Category Archives: Personal

If it’s not one thing….

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Thursday, May 21, sometime after 3:30 p.m. We were coasting into the Memorial Day weekend, and my biggest gripe was being stuck on a diet of pureed foods.

I decided to take advantage of the afternoon heat to take a shower. I skipped this ritual yesterday because it is more complicated the it would normally be. I still have a plastic tube in my gut draining small amounts of fluid from the site of my surgery, now 10 days in the past. This complicates things, as I have to be careful not to put pressure on the drain. I managed it so far by wearing a pair of underwear into the shower and clipping the plastic collection bag to it, leaving my hands mostly free.

I quickly realized things were different. Water in the shower/tub was slowly backing up. I tried moving the drain lever to the opposite position. No effect, as far as I could tell. I flipped that switch several times, hoping to hear the sounds of water draining. Nada. So I figured, okay, don’t worry about the backup. We don’t have to take showers tomorrow.

I was just starting a final rinse when the hot water expired. Yikes! If it’s not one thing, it’s another, as Gilda would say. Kids, you’ll just have to look up that reference, I guess.

So my rinse was truncated, and I stepped out. Quickly dried off, then reached down for the pair of shorts I had ready for the occasion. And that’s when I discovered the toilet had overflowed, covering more than half the bathroom floor.

A plumber had apparenty blessed the bathrooms after a recent checkup prior to our arrival. So much for advance preparations.

So there we were, an hour ago. Cursory efforts to mop up the water using bath towels grandly inadequate but the house had been empty for a while and the typical collection of household rags, as well as mops, were no longer available. Meanwhile, Meda was wiping her hands with alcohol wipes and helping replace the bandage at the site of the surgical drain.

A three ring circus.

I thought about just moving to a hotel, but realized that a have delivery of commercial pureed meals arriving tomorrow, exact timing unknown. So we’re kind of stuck.

This one hit us out of left field.

We’re waiting for the plumber to arrive. It’s 82° outside, not quite that in the house. We have two fans that we move around the different rooms as the sun changes position.

And I thought being stuck with pureed food was the biggest problem we faced.

The breakfast challenge

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I’m up early on my first full day after getting out of the UCSF adult cancer hospital late Saturday afternoon. Meda, as well as her sister and husband are, as far as I can tell, still asleep in their beds.

I want to take my first round of pills, but decided not to do that on an empty stomach. I should eat first. So I scrounged. Remember that I’m on a gruel diet, more properly referred to as a pureed diet. Everything is to be ground into a fine mush. Everything.

To bypass the need for a blender this morning, I went for already soft and blended ingredients.

I found a large coffee cup. Added close to a cup of yogurt, then a scoop of protein powder. Then, unable to figure out where the silverware is hiding, I pulled a spoon out of last night’s clean dishes and put a spoonful of smooth peanut butter into the mix. Still scrounging, I found honey and added a bit to the mix. I failed to get blender instructions last night, or I would have added half a banana. And I’m not at all sure what liquid to cut the whole concoction with. Milk would be perfect, but this household is into alternatives to dairy, milk, soy, etc. So I decided to just stay with the thick version.

My concoction is full of protein and calories, tastes okay, and I think it will be a fine breakfast. Then I’ll turn to the pills. Two different things for pain management, an antibiotic, and my regular blood pressure medication. Taking pills is not my favorite exercise, so I’m not looking forward to this.

My breakfast isn’t perfect, and not really by the book, but it doesn’t seem like a bad start.

And it is a beautiful California morning with clear blue sky and lots of sun. Of course, it’s San Francisco, so it’s also cold (by our standards at least) with a chilly wind.

Post-Surgery update #4

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3-14-2026

This tiny serving of orange Jell-O was the first food or liquid of any kind that I’ve had my mouth since Saturday night. It tasted wonderful, and I savored each spoonful. Then I moved on to a 4.23 ounce box of apple juice from concentrate. It also massaged my taste buds. And, finally, I got to sip on a small serving of vegetable broth. I’m hoping for chicken broth later in the day, but we’ll see.

I am restricted to a clear liquids-only diet for the time being as my system begins to power up again. It’s not so bad. At least, not as bad as I thought it would be. After not eating for so long, everything taste really good.

It’s been an interesting morning. Non-nursing staff throughout the University of California San Francisco system were scheduled to go on strike this morning. I think it’s something like 40,000 people. So as of early this morning, nursing staff were here, but there were no nursing assistants or other staff on duty.

I waved off Meda and other family members who wanted to visit ,thinking that they would have to cross a pick up line to come and visit. I just told them I’m doing fine and they don’t need to cross the line. But then I read the news and found they had reached a last-minute deal, and not long after that the nursing assistants and other staff started showing up for work.

Meda’s two sisters and their husbands live in the area here in and around San Francisco, and we have several friends who are here as well, so I’ve had a busy social calendar, holding Court here in my hospital room, dressed in my flimsy hospital gown and wrapped in a blanket to protect myself from the ravages of the freezing temperatures here in the hospital.

All in all, I can’t complain.

Remembering my mother on Mother’s Day

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This is a repost from another Mother’s Day several years ago.

This was a year that would have created problems for us.

Mother’s Day on May 10. My mom’s birthday on May 15. The problem was that we lived across the island and had busy professional lives in town. Two separate celebrations in the same week was hard for us to fit in, but the background guilt of letting one of these occasions go unrecognized was also hard to cope with. I recall that we ended up with one event, lunch or dinner, but with presents attributed to both occasions.

That seemed to work relatively well.

Musing about my mother….

I wasn’t home schooled, but I was definitely home educated by my mother, Helen Yonge Lind.

She encouraged me to read, and helped me break the rules when the librarian at the Kaimuki Library said I was too young to venture into the adult book section.

She also gave me the best single piece of advice ever, which I later found applicable far beyond its original context.

When she finally got tired of my endless questions how to make this or that in her tiny kitchen, she finally told me: “If you can read, you can cook.”

And then she shared her cookbook, a small three-ring binder with recipes carefully typed, then revised with handwritten notes based on experience, changing quality of ingredients, etc.

Now I could look recipes up myself.

“If you can read, you can cook.”

Sage advice.

I’ve later applied that in many other areas of life. Reading is a core skill. Master it. Love it. You’ll go a long way.

This photo was taken on the back steps from the living room of my parent’s house in Kahala, leading down onto the lanai and the back yard. It’s a scene that no longer exists, because when we renovated the old house after her death, we built a back deck at the same level as the house, rather than a lanai at ground level.

In any case, I can still remember this scene, repeated many times, the anticipation when turning the crank on the little music box and waiting for the punch line, “Pop! Goes the weasel!” Somehow knowing how it was going to end didn’t take away from the pleasure I got from it each and every time.

My mother died at the end of January 2013, a few months short of her 99th birthday.