OliviaFong: I <3 Htown & I’m a bandwagon hockey fan…but it would be great to be in a city that has a championship-winning pro sports team. Go B’s!

andrew_fong: @OliviaFong honestly, when watching hockey, do you even know what you are looking at? I don’t #texasforever

EH:  i wanted to tell you something important.

jalapeno farmers have developed their jalapenos now to fit maximum cheese

me: !!!!

god bless the jalapeno farmers.

i like that you prefaced it with “i wanted to tell you something important.”

because really, what news could be more important than any news about the amount of cheese you can fit into produce

EH:  http://www.good.is/post/new-jalapeno-bred-specifically-to-hold-more-cheese/.

i knew this would be significant for you.

i merely wanted to prime you for the news

Sweetie,

I watched the last part of the Cats/Horns game.  A 5 second inbound violation and a three-point play??  That’s too tough to swallow.

Hope you are hanging in there and not just hanging.

Love,

dad

My response:

hello father,

i am alive and well. no need to send the emt over to my apt today.

Good fathers know when their daughters should be on suicide watch.

From stumbledupon.com

From a forum from one of my March Madness Brackets:

ZL: pretty sure i’m the only one who picked zona in the UA/UT matchup. go cats!

CH: i’m pretty sure you did =P we should have a little friendly side bet for that game

ZH: let’s do it! 1-on-6 bet. ideas? takers?

OF: z- let’s say winner takes the other person out for coffee or dessert the next time we are in the same city. GAMEON

ZL: boooooring! here was my original proposal – you win, i eat a pound of beef. i win, you guys each eat an ounce of cat. no takers. second proposal – you win, i eat a pound of beef. i win, you guys split a can of cat food. still not really sure there are any takers…ha! OF? CH?

OF: no deal! you would eat a pound of beef regardless of whether your team won or lost.

…to be clear, no one agreed to eat any cats. Conditions still TBD for tomorrow’s game.

Immediate responses:

TTHdoesntloveme: @OliviaFong whoa. what are you gonna eat?

angryjlau: @TTHdoesntloveme @oliviafong is gonna starve…

Haters gonna hate.

Come Easter, expect a leaner (maybe), meaner (without those foods? most likely) Ofo.

A few of my favorite mnemonic devices for models/stages in language development, courtesy of SL:

Dogs and raccoons are cute, cuddly elephants.

Push cats down igloos.

What these are supposed to help me remember, I don’t know (I realize the irony). But if I start laughing out loud while taking comps, it’s because I’m visualizing some jackass shoving Garfield down a frozen ice sculpture.

Okay, so maybe IF required coaching from SI to say that she misses/loves me. And maybe she doesn’t even really know what those words mean yet. But considering that last time I saw her, I was dismissed during her bedtime story and my declaration of love was met by a blank stare, I’ll take it.

This is a modern tragedy, replayed millions of times over. When there is no way of knowing exactly how long our skeins will run—and when we imagine ourselves to have much more time than we do—our every impulse is to fight, to die with chemo in our veins or a tube in our throats or fresh sutures in our flesh. The fact that we may be shortening or worsening the time we have left hardly seems to register. We imagine that we can wait until the doctors tell us that there is nothing more they can do. But rarely is there nothing more that doctors can do. They can give toxic drugs of unknown efficacy, operate to try to remove part of the tumor, put in a feeding tube if a person can’t eat: there’s always something. We want these choices. We don’t want anyone—certainly not bureaucrats or the marketplace—to limit them. But that doesn’t mean we are eager to make the choices ourselves. Instead, most often, we make no choice at all. We fall back on the default, and the default is: Do Something.

Last week, my pastor at CCFC remarked how there is a disconnect in between how Hollywood portrays the process of death and how it actually occurs in real life. Even a person who dies in a violent or graphic manner somehow manages to go in a relatively quick and graceful fashion. But very rarely does a perfectly healthy person quietly pass in the night. Instead, there is often an uncomfortable and unglamorous deterioration cycle that seems to accelerate as a person ages. People collect diagnoses like basketball cards, trading up and down and exchanging this for that as they enter a carousel of hospitals and rehab centers and skilled nursing facilities, never completely recovering from one injury before having to endure the next.

It would be impossible to spend any amount of time with medically fragile patients, the youngest of whom are in their 70s, without thinking about end of life issues. Indeed, in the past 6 weeks, 3 people on my caseload have died.

My first encounter with death of a patient occurred during my first week. Rather, she “expired” due to a “failure to thrive.” In her final days, her body’s systems were breaking down, she wasn’t eating, and she was barely conscious, even when awake. In crude, unfeeling terms, she was circling the drain.

One of the harder aspects of working with people who are dying is seeing how it affects their family, who are nearly invariably more devastated than the actual patient. That particular patient’s son, who came to sit with her every day, was a wreck. He told us that because his father had died when he was still young, his mother raised him on her own and, in typical mother form, had sacrificed everything to give him a good life. To see her like this–eyes closed, slumped over, thin as a rail– it broke him.

Of course, I can’t know this for sure, but I think that he knew she wasn’t going to miraculously get better. But he was unwilling to let her go, not like this. So what are you supposed to be hoping for in situations like this?

Later, my supervisor told me something that was a complete paradigm shift. She told me that people get very upset when their loved one stop eating. “Mom/dad/grandmother/grandfather is going to die unless we get something in their system,” they say. In actuality, it’s the other way around. They’re dying, and that’s why they are refusing to eat. In a lot of cases, these patients have in some way, either in word or action, demonstrated that they are ready to go.

But doctors, by nature and training, are healers; they’ve been taught and are equipped to delay death for as long as possible. The fact that a person’s body and mind have given up are simply unacceptable. Instead of being placed on hospice care that focuses on comfort in a person’s last days, those who do not have some sort of advanced directive are prescribed more drugs, more therapy, and more aggressive treatments. Instead of leaving this world with as much dignity with as when they arrived, they are indefinitely hooked up to IVs drips and breathing machines, caught in a limbo of existence.

Here’s the question that I’m struggling with: At what point does quality of life become more important than life itself?

Okay, so one day of cooking does not a habit make, but if you know me at all, you can appreciate these baby steps toward domesticity.

For lunches this week, I made a curry chicken salad with almonds and apples (secret ingredient: soy sauce and mango chutney), similar to the recipe found here, as well as an artichoke-lemon-garlic aioli to go in a sandwich with proscuitto, shredded mozarella and parmesan cheese, and baby spinach. Pretentiousdouchebagsthrowyourhandsupatme.

I also made clementine cupcakes, adapted from this recipe from a friend of EH. Grainy, but EH and I finished 6/8 of them in 24 hours.

And for pure nostalgic value, I made a cheesy broccoli, chicken, and rice casserole. In college, SI would make a variation of this that included an entire stick of butter (possibly 2?) and jarred Velveeta cheese. It’s as awesome/awesomely bad for you as it sounds and I’m pretty sure our stomachs were not biodegradable after consuming copious amounts of this. But so worth it.