Week 32 - Good Bad Ugly

The Good

Anyone who knows me knows of my love of ditch food. I think it comes from when I was little and my mom would send us out to the field, the wooded lot next to our house, to pick blackberries with the promise of pie for dessert. It would keep us busy for hours, which I’m not so sure wasn’t my mom’s ulterior motive, but we would have the reward of pie after supper and the berries were free for the taking. This lead to a lifelong love of ditch food. From peaches from a lone tree by the side of the road (probably from a discarded pit) to blackberries from the entrance ramp of Route 10 in Providence. I was always on the lookout for wild fruit.

When I moved to Nebraska, the ditch food changed to elderberries, chokecherries and wild plums. I’ve picked enough to make an occasional batch of jelly (none of them make good jam, which I found out the hard way) but was missing the blackberries that grow all over Rhode Island. Well, this week I discovered a blackberry patch in a mile long ditch off the highway between work and home. I wasn’t dressed for picking but found a couple to try and they were yummy. I left with scratches on my ankle and plans to pick more soon. I’ll make some jam and a pie. Happy days!

The Bad

Good thing I had something good this week because I did not get good news at the GI doc. I guess I was expecting to get a “Great job. Keep up the fiber.” Instead the doc came into the room with his thumb and finger an inch apart and said, “You were this close to being like your sister.” He said he saw a bubble on the CT scan, which meant I had a micro-perforation and next time it could be bad. I needed surgery to remove a section of my colon. You could have knocked me over with a feather! I was absolutely shocked and after calling my sister, who had a major perforation and emergency surgery that she barely survived, I cried in the parking lot. Then I headed to work and cried some more. I have a colonoscopy scheduled for the 26^th and after that I’ll meet with the surgeon. While there’s no part of me that wants surgery, I want another bout of diverticulitis even less. And since it won’t be an emergency, I won’t end up with a colostomy. How’s that for looking for the silver lining?

The Ugly

I mentioned last week that my cat had brought in a baby bunny and it was somewhere in the basement. So I took Wednesday off and dug through the entire basement storage room, which is where Tot dropped the bunny, which scooted under a shelf. I moved everything, including the Corelle shelves, which took some doing. My boss made me a fake baby bunny and gave me one of her famous reused cards to celebrate the find but alas, no bunny. For all I knew, the cats had eaten it.

By the weekend, I was sure I could smell something amiss downstairs and I thought it was coming from under the stairs. I moved all of the Christmas stuff out from under the stairs. Nothing. Then I moved everything in the laundry room, including the washer and dryer. My last ditch effort was my friend Lori’s dog, who came over and sniffed around but didn’t find anything. I had been hoping for some drug dog digging action but no. Lori said she couldn’t smell anything but basement mustiness. After all this, I’m still wondering where the bunny is and if I’m really smelling anything.

So I ended the week with an unsuccessful bunny search and worried about surgery but with blackberries in my future. And the countless offers of help from my family and friends have been amazing. While none of this was in my plan for this fall, I’ll get by with a little help from my friends and hopefully be on the mend soon. I live in hope.