Journal of a Living Lady #82
For the record, I have postponed taking any more chemotherapy, at least for now. Possibly forever. This was my fifth regimen of chemotherapy. The second dose of this premeditated poisoning nearly killed me. My obituary came close to reading “death by drowning.” I could hardly keep my head above the toilet water.
For the moment I have decided I’d rather die of the disease than the treatment. Except for the dying part, I am ready to go. It is a dilemma really. I don’t know whether to make plans or cancel them. While I am waiting around to see if I am going to live or die this round, I thought I would attempt a few interesting projects just to be sure I haven’t missed anything.
God really knew what he was doing when he created me during the early 1940’s. I could never have made it in the olden days of my grandmother, much less in the days of the pioneers or even further back in the days of manna in the wilderness. Try as I might, cannot master the old ways of doing things.
Take that manna for example. That is a bona fide word straight from the Bible. Manna is bread. God provided it everyday for his people when they were looking for the Promise Land. If I had to depend on my bread-baking abilities to make it to heaven, I wouldn’t rise.
Baking sour dough bread was my most recent project. I have a bread machine that makes wonderful bread, but in my humble but accurate opinion, that is cheating. Anybody can dump in the pre-packaged flour and yeast, drop in a tablespoon of tepid water, and turn on the switch.
I wanted to make bread the real way. While I didn’t major in chemistry or biology, and certainly not Home Economics, I did remember that bread-making involved activating single-celled fungi. The result would cause a wad of flour to expand exponentially.
I went right by the directions on the package. Honest. I mixed the flour, the water, and the yeast. I let it sit and grow. Then I beat on that lump and let it sit some more. Each time the arrogant dough came back higher than ever. From Monday until Wednesday, I punched the lump and it did what it was supposed to do. It got puffy. Finally it was time to bake the bread.
The directions on the yeast package said sour dough bread likes humidity. Dutifully I placed a shallow bowl of water in the bottom of the oven. The instructions also said to spray water on the sides of the oven while the bread was baking. Now, that was the mistake.
Using the same plastic water bottle that I use on my indoor plants, I sprayed the sides of the oven. One squirt. Two squirts. The third squirt ricocheted to the light bulb in the back of the oven. That bulb exploded better than gun powder.
Glass shattered all over the top of the raw dough and just missed my eyes. As I jumped backwards, one bare foot landed on a piece of the broken bulb.
The cut probably needed a half-dozen stitches, but I wasn’t about to tell this tale in the emergency room. I bought these bandage-like doohickeys shaped like butterflies which work just as good as stitches.
They say cats have nine lives. Guess you can call me the “cat lady.”
+++++++++++
(Posted - September 27, 2000)