I am excited beyond belief. My brother is coming up for a visit. He arrives around noon. I cannot help him unload the car, which feels a bit weird. Big hugs all around. I cry a bit.
Fo’ad and Barbara travel together all the time. We spend a lot of time talking. He spends a lot of time on his computer. He still has a business to run. Barbara is always on the computer. She helps run the business, but is also writing a book. I think we should have one implanted in her that is able to read her thoughts.
I convince her to cook a Persian for me. I have not had rice in about two months and miss it terribly. She decides to cook green rice with fish. Fo’ad and Devin are to go shopping the net day for the ingredients. We will start a recipe page at some point and provide you all with a list of foods that helped me through this episode.
Fo’ad is also visibly excited to be here. He was not sure what to expect and is delighted to see me navigating the stairs and walking around. We go for a couple of walks just to make a point. We are still getting a lot of visitors, and Fo’ad gets to meet them all. Included in these is my father-in-law Morris and Qayla.
Devin dices the herbs, and cooks the fish. Barbara cooks a LOT of rice. It was so delicious! I cannot wait till I can cook again.
I started reading a book called AntiCancer that Nancy bought for me. Took me a few days to get through it. I have very little concentration, which makes reading particularly difficult. Unless, of course, you don’t care if you understand a word of what you are reading. Shawn offered to lend me his books by Jeung and Freud. To which all I can say is Hah! Funny man. I can barely make sense of the Saturday comics. I will devote one blog page to the AntiCancer book. It is very informative.
We had to find a place to park my brother’s car so he would not get a ticket. I would normally go to City Hall and get a temporary permit. Some of our neighbours have driveways. Brenda in particular, has a double lot and a huge driveway. You would think we were living in the country. I took a walk to talk to her but she was not home. I opted to go see Marianne instead. The first thing she said was of course we could park in their back yard, followed closely by you have lost a lot of weight. I weighed 180lbs before this ordeal started. I now weigh 160. I lie. This morning I weighed in at 164lbs.
I told her I had discovered the perfect diet. Instant weight loss. The side effects are a bit tedious. A bit like those commercials you see on television. Take this drug, it will do wonders for you, except for the last 10 seconds of the advertisement which lists all the possible side effects. That’s me. Great diet, slight side effects. The usual reactions follow. Shock. But you look great. No worries, you are strong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We talk briefly, and I go home.
My brother is a take charge person. He went shopping with Devin and bought all sorts of things. Including way too much jam. Jam is one the bad foods in my diet. Too much white sugar. If they would replace the sugar with agave, we would be in business, but white sugar is a cancer promoter. More about this later.
The next day, Fo’ad decided to get souvlaki for the whole family. We had a discussion about the fact that souvlaki means pork in greek, so that makes chicken souvlaki, basically a non-entity. He and Dev go out returning some time later with some mediocre food. Turns out that what we call souvlaki, some of these Greek restaurants call Doner. Not quite the same thing. I wanted a greek salad. I feel like a pregnant person. I keep getting cravings. Yummy is all I can say about the salad.m Not the best I have had, but good enough.
My brother did not stay long. He had to go home to Atlanta. His daughter, Khandan was driving up from Louisiana with Scot and the kids. Scot was goiing to help Fo’ad with some construction projects he was working on. They left on Thursday evening. They will drive about three hours and stop at some hotel/motel before finishing the trip the next day.
It was a very good visit. My spirits were uplifted daily. My voice getting stronger. I crashed after he left, but that is a whole other story for another day. Lets leave this on a really positive note. He left promising to come back in a couple of months, probably November. I was in high spirits, very happy and content with my progress and life.
