Suebob's Red Stapler

I cut back on caffeine today. I normally only drink 3 cups of coffee per day.

24 oz. cups.

So.

I just drank a cup and a half in the morning (drinking from a smaller cup, too). It was kind of a surprise how nice it was, not to feel like this:

Lisa Bonchek Adams is one of ours and she’s under attack from some of the biggest media outlets in the world because of it.

The 37-year-old mother of three is going through cancer, and she is blogging and tweeting about it. She’s tweeting a lot – up to 200 times a day. Not just about cancer, but about life, her life, as she shares ideas and news and information.

First, Emma Keller wrote an opinion piece in the Guardian wondering about Adams’ sharing so much.

Will our memories be the ones she wants? What is the appeal of watching someone trying to stay alive? Is this the new way of death? You can put a “no visitors sign” on the door of your hospital room, but you welcome the world into your orbit and describe every last Fentanyl patch. Would we, the readers, be more dignified if we turned away? Or is this part of the human experience?

Emma Keller’s piece asks questions rather than giving Keller’s opinion of Adams’ writing, but the implication seems clear to me – “Why so much truth?”

Then, remarkably, several days later, Emma Keller’s husband Bill took to the pages of the New York times to tell Lisa, in so many words, to shut up and die.

In October 2012 I wrote about my father-in-law’s death from cancer in a British hospital. There, more routinely than in the United States, patients are offered the option of being unplugged from everything except pain killers and allowed to slip peacefully from life. His death seemed to me a humane and honorable alternative to the frantic medical trench warfare that often makes an expensive misery of death in America.

Not content to merely discuss the merits of ending cancer treatment versus treating it aggressively (while ignoring that a 37-year-old mother may have different motivations than an elderly man), Bill Keller throws mud on Adams and her relationship with the treating hospital, even tossing in a little sneer about therapy dogs in the process:

The first thing I would say is that her decision to treat her terminal disease as a military campaign has worked for her. Her relationship with the hospital provides her with intensive, premium medical care, including not just constant maintenance and aggressive treatment but such Sloan-Kettering amenities as the Caring Canines program, in which patients get a playful cuddle with visiting dogs. (Neither Adams nor Sloan-Kettering would tell me what all this costs or whether it is covered by insurance.)

I don’t have a lot to say. I think you can read the two opinion pieces and see how disgusting they are for yourself. I just wanted to record a few words of support for Lisa, because she is one of us, and by “one of us,” I mean more than just being a blogger.

There are many types of bloggers, but only a small percentage are truth-tellers, people who are on the journey not to sell and not to self-promote, but to tell the truth, the honest and beautiful and painful truth, about life as it is, not as how they wish it would be.

There are always those who hate the truth. Any truth-teller who has been at it for long has heard the criticism, often posed in the form of a question: Why are you doing this? Who do you think you are? Why are you so special? Don’t you know that others have it worse than you do? Shouldn’t you be doing something better with your time? Why don’t you give it up?

Lisa is one of ours. She tells the kind of story that is hard to hear and easy to turn away from. That’s ok, though. She’s not telling it for those who can’t stand it. She’s telling it for those who need it, one of whom is her.

Rock on, Lisa. Rock on.

I once had a tiger cat named Antonio. He was a special cat in many ways.

One of those ways is that he did not speak. Antonio made his presence known, certainly, but as far as I knew, he could not meow.

He would often open his mouth as if he were going to speak, but no, only silence emerged.

I had had Antonio several years before I got a catnip plant. Antonio, as cats tend to do, enjoyed the catnip. He and my other cat enjoyed the plant to death – they knocked it from the shelf on the front porch and ate it down to nubs.

When I opened the front door the next morning, I spied a broken pot, a pile of dirt and roots, and two tired, marble-eyed cats.

I let several years go by before I got another catnip plant. After giving the cats a few sprigs, I put the plant in a spot where they absolutely could not reach it.

Antonio walked over beneath the plant, sat down, looked at me, and said, in a very clear and distinct voice, “Meow.”

Lesson: When you want something bad enough, you’ll find the voice to ask for it.

I have taken to my bed.

That sounds so grandly Victorian, as if I have a lace coverlet and a chambermaid to fluff my pillows as I recover from some genteel lady-disease.

If only. The truth is far more grubby and wrinkled, with half-empty water glasses crowding every surface and the crumbs of dry cereal (one of the few things I have felt like eating) sprinkled over the dog-fur befouled duvet cover. Until, that is, said dog decides to climb up and lick every surface, trying to Hoover up the cereal crumbs, because obviously the $3/pound dog food I’m buying her at Sal’s Doggie Gourmet Palace isn’t making the grade.

So Downton Abbey it isn’t.

The worst part is that this whole business is completely and utterly my own fault. As a germophobe, I wish I could lay the blame at the feet of someone I came into contact with, but no, I’m pretty sure I brought this plague upon my own house.

After listening to the RadioLab show about how important intestinal flora are to our mood and health. The show contains a fascinating piece about how mice who ate yogurt – which is rife with probiotics, or good bacteria, have more emotional resilience than other mice (listen to the show. It explains the whole thing).

Well, hey, I thought, I want to be a mouse that keeps swimming! I want to be emotionally resilient! I was encouraged by my friend Annette, who even emailed me an article about probiotics, an article that mentioned that you should be very careful to start taking probiotics slowly, bit by bit.

Which, of course, I promptly forgot. I dove into the massive case of probiotics at our local health food store and finally, after much reading of bottles and listening with one ear to the worker there talk to another woman, selected one completely at random.

I came home and popped the pill. No big deal.

Except.

Two hours later, I felt like the contents of Mount Vesuvius had been emptied into my belly. Or maybe a couple pair of fighting otters. In any case, it wasn’t good.

It turns out that my own intestinal flora, who had been happily occupying my guts for 50+ years, were now under attack by foreign flora, and they weren’t happy. There was literally a fight to the death going on IN MY STOMACH.

Without being too graphic, here’s how the night went: vomiting. Fever. Chills. Muscle aches. Rinse. Repeat. Again. Again. Again.

So don’t try this at home, kids, lest you end up spending two days in bed drinking ginger ale and coconut water, eating dry cereal, and feeling like your intestinal flora have given you a good, hard beating with a baseball bat.

PS What’s up with netflix? So much content, and so little good to stream.

There are times when I’m glad I live by myself.

Strike that. I’m always glad I live by myself, but some times I am more glad than others.

Also: remind me not to eat the cheese that’s in the square container in the fridge. Now it is dog cheese.

Not cheese made of dog milk, mind you. I don’t even know how you milk a dog (“You can milk anything with nipples.” “Can you milk me, Greg?” NAME THAT MOVIE).

Cheese FOR the dog. Because I sure as hell am not going to eat it now that I scrubbed the floor with it.

Do you want to know how I ended up scrubbing the floor with cheese? And why I’m glad I live by myself? Those two things are closely related.

I had cheese in the fridge, like a sane person. And the cheese fell out of the fridge, as cheese sometimes does, and it fell out of its container, but it stayed mostly in, so I could just cut the floor-touched piece off and move on with my life. I could be more obsessive about germs, and throw the cheese away, but why waste a $5 piece of cheese because a corner of it touched the floor, a corner that is now cut off and put in the trash? My parents didn’t survive the Great Depression so I could throw away perfectly good cheese.

I put the cheese back in the fridge, like a sane person.

Then I reached in the fridge for something else, and the cheese fell BACK out of the fridge just to annoy me. It fell all the way on the floor like a very bad cheese, like a cheese that I hadn’t just cared for enough to trim and return to its place in the fridge, where a sane person keeps cheese.

So I had to become insane, of course. I had to show that cheese who was boss, because that stupid Cotija was not going to pull this crap with ME.

I scrubbed the floor with cheese. I took the cheese and mauled the cheese. For about 15 seconds, like a completely not sane person, I scrubbed the cheese back and forth across the floor, damning that cheese to hell. Now how do you like being out of the fridge, cheese? Huh? Huh?

Like I said, it’s a good thing I live alone. Because of cheese. And other stuff.

Then I cleaned up, like a sane person, and saved the cheese for the dog, because if there’s one thing she doesn’t mind, it’s dirt, and because I’m not going to waste a perfectly good piece of $5 cheese just because it has dirt ground into it from me scrubbing it on the floor. Like a not sane person.