Good advice?

A month or so ago my pulmonologist suggested that I try Spiriva (tiotropium bromide). Spiriva has been on the market for about ten years. Boehringer Engelheim had partnered with Pfizer on the development and marketing of this product, and it was one of the drugs to which I was assigned for a while. Even at the time I was already struggling with pulmonary disease, although I was not using oxygen full time and kept my condition mostly to myself. I can still remember hearing discussions about levels of FEV₁ in the 25% range and having some of the physicians regard this as practically being at death’s door. By then my FEV₁ was below that, but there I was travelling to Germany for meetings!

Over the years I have tried many different inhaled medications for COPD, and none have been particularly helpful; if anything, using them would bring on terrible fits of coughing. I was never prescribed Spiriva until about a month ago, when my pulmonologist suggested it might be worth a try, although those commercials with the elephant sitting on the woman’s chest really do not work for me. To be honest, I did not remember anything about side effects and did not read the package insert before beginning therapy. But within a few days I started experiencing dry mouth. Barry and I went on line and read that rinsing the mouth after use might help. We also read suggestions to use Biotene. So I did those things, but it is still a troublesome side effect. So today I sat down to read a bit more, and I found a most curious item in the list of suggestions for handling dry mouth:

Avoid tobacco and alcohol, as these substances can also dry out the mouth.

Tobacco? You mean to tell me that Spiriva is a reason for a patient with pulmonary disease to avoid tobacco?

That one surely left me scratching my head!

Love,

Rebecca

All good things must come to an end

This is the phrase that came to mind during Finial Jeopardy this evening. I did not know its origin, so I looked on-line and found that Geoffrey Chaucer penned the phrase in his poem titled "Troilus and Criseyde," completed in the mid-1380s.

Julia did not quite seem at the top of her game this evening. But that in no way detracts from her wonderful accomplishment over the past four weeks. We will miss her sweet smile and calm manner, and look forward to seeing her on future “Jeopardy Tournaments of Champions.”

Love,

Rebecca

Take me out from the ballgame?

We had a nice Sabbath, saw quite a few friends at synagogue and spent a quiet afternoon at home. We ate our lunch outside but by mid-afternoon the skies began to darken and eventually it started to rain, so we had to retreat indoors.

I am beginning to think that I am bad luck to our baseball teams. Although the Mets did win that last game we attended, they only won after we left. Today we headed to Yankee Stadium for a day game against The Minnesota Twins. Yankee Stadium is very close to our house, but we had never been there so we left plenty early to have time to figure out where to park and orient ourselves around the area. Because it is a “city” stadium in a very congested area, the parking is not nearly as straightforward as at CitiField where the Mets play. We were somewhat surprised by the number of cars when we arrived 1½ hours before the game. We found our way to the handicap entrance and then to the section where our seats were located. What was extremely odd was that, although we had purchased an accessible seat and the row was “labeled” as accessible (with the usual symbol),

the only way to get to that row was to walk up 4 steps!  Fortunately I can do this, but we are still scratching our heads about the little picture of a wheelchair next to a flight of stairs. Then we had to spend time trying to find out what to do with the wheelchair, because there were few attendants and the first two we asked had no idea how to handle this. Finally we were shown an area within our view where we could leave the chair. All in all, I am sad to say they did not earn high marks for handicap services.

It does leave me wondering whether the management of the park would prefer not to see people with disabilities there at all (hence my header). Seeing someone with oxygen in a wheelchair may strike some people as their worst nightmare. Certainly if I could turn all this around, I would. But I am glad that there are at least enough people out there who are willing to accommodate those of us who have challenges and make available disability seating and parking so that we are not imprisoned in our houses. But back to the game….

After a little excitement early on, including the Twins scoring one run in the 3^rd inning and the Yankees scoring two runs in the 4^th, neither team scored any more until the top of the 9^th when the Twins scored 6 runs - yes, you read that correctly, 6 runs! We saw no point sitting through the bottom of the ninth, and by the time we got to the car and turned on the radio, the game was over, final score Twins 7 and Yankees 2.  So you can see why I am beginning to think I should stay away from baseball games. In fact, recently the Mets have been doing pretty well without me there. We have tickets for a Mets game when Joshua will be visiting us later this summer, and we have 2 tickets for another Yankees game given to us by a friend who has season tickets and cannot use one of the days Joshua will be with us; Barry and Joshua will use those two tickets. So assuming that I am the source of the bad luck for the New York teams, maybe they will at least see the Yankees win.

I have one other bone to pick with Yankee Stadium. Barry went to buy me some ice cream. I prefer to eat from a dish than a cone because cones can be so messy. But the only “dish” they had was a whole PINT of ice cream. That is 4 servings! Someone please call Morgan Spurlock (of the 2004 movie “Super Size Me”). Even if I could eat that much, I hope I would stop myself from doing it. Of course Barry bought it anyway (because that’s just the kind of guy he is) but needless to say most of it went to the garbage.

We will be heading up to Sharon on Tuesday for Shavuot.  So you all get a break from me for a few days.

Have a wonderful week.

Love,

Rebecca

She won!

Julia Collins Wins 20th Victory On 'Jeopardy!'

What more can I say? It was a real cliff-hanger but we were thrilled when she got that Final Jeopardy and had wagered enough to beat the second place player. Her total winnings are now $428,100.

Go Julia!

Love,

Rebecca

Cheese glorious cheese

And while we are on the topic of food….next week is the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, or Weeks, seven to be precise, since Pesach (Passover). This practice is known as Counting the Omer. Traditional Jews actually count the days, one by one, according to a specific formula: today is the 45^th day, and we count by saying a blessing followed by

Today is 45 days, which is 6 weeks and 3 days of the Omer

Barry and I have long had a tradition that we count together each evening. In order to remember, we hang what is known as an Omer Calendar on the door to our bedroom so that we remember each night to stop and do the count. I am forever cognizant of the fact that two years ago this lovely tradition was completely obliterated, so something that we always found a sweet custom has become all that much sweeter now.

There is a strong tradition to eat dairy foods on Shavuot. I wrote about this in a post on May 9^th of last year, but will briefly repeat here. One of the reasons given for this custom is that when the Jewish people received all the instructions at Mount Sinai, they were only first learning about the laws for properly slaughtering cows and preparing meat. They needed some time to get their act together, so meanwhile they ate dairy. So Shavuot is a vegetarian’s delight! Often when people eat Shabbat and holiday meals at our home, they are disappointed not to have the meat or chicken they are accustomed to eating. But on Shavuot, everyone expects cheese blintzes, vegetarian lasagna, and cheesecake. If I say so myself, I do make a mean cheesecake: not heart healthy but really good!

This year our Shavuot will be further enhanced by a friend of our daughters who has been baking and selling challot (the braided bread we eat on Shabbat and holidays) under the name Mandylicious. For Shavuot she is offering three special options:

Gooey Cheese Filled Challah, with Ranch or Marinara (Challzone!)

Cheesecake Challah with Chocolate Dipping Sauce (WOW!)

Cream Cheesy Spinach Artichoke Challah

We are not big artichoke fans but we did order the first two. I suspect we will use these more for dessert than for the meals. But we also have my cheesecake, which will be tough competition.

Before I leave the subject of cheese, here is a commercial for the American Dairy Board that ran frequently in the 1980s. It is great fun just to watch!

Because we will be going to Sharon early next week for Shavuot, we are spending this Shabbat in New York. Shabbat starts this evening at 8:01 pm. It is permitted to begin an hour early and that is our usual custom during the summer. But tonight we will not start until 7:30 so that we can watch Julia Collins play (and hopefully win) her 20^th Jeopardy game, which will put her in 2^nd place for total number of games won after Ken Jennings, who won 74 games (and $2,520,700) back in 2004. You can see here that the statisticians are having a field day with this (note that this plot is cut off after 20 games). 

To see the full piece on this, here is the link.

Julia Collins, winner of 19 games on Jeopardy

Sunday is predicted to be a beautiful spring day and the Yankees are playing a day game. Barry tells me he has never seen a Yankees game, and like Citi Field (formerly Shea Stadium), Yankee Stadium has also been replaced with a newer model. We do live in the Bronx, after all, and our rabbi and his wife are huge Yankees fans, so Barry bought tickets for Sunday. Barry actually has two box seat tickets for a game to which he plans to take Joshua later this summer; these came from a friend who cannot use them. He told me that he wants to learn about the stadium before taking Joshua there in August, but I think the young boy who was an avid baseball fan has come out of hiding!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Love,

Rebecca

How to boil an egg

Most weeks I look through the Sunday New York Times. Notice I do not say that I read the paper, because that would be excruciatingly slow and painful. But I read little snippets and pursue those that pique my interest. I can read the short ones on-line with my large monitor, and Barry reads some of the longer ones to me. Actually, reading to me is something he has done for years; I can still remember listening to Barry read Franny and Zooey (J.D. Salinger) and The Art of Loving (Erich Fromm) to me during our undergraduate days.

Sometimes he reads me the “Eat” column, often written by Mark Bittman, who is the author of How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food. A few weeks ago the column was titled “Get Cracking,” and focused on recipes using hard boiled eggs, with the following instructions for boiling the eggs:

MASTER HARD-BOILED-EGG RECIPE Choose a pot that will comfortably hold all the eggs you plan to cook. Add the eggs, cover with cold water by 2 inches and put the pot over medium heat. Bring to a gentle boil, turn off the heat and cover the pot; the average large to extra-large egg will be ready in 9 minutes. Transfer the eggs to a large ice bath for about a minute; crack, peel and eat, or refrigerate for up to a week.

I ripped out the two pages and left it in the kitchen in Riverdale, after which I more or less forgot about it. But today I was in the kitchen and noticed a pile of papers in which this was included. Having a fresh carton of eggs, and heeding the old adage that there is no time like the present, I made my attempt. However, mindful of another old adage that old habits die hard, I was plenty nervous.

A slight detour is in order. I used the term adage to refer to the sayings “there is no time like the present” and “old habits die hard.” But in looking for sources for these two phrases, I see that they tend to be called idioms rather than adages. That led me to explore the definitions of these two terms.

Adage: a proverb or short statement expressing a general truth.

Idiom: a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words

It looks to me that either word could be appropriate, so I am going to stick with “adage” here because it more appropriately captures the way I think about these two phrases.

So, which came first, the chicken or the egg? That is a quandary for another day. The question for today is “how did the eggs come out?”  

Very well! This was an experiment, and not wanting to waste too much food, I made just two eggs. The recipe above calls for large or extra-large eggs and specifies that they should sit for 9 minutes; I was using jumbo eggs and left them for 11 minutes. I then put them in an ice bath and, when they were cool, put them in the refrigerator. I was anxious to see them but wanted to wait until Barry came home.

The first egg I pulled out had cracked and was a bit stubborn to peel. But the second egg peeled like a charm. I had forgotten what Mark Bittman said about peeling, but maybe just by chance I did this with the second egg:

There are countless “tricks” to peeling hard- boiled eggs: pricking the shell with a pin before cooking, rolling on a counter to crack every bit of shell, doing a prayer dance. The key, though, is that ice-water bath, followed by cracking them against the countertop and starting to peel from the wider end, where there is usually an air pocket.

What was missing was the dark green you often see around the yolk. The yolks were just a beautiful shade of yellow. So the next time you hard boil eggs, try this approach!

On an entirely unrelated topic, Julia Collins continues to win at Jeopardy: we just watched her win her 18^th game with a total of $391,600 in winnings. If she wins one more game, she will be tied for the #2 spot in the most games won in the history of Jeopardy. Go Julia!

Be well, all.

Love,

Rebecca

In our stars?

I just saw a television advertisement for a new movie, “The Fault in Our Stars.” I believe this film has neither opened in theaters nor been reviewed in the New York Times. To be honest, it does not look like a film Barry and I would ordinarily be likely to see. But if you have caught one of the commercials for it, you could not help but notice that the lead character, a young woman, is using supplemental oxygen via a nasal cannula. That clearly piqued my interest.

The title comes from the Shakespearean play, “Julius Caesar.” In Act I, Scene ii, Cassius, a nobleman, is trying to persuade his friend, Brutus, to stop Julius Caesar from becoming monarch of Rome. Cassius says

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

I am no Shakespearean scholar and I neither recall enough about the play nor know enough about the plot of this movie to comment on precisely how that line fits. However, after seeing a trailer, my attention was drawn to a very different aspect of this film: the main character uses supplemental oxygen. I have commented here previously that, ordinarily in the movies and on television, a nasal cannula signifies that the user is at death’s door. Here, too, the young woman has a disease that will eventually be fatal, but she certainly does not appear to be moments from the end. Instead, she is still trying to continue to live her life as fully as she can with oxygen in tow.

If you have been reading my ramblings then you know that I am not one for a lot of sappy sentimentality. I suspect this film is a real pull at the heartstrings. I also would be quite surprised if it wins wide critical acclaim. Still, there is a small part of me that does applaud the portrayal of a beautiful young woman (played by actress Shailene Woodley) who wears this contraption in public and makes it appear almost routine.

There have been a number of movies released to very good reviews recently but between Passover, Julia, and a lot going on for Barry, we have not seen any of them. Still, I plan to put this one on the list.

Have a good week.

Love,

Rebecca