Unwired!

by Elouise

Trader Joe's British Muffins

Dear Friends,

The wires are off my jaw, and the end is upon me! The end of Strictly Pureed Food, that is. Chewing (what is that, anyway?) is number one on the list of skills I need to relearn.

Granted, it’s slow going, and if I were to depend on chewing alone to get the food ready to meet my stomach, I’d be one dead woman.

What does it feel like? It feels like my left-side teeth are being ground down to my jaw. From my inner-ear perspective, it sounds like boulders scraping down the side of a hill.

Seriously, I hope my lower choppers are intact when I finally can hit the Sweet Spot automatically. It’s there. I know it is. It just takes a while to find it. Then it goes right back into hiding.

My Best Food Friend? Classic Trader Joe’s British Muffins! I can slather tuna salad on half a toasted English muffin and practice chomping away without having everything disintegrate into disgusting bits and pieces that fly around in my mouth and get stuck in my teeth.

Food and rest are my major activities on any given day. Fatigue is my worst enemy, though I finally have guidance about how to defeat it.

Yes, there’s a story behind that:

Last Wednesday I landed in the emergency room at a nearby hospital for most of the day. Problem? Way-too-low blood pressure in the morning. Multiple tests and hours later my wonderful Lucy Pacemaker doctor told me the problem was most likely simple. Not enough salt in my diet!

Can you believe it? I couldn’t.

For over 10 years my doctors have advised a low sodium diet. I’m a Good Girl (aren’t I?) so I did what the doctors ordered. Then, just about the time Lucy arrived I started a med to lower my blood pressure. Oops.

Ever since then I’ve had several very low readings a week. Yes, I reported this to the doctor. But they weren’t like the reading I had last Wednesday. I’m grateful to be alive. It seems my weight has gone down enough during the last 7 weeks to trigger alarms in my body.

So my doctor’s orders changed: Put salt in everything! (Well, just about.) Don’t worry about too much right now. If that happens, you can adjust. Add salt to everything you eat! Buy salted nuts and seeds! Buy salted chips and dip! Try it! Your Body will like it!

He also said I would know within a very short time whether he was correct. Which I did. That night and every night since then, I slept well. The next morning and every morning after that I’ve been alert, had energy, and felt like an almost-new woman. I still have fatigue, but I don’t feel I’m losing touch with who I am and what it means to be alive.

In my Misadventure post, I talked about the irony of having my jaws wired so that I couldn’t speak. I want unwired jaws! The ability to tell the truth, no matter what. So as of last Friday, I now have them.

Thanks for reading this update written by me, Unwired!

Elouise♥

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 19 June 2016
Photo from lolitafontaine.wordpress.com