, I was (and am) the mom who buys cupcakes or the birthday cake at the bakery instead of makes them herself. And I've grown to realize what a great lesson my daughter is getting-- men can cook (and cook well). And the roles that were decided for us long ago do not have stay if you don't want them to.

4) Oh the recipe I made? I got it from Live with Regis & Kelly. I figured if it could be made on tv in 10 minutes, I could make it in 60.

5) I got my haircut and I left the salon looking like Ellen Barkin. Now I look like an Ellen Barkin version of myself, but not as sexy.

6) I went to eye doctor on Friday and I have 20/20 vision (though still have the very very lowest prescription for reading/computer glasses if I need them.) But what he said that made me the happiest was, "If you hadn't told me you had optic neuritis, I wouldn't have known, all the scarring on your optic nerve is gone."

Backstory-- In Dec of 2006, I lost the vision (slowly and one eye at a time) in both my eyes. It started on December 6th in my left eye and by Christmas I could barely see out of either eye (though my vision was starting to improve slightly in my left eye). It was ridiculously scary, but also fascinating in knowing that my vision would get terrible and then correct itself (which it did). It turned out I had optic neuritis, which can be one of the symptoms of MS.

On the day I first lost my vision I had drank a motherload of diet soda, specifically diet coke. Drinking a motherload of diet soda was nothing new for me at the time, but I remember thinking I should go downstairs and get my water bottle, but instead, I opened a can of cheapo Albertson's brand orange soda (I could taste the artificial sweetener when I drank it) and soon after there was this terrible pain behind my left eye and then I completely lost vision in it and it slowly came back.

Only one doctor (my granola ob-gyn) considered it could be related to the aspartame in the diet soda (I swore it was aspartame poisoning), all the others said it was either a first symptom of MS or it was caused by a virus. It really could have been caused by a virus, but since that December, I haven't had anything to drink (or eat) with aspartame in it. I know drink sparkling water or just water with all my meals. And I drink a lot more coffee.

I have had 2 MRIs which have all come back perfect and I have one more scheduled for spring to check to see if I'm someone with MS. In the NW, we have a large population of women who have MS and though they don't know what causes MS, I hope that all my non-healthy behavior of spending months and months at Greenlake sunbathing throughout my youth, may have given me enough Vitamin D to not have it. I hope to be the freaky gal who lost her vision for no apparent reason except perhaps, punishment from the environment gods because on the night I got optic neuritis, I had 2 movie choices to watch--An Inconvenient Truth or The Break-Up (with Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn), I chose the latter. Do bad movies cause blindness? Maybe this was my mistake.

And with eyes wide open, I say Amen.