Let me tell you first about what I cook and eat in general. In my 20s, I worked in a small cafe called Soupe du Jour which had a simple menu of soups, crudite, homemade bread, cheese and pastries. I learned to cook there and I learned that I love to cook. Over the years, I have focused on cooking and eating healthy. I went seven years with no dairy, ten years with no meat of any kind, and somehow wound up here. I eat some chicken and fish, but still enjoy a mostly vegetarian lifestyle. That week in the hospital with no food, however, led me to rethink some things about cooking and eating.
For the past five years, I have been living in pain. I had a retrolithesis at L5/S1 - basically, one vertebra had collapsed upon the one below and was smushing my nerve root. I have had relentless nerve pain down my leg. I have had about 20 epidural steroid injections which have allowed me some amount of functioning. I gave up a thriving chiropractic practice and chose to teach high school in order to reduce the stress of working with my body and a 45 minute commute. Teaching is much less physically stressful but I eventually found that to be too much pain as well. In June of 2011, I had a foraminotomy surgery on the area - they used a laser knife to carve out more space around the nerve root. This was unsuccessful and my pain became much worse. So in December, I decided to have the big surgery - a fusion. They put in a lumbar cage and three screws to stabilize the area. They lifted one vertebra off the other and put a bone spacer in there from a cadaver. For a few weeks after surgery, my nerve pain was gone. It was like a black cloud was lifted out of my brain. Then, it came back with a vengeance. After having CT scans just after surgery and a month later, the surgeon found that I grew a new bone spur which is directly pressing on the nerve root again. I had yet another epidural which has settled it down enough so that I can wait to have the next surgery until the fusion is done fusing.
With the esophagus hospitalization, the cupcake fantasies were obvious. I missed cooking. I had given up most cooking due to the pain of standing. Baking was always a bigger love for me than regular cooking but I had a lot of guilt around cooking treats. I reserved baking for Christmas or having company over or some other justification. I realized I was never just cooking what I wanted. I was terrified of becoming overweight. I doubted my control over eating and in the process had excessively controlled one of my favorite creative outlets.
After living in pain and then struggling to eat, I decided that baking was a love I needed to return to. I can only eat small amounts of food at a time and raw foods are completely out of the question. Cake, however, is pretty darn easy to digest. For me, cooking in this guilt-free, love for myself place has become a part of self-love. Over the past few months, I have made cakes, cupcakes, muffins, breads, and some wonderful savory yummies too.
I want to tell you about the logistics of cooking in pain. Pain strips away a lot of joy and it is hard to find this middle ground where you still feel like you are alive and where you are taking care to rest. Sometimes, I wait to take pain meds until I know I'm heading into the kitchen. I will work in pain so that I can come home and cook without pain. Right now, I'm not allowed to take advil or anything similar because it inhibits the proper fusion of the bone. That means I'm stuck with narcotics. I refuse to take enough to be without pain because it would be A LOT. Currently, I'm not too bad because I had the epidural just a few weeks ago and pain management is pretty easy with very little medication. It doesn't last too long though.
I have this awesome chair now! It's on wheels, has no arms, and goes from a regular chair height to the height of my counters. My kitchen is 6 feet by 9 feet so I can pull and push myself all around the kitchen in the chair. It's AWESOME. It has completely liberated my kitchen time. Granted, sitting is a position that can be the most painful so it's not as if it's a pain free option or anything. It has allowed me to be less exhausted by cooking though. I don't know why more people don't have something like this - I think most people would love to sit and cook. I have my laptop there and I watch crazy science documentaries or mystery BBC shows and cook to my heart's content.
My heart's content. That's the whole thing right now. I am baking to play, to live, to heal, to think, to be with myself again. All these years in pain have taking some parts of me and buried them. I am trying to find myself in these recipes.
It's hard to find this balance between maintaining a positive outlook and being real with how much this has really sucked. I don't like to be a complainer or to be seen as weak. I realize, however, that I am not taking the time to express enough of what has gone on inside me over these years. I'm writing here to just get it all out. Maybe it will bring someone else comfort or maybe it will just be fun to think about food. My agenda is to share what I am cooking and what I am feeling.
These recipes are not health food but I'm sure some of what I cook will meet some standards of "healthy." I'm so thrilled with how much food blogging has taken off in recent years. Much of what I am inspired by comes from awesome food blogs. I hope to give props to the incredible food writers out there in the world. I tend to mess with recipes. I start out thinking I will stick to the recipe but I never do. Recipes with lemon always need more lemon. I almost always reduce the sugar, not out of guilt but my own taste preference. I generally hate buttercream frostings so even if the recipe sounds good with it, I will switch for cream cheese frosting or a simple glaze.
I hope you enjoy reading and that I inspire you to bake, to your heart's content.
