Yeast in my kitchen, hard at work!

Tomorrow I take in baked goods to my booth at the market. The work started last night, when I fed my sourdough a little extra for Tartine's recipe for country boules. This morning when I got up for my workout at Crossfit, I tested it, and it wasn't at the float stage. If the starter sinks to the bottom of a bowl of water, it doesn't yet have enough gas in it to make bread rise. By the time I got home from working out, it was perfect!

I also started my poolish, which is sort of a sourdough, because you mix flour, water and a tiny bit of yeast and let it sit on the counter for 12 hours before making the dough for French baguettes. It enriches the flavor, and allows me to use only half as much yeast in the finished dough.

I then fed my rye sourdough, filled the jar nearly to the top, so that I would have the 15 ounces of active sourdough to make two loaves of sourdough rye. This morning, I ground the rye berries, caramelized the onions and mixed the sourdough with water and the freshly ground rye flour.

The coffee beans on the counter by the new ferments are there to attract yeast that like coffee - or so one of my bread baking books says they will do. Left to right, the poolish for nine baguettes (will bake in the morning), the rising rye dough with a new jar of starter in front, and rising dough for boules with new starter in square bowl in front.

Poolish for baguettes, sourdough rye rising, country boule on first rise. 

By 3 this afternoon, I set the rye bread and boules to rise. The baguette dough will be made this evening, refrigerated for a slow rise, then in the morning, loaves are formed, set to rise, and baked. They are always still warm when I leave for market.

Two loaves of rye rising, two boules rising (one round, one oblong)

Buzzer just went off. Time to turn on oven and get ready to bake bread!

I am feeling soooooooooooo good!

At last, my stomach doesn't hurt when Fred decides to crawl onto it. My energy level is almost up to pre-cancer treatment levels. Three weeks from Wednesday, I get to go back to Crossfit. Yesterday afternoon, I mowed the whole lawn (first time since foot and ankle surgery).

I am on a ketogenic diet for health reasons. It has gotten me off a nasty scrip, and has enabled me to lower my dosage for blood pressure meds. Lately I have been taking Celebrex every other day, sometimes I can quit altogether, depending on activity level AND how well I have been eating.

How well have I been eating? Not very. Did you know a Klondike bar has 28 grams of carbs? Cut in half, that's only 14, and I can have 22 a day. That's okay if I haven't had a tiny (or not so tiny) bite of bread, haven't eaten some of my favorite keto recipes that still have 10 grams per serving (so why not have TWO servings?). It had to stop.

Now that I am back in the groove with the keto diet, I am hoping to ditch the Celebrex altogether. Besides, a healthy dropperful of CBD oil works almost as well as Celebrex, especially if I have been in ketosis. I'm happy with 5, but this morning my reading was 15, and I can feel the difference. It's almost like taking speed.

It has been a long road since I had surgery for torn ligament in ankle and torn tendon in foot the day after Christmas. That one was worse than I imagined it would be. I had barely gotten back on my feet when I noticed severe stomach cramps and black, tarry stools. That eventually led to a diagnosis of a malignant sarcoma, known as a GIST (Gastro Intestinal Stromal Tumor), planted in my stomach near my esophagus, a particularly bad spot. I was back at Crossfit for only six weeks when I had to go on chemo, which sapped my strength to the point where I didn't go anymore.

In the midst of all of this, I lost my beloved Tashi, 14 years old, pretty ill for the last five years of her life, but we hung in there together. Still miss her so much.

Maybe when so much goes wrong in such a short time, one finally becomes immune to shock. However, I experienced shock when the oncologist told me that I would not need anymore chemo after my surgery. In the hospital after its removal, the surgeon told me three years of chemo! Seems like it was just more bad news to deal with, another challenge I really didn't want to face.

And then three weeks later, after all of the path reports were in, the oncologist gave me the lovely news - NOT an aggressive tumor, although definitely malignant. SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOW growing tumor, in spite of a spurt of growth when I was taken off Gleevec due to liver and heart problems. But it's gone!

So yes, I am shocked! GOOD shock!! I was considering how to deal with having to go back on chemo, which was like poison to my body. I seriously considered just saying no, and letting the chips fall where they may. Better a few years of feeling good than 20 years of the hell of dealing with Gleevec and all of its side effects. I was on a support board, and many of the people on the board have been on Gleevec for 18 years!! Bothering your liver? Then just get on steroids - with all of their side effects - in order to tolerate the chemo. I was the only one on the board with heart issues, so I had no one from whom to get info on that.

CT scan in six months, every six months for two years, then every TEN YEARS! I choose to look at the situation as a cure. If I get bad news in six months, I will deal with it then. In the meantime, living with the firm belief that I am cured has helped me to get back on the wagon and "just say no" to Klondike bars, a small (well, maybe this time a medium) order of well done French fries, and one too many tastes from my samples of the French baguettes I take to market on Saturdays. I am back on the keto train and feeling wonderful!

My health - not so good right now.

I have followed a ketogenic diet for eight years. I slip out of ketosis from time to time, but for the most part, I am in, at least minimally. This means that I use fat for energy rather than carbs. Although I eat about 25 to 30 grams of carbs a day, which my brain needs, for the rest of my energy needs my body uses fat, which it converts to ketones. Those ketones act like carbs in terms of providing energy. While the brain needs a little pure carbohydrate, it is interesting that most people, including me, say that a low carb diet helps them to get rid of "brain fog." So I guess a little is great, and too much is NOT!

I have read enough about the effect of carbs on malignant tumors that I felt that I was hedging my bets with my low carb diet, since my family has had its share of malignancies. Ketogenic diet = insurance policy against cancer, or so I thought.

I have just been diagnosed with a soft tissue sarcoma, called a GIST. In layman's terms, I have cancer, or pre-cancer because the cells are still too small to be picked up in a test. But they are there. There is no such thing as a benign GIST. 

Mine was diagnosed locally as 3 cm, considered very small. They did another test locally and told my daughter it was 4 cm. When I talked to the surgeon at IU, Dr. Schmidt, he said surgical removal would require taking out nearly half of the stomach and part of the esophagus. Not good news. Chemo might shrink it into a more manageable size, or sometimes even eliminate it entirely. He ran another test, as the test from St. Joe Med Center was not done properly, and it showed the small intestine in great detail but missed most of the stomach (waited too long after I drank the barium shake to run the test). He ran another CT scan Monday evening.

He called me on Tuesday and we played phone tag until mid-morning the next day. I got hit with very bad news. It is not 3 cm, not 4 cm, but 6 cm. Surgery would require removing the stomach in total. I was gob smacked, for lack of a better term. He had already lined me up with an oncologist, so I went back down Wednesday to see him and look at alternatives to surgery, at least for now.

On Wednesday, I spent two hours listening to my oncologist, Dr. Rushing, at IU Hospital in Indianapolis. He explained in detail what the term "cancer" means in biological terms. Most people use cancer interchangeably with malignancy. They are not the same thing. Malignancy is the top level term, and cancer is one of several subsets of malignancies. "Cancer" refers only to malignancies of organs -- cancer of the lungs, cancer of the liver, cancer of the colon, etc. My tumor is in my stomach, but it is not cancer OF the stomach. The malignancy is in a soft tissue tumor that has planted itself firmly into the wall of my stomach. It can occur anywhere in the alimentary tract, but usually in or on the stomach.  It is part of the subset of malignancies called "sarcomas." They are soft tissue tumors, and they occur as GISTs (what I have) or tumors of fat, muscle, bone, cartilage, tendons, vessels and nerves. Fortunately, they are all less apt to metastasize. If they do, GISTs go to the liver the most often, rarely to the lymph nodes. 

The oncologist and I agreed that my best course of action is chemotherapy. He said my tumor will not be totally eliminated -- it's too big and buried in the wall of the stomach.

I asked, "Really? Never?" He answered that if it did, it would be a first. Sigh . . .

But he said the chemo may shrink it to the point that we are back to removing only half the stomach, and that it might eliminate the pain and bleeding. Those two symptoms were what led me to the doctor in the first place. I am on ulcer meds, and they do help, but I still have some discomfort.

Speaking of being gob smacked, one month of my meds (it's a pill, taken orally once a day) is $11,000, and my insurance doesn't cover it. However, if I go with generic, it drops to around $4,500 a month and is covered, with a co-pay of $700. Sounds downright cheap after hearing $11,000 a MONTH! My oncologist's office is working with pricing. Hopefully they will say the generic is okay. He even said they might find a program that would help with the co-pay.

In the meantime, on a lighter note, I hit the five-month mark (yesterday) since my foot and ankle surgery, and I have the surgeon's permission to start running again! We just did short 30 second sprints at Crossfit today, and it felt like I was flying!! So lovely!!! Tashi and I just came back from a little trot, because running is very good for her as well.

So how am I doing? I'm past the shock. I'm continuing to do my low carb thing, and am going to add bone broth to my regimen. I'm doing tai chi once a week at the River Bend Cancer Services in South Bend. My friend and Chi Gong specialist Jessica is going to lead my friend Cyn and me in a walking chi gong medication on Sunday, May 3, I hope. I am blown away by the loving support of family and friends.

And of course, I am still asking for jokes. I decided I would rather have jokes than sympathy. If you have read this to the end, send me a joke. Every one of them I have gotten so far has elicited a belly laugh, even when I read them for a second and third time.   :)

Peace.

The gym in my basement

Over the years, I've acquired a good bit of equipment that has just been sitting since I moved here. I have used the stationary bike a few times, but the rest of it wasn't even completely put together after I moved.

I tore a ligament in my right ankle as a child. I am quite certain I know when. Second grade, we had some old playground equipment that was brought in from the country schools when they were consolidated into the town school.

One sad piece of equipment the town school inherited was a sliding board with no slide. But they set it up anyway, and we loved to pretend we were firemen. We would climb the stairs and then slide down the bars. I went down a bar one day and just simply crushed my ankle! I couldn't walk, even missed a couple of days of school. After that, sprains became a familiar experience. One of the more dramatic incidents occurred in London, when I stepped off a curb and fell flat on my face. The next thing I knew, my husband and a stranger were pulling me back up and out of the path of a speeding taxi.

In my freezer, I have three difference ice wraps for the ankle. In my closet, I have two different support boots. In the garage, a set of crutches resides. In my purse, I carry an elastic bandage. You just never know when you'll need some help, right?

Crossfit really hasn't helped it any. And mowing my very bumpy half acre yard with a regular lawnmower (no riding for me - it's exercise, you know!) has contributed bigly to the pain in my foot and ankle.

I finally bit the bullet after being on crutches again for a few days and saw my doctor. He held my heel and wiggled my foot. He said, "Call South Bend Orthopedics. You need surgery." I did, I do, December 26 it will be repaired. MRI showed not only a torn ligament, but also a torn tendon. Surgeon says that the tendon got overworked because the torn ligament couldn't stabilize my ankle. Voila - a mess!!!

I have continued to work out at the Crossfit box. Finally the pain was bad enough that I called it a day, hence the dusting off of the equipment in the basement. I can go at my own pace, stay away from anything that puts pressure on the ankle, and stay in reasonable shape prior to the surgery. I'll be laid up for a month after surgery, can do upper body stuff, but no weight on foot at all. I can't even drive.

In the meantime, I FINALLY have my gym set up in the basement. Alarm still goes off at 5 am on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I back the car out of the garage on jump-rope days, 50 jumps, then head downstairs to Nordic Track, stationary bike and weights. Have to keep this creaky old body in shape!

My home gym - it will do the job for now.