Melissa | Growing Green Nutrition – Page 9

Suddenly September

Some parents complain that August just drags on — seemingly endless summer days until school starts again, with frequent complaints of “I’m bored” from the peanut gallery. That wasn’t our experience. Between dealing with G’s broken leg and finalizing plans for my return to school, the month of August flew by.

In the first meeting of one of my dietetics classes, the professor asked us to go around and introduce ourselves by stating our name and the most fun/exciting thing we’d done over the summer, and I drew a complete blank. A big ol’ nothing. The two-and-a-half weeks since Gabriel had broken his leg were so intense and draining that everything prior to that (i.e., June and July) was just a blur, a faint and distant memory.

So here we are in September. I am two weeks into the semester and feeling pretty good about pursuing dietetics as a profession. I enjoy the material and the science and math that go along with it.

I am also enjoying the challenge of increased bicycle mileage. I am pretty sure that I’ve been on my bike every day for the past 15 days (there’s one Saturday morning that I don’t quite remember whether or not I ran errands), for a total of 133 miles. That’s quite a bit more than I’d been doing, and it’s apparently enough bike time that I’m now doing bikey things while OFF the bike, like almost using an arm turn signal when walking through a building on campus yesterday — that wouldn’t have looked weird at all, right?

We had another check-up with G’s surgeon yesterday, and everything looks good. He’s been completely off of pain meds for almost a week now. We are just over 4 weeks out, and G is finally starting to walk, with a lot of assistance/support (holding onto our hands plus furniture), though most of the time he still just scoots around on the floor. He’s also enjoying riding his tricycle.

We go back for another check-up in a month, at which point the doctor might recommend some PT (depending on G’s gait), and we’re hoping to have the nails removed in December.

In case August didn’t have enough excitement, we ended the month with a bit of activity on the house-hunt front. We made an offer on a house, but failed (so far?) to reach an agreement with the seller. Then, last Thursday, I took a different route to school, and saw a For Sale sign in front of a [previously off-market] property that we’d been interested in for awhile. It seemed like fate — I’d just happened to take that route right after negotiations on the other property had ended, and, as it turned out, just five days before bids on this property were due.

We soon discovered that this latest property was a bit of an odd-ball, not really set up for standard home buyers. After a bit of back and forth with our Realtor and a third party, we figured out a round-about way to get our foot in the door on the bidding. We have no idea how many people we’re competing against or what those other offers will look like, so now we just wait.

Adding moving to what already feels like a crazy next few months is not exactly my idea of a good time, but after house hunting for over six years, we can’t really pass up a good opportunity due to “inconvenience.” Moving will likely be a pain whenever it happens, and we’ll just have to deal with it when the time comes. And, in reality, there’s a decent chance that that time will NOT be now.

So, now that we’re in September, what’s the most fun or exciting thing YOU did over the summer? Or what are you most looking forward to with fall approaching?

Curried coleslaw

I was planning to make coleslaw a few weeks ago, but my usual recipes all sounded a bit blah. I love a good slaw with peanut or sesame dressing (good recipe here), and my MIL makes a lovely Greek slaw, but I was in the mood for something a bit different, so I turned to the interwebs, where I came across some interesting slaw variations, including a recipe for Curry Bacon Slaw.

I decided to give it a try, minus the bacon. I had a bit of leftover masaman curry paste in the fridge (masaman curry paste is one of the few store-bought canned goods that we regularly have on hand; I usually don’t use the entire can when I make a batch of curry, which leaves some extra to mix into things (it’s great in sweet potato or winter squash soup)), and I decided to use that in place of the curry powder and cayenne (the masaman has plenty of heat for us).

While I’ve entertained some fantasies about BLTs recently, finding a replacement for the bacon in the recipe was easy enough. I often top my slaw with toasted sunflower seeds (or peanuts for the peanut/sesame slaw). I started with my go-to sunflower seeds here. They work fine, but toasted cashews work even better.

Note: In the above picture, the coleslaw is accompanied by my first attempt at a barbecue jackfruit sandwich, which will be the subject of another post. Now, on to the recipe!

CURRIED COLE SLAW

Recipe by Melissa, adapted from Curry Bacon Slaw recipe at thesavory.com
Serves 6-8

Ingredients
Dressing
1/4 c. mayonaise
1/4 c. plain [unsweetened] yogurt (regular or Greek)
2 T. white vinegar
1/2 t. salt
1-2 t. masaman curry paste (this is the kind I buy from our local global foods store)
1/2 t. sugar
2/3 c. toasted cashews
———–
Veggies
5 c green and/or red cabbage, shredded or cut very finely (can also sub in some kohlrabi and/or turnips here)
1 carrot, cut into matchsticks (okay, to omit, but adds nice color)
1/2 small red onion, thinly sliced

Directions
Whisk together all dressing ingredients to make a rich, thick dressing. Taste, and add more salt and/or curry paste if desired (at this point it should taste fairly salty, since the veggies haven’t diluted the dressing as all).

Prep your veggies. I cut the cabbage by hand and use a box grater for the kohlrabi and turnips.

Pour dressing over prepared vegetables and refrigerate at least one hour (2-4 hours would be even better) before serving. To serve, garnish with toasted cashews. Enjoy!

Brain and body boot camp

So much to say, so little time! I just completed my first week of dietetics classes. My career exploration over the past 6 months (and really over the past year, if you count the PA school detour) led to this point. I’m about as sure as I can be that this is a good decision, maybe 98% certain (and yes, that 2% unsure is really scary for me!).

Anyhow, I am enrolled part-time at Fontbonne University. Over the next three years, I will be completing the junior- and senior-level dietetics coursework (9-11 hours/semester), followed by a year-long internship (unpaid and you pay for the privilege) before I can sit for the R.D. exam.

I plan to continue working part-time, so classes plus paid work will be a full-time job. My current coursework is pretty basic, which is okay, because getting back into the swing of being a student, and balancing work, school, and home, will be enough of a mental challenge for now.

On the physical side of things, I am on campus three days a week, and I plan to bike for as many of those trips as possible. The 15-mile round-trip bike ride is much more than I’ve been doing recently, since most of my weekly “errand” rides are within a two- to three-mile radius of our home. Fortunately, the weather gods have been smiling on St. Louis, which has made the bike commuting quite pleasant, if not entirely easy (so far, the trip home always seems easier than the trip there).

In case the additional 45 miles of biking a week weren’t enough, Matthew and I just started another aerial silks class. It took us awhile to find something that worked with our schedules, but after a 5+ month hiatus following the Intro Silks class, we began Silks 1 last week. I was pretty nervous going into it, but Intro Silks, plus some open gym sessions, evidently drilled things into our brains and muscles fairly well.

Our first Silks 1 class also marked the first time we traveled to Bumbershoot by bike. Despite being a perfectly bikeable [just a hair over] four miles away, the timing and weather conditions during the winter session consigned us to car trips (or walking plus bus for me, a couple of times). So in addition to the extra biking to school, I’ll be getting an additional 8.5 miles on the bike with this.

This sudden increase in activities will leave me less time for writing, but I am using Twitter and Instagram more (yes, I may be a bit addicted to my four-month-old smart phone), so follow me there if you haven’t already!

Broken leg aftermath

It’s been a heck of a two weeks, friends. In many ways, having a young child with a serious injury is a flashback to those [seemingly] endless days of early infancy as a new parent. The first night in the E.R./hospital gave us a head start on the exhaustion, which just builds with each middle-of-the-night pain med wake up. There was inconsolable crying, the feeling of not knowing what the heck we were doing (as I mentioned the discharge instructions could have been clearer), general lack of predictability, and little-to-no time for self-care. I spent the entire first week in a deep mental fog.

Thankfully, except for a few blips (when we tried to ditch the oxycodone too soon), G hasn’t been waking at night except when we wake him for the scheduled pain meds (and most of the time he barely wakes then). The alarm on my phone goes off at 3a.m. every morning, and I drag myself out of bed and into the kitchen to get the drugs. For the first week, I was tired enough that I got back to sleep pretty quickly. This week, that ability seems to have disappeared, and I often spend those remaining hours tossing and turning. (In another flashback to G’s infancy, I decided that if I’m getting up, I need a middle of the night snack, even though this time around, it isn’t fueling breastfeeding.)

Last Saturday, one week after the surgery, G finally saw the light of day when we took a stroll to our neighborhood’s new Little Free Library. Getting out was good for him, and we followed up on Sunday with the first car outing. Holding 40-pounds of anxious child in just the right position to avoid pain while wrangling him into the middle-positioned car seat in a small car is quite the feat. Still, we not only made it work, we repeated it again on Monday (when Matthew took off work to help care for G at his mom’s house, giving me a MUCH-needed break) and then again on Tuesday for G’s first post-op doctor appointment.

Other than the tech positioning G’s leg for the x-ray, which was quite painful, based on his screams, the visit went smoothly. We got our first peek at the new hardware (it was also the first time I saw the break).

Hip joint visible at the top, knee bone at the bottom, and some big ol’ titanium nails. Matthew and I were both surprised to see how off-set the bone is still. The doc said that was completely normal (and that it would have been more off-set if we’d done casting instead of the nails). The surgical incisions also looked good (a relief, given my surgical site infection fears!), and with that, we were told to come back in three weeks.

This week, we managed to get him off the couch, and by Wednesday, he was spending most of the time sitting on the floor (or in his booster seat on the floor) playing. He has not attempted to crawl yet (despite a bit of gentle prodding), but he his bearing some weight on the leg, scooting around on the floor from the sitting position — as he’s gotten more comfortable with it, it kind-of looks like a crab-walk.

We started to cut back the oxycodone for the second time (after our first, too-soon attempt). It seems that ibuprofen or acetaminophen are sufficient for pain control now, but he did have what we suspect were some opioid withdrawal symptoms (agitation and inconsolable crying for no reason), so we’re trying to dial it back slowly.

My mental fog seems to have lifted this week, though in the logistics of getting G loaded into the car on Thursday afternoon, I left our front door wide open while we were gone for almost three hours. Thankfully, we do at least have a storm door that was closed. Also, this was another flashback to G’s infancy — one morning in those early months, I went down our front stairs, only to discover that we’d left our front door open all night long. Oops!

Yesterday marked our first post-break bike ride. Big Blue has been a bit neglected since we got the tag-a-long in May, but she’s just what we need now. I removed one side of the Hooptie to make it easier to get G into his seat, which he said felt just fine. Getting him onto the bike is much easier than getting him into the car (though the logistics of getting me, our stuff, and then him, in my arms, out of our second-floor apartment are tricky with any mode of transportation — walking is the easiest).

The trickiest part here was strapping the stroller (necessary once we reached our destination) onto the bike. A couple of bungees worked well enough for our short trip to the library and Target.

If all goes well (knock on wood), Matthew and I will be getting a much-needed break this week when G goes to Tennessee with my MIL. For the past two weeks, we’ve been back-and-forth on whether or not that trip (which has been planned since June) would happen or not, but as of now they’re a “go” to leave on Monday. I need to reconnect to my mindfulness practice, and a few nights without that darned 3a.m. alarm will be most welcome!

Friday night E.R. lights

Friday started innocently enough. The newly be-Hooptied Big Blue was finally ready to ride (after a bit of a debacle involving the internal hub and a missing o-ring), and we towed Lightning to the park for a morning ride.

The previous week, we’d made some progress in riding Lightning after I added some homemade streamers to the ends of the handlebars and made a game out of riding the circle path around the playground. His interest was strong the first two days but already starting to fade.

Later in the day, after not napping, we hooked Green Bike to Midnight (finally picked a name for my 3-month-old bike) and headed out for a multi-modal trip to meet up with my family, who were visiting from Iowa for the weekend.

Two mile bike ride and 10 minutes on the MetroLink later (I rotated the Burley Piccolo almost 180 degrees to fit on the train), we were at the hotel where my family was staying. Easy peasy!

An outdoor pool is a nice amenity for summer StL visits, and we changed into our suits and headed to the pool (I was wishing I’d worn mine under my clothes so I could just jump in after the hot bike ride!).

Things went south from there. I was just about ready to join G and my mom in the pool (after getting all sun-screened and letting it have some time to sink in), when G came out for a little break. I don’t remember what he was heading for, but he was running on the pool deck. I was a few steps behind and literally starting to say, “Don’t run next to the pool,” when we experienced the consequence of said action.

He slipped and landed really awkwardly, kind of a side split, but with knees bent instead of straight. Given the position, I was assuming he’d pulled or strained something in the groin. He was in quite a bit of pain, and ice and time didn’t seem to alleviate it. We got him back to the hotel room, and he held his leg very awkwardly. There was some swelling, but no bruising, and after consulting with a nurse on the after-hours exchange line, we headed to the E.R. at Children’s Hospital. By that point, I was pretty convinced that something was wrong — I’ve never seen him that upset/inconsolable.

They started pain meds, and took him for some x-rays. Soon enough, we heard the news: spiral fracture to his right femur (the long bone in the upper leg). Our treatment options were either spica casting (basically a huge cast, from his waist down past his knee on the right leg, and possibly including some of the upper left leg) or titanium elastic nailing (TEN) of the femur, a surgical procedure which would involve no cast and allow him to start bearing weight as soon as he was ready. Either way, it would be done under full anesthesia, and we would be waiting until morning.

They put his leg in a very temporary cast for the night. The manipulation this required was pretty tortuous, even with morphine in his system, as he was crying and screaming, “No, please no, please don’t do that!” — agonizing for him and for me and my mom.

Matthew stayed with him at the hospital overnight, and I headed home to do a bit more research on our treatment options before attempting to get a bit of sleep. The TEN procedure seemed like a no-brainer in most ways, both for G and his caregivers, and it was what the pediatric orthopedic surgeon recommended (“What I would do for my kid”). There wasn’t a ton of information either way. We were concerned about the risk of surgical site infection with the TEN procedure (not an issue with the spica casting, since it doesn’t involve surgery), but in the end, we went with that option.

Saturday morning a bit before nine, he was wheeled into surgery. Sometime after ten, the surgeon found us in the waiting room and said we would be able to see him in a bit, and the procedure had gone as planned.

The green is not a cast, just a stretchy bandage covering the incisions from the surgery. After some time monitoring him, a visit from a physical therapist, a trip to the pharmacy for oxycodone, and much crying about the transfer, we headed home on Saturday night, a little over twenty four hours after arriving at the E.R.

We had great care overall, and were fortunate to be at a state-of-the-art children’s hospital. I do feel the hospital staff could have done a bit better job preparing us for what to expect once we got home, i.e., how much pain he would be in, wound/dressing care, etc. I also wonder if some kind of splint or brace would have been useful, but that was never mentioned or offered.

The past few days have been challenging for all of us — a temporary return to the days of having a needy young infant: lots of inconsolable crying, sleep-deprived parents, multiple night-time wakings (even if he’s sleeping, we need to make up to give him more pain meds). Those were not my best days, and I’m trying to stay positive this time around.

Despite the fact that, bone structure-wise, he theoretically could be bearing weight on the leg now, he is clearly far, far from being ready for that. I think the way they presented the procedure was a bit misleading in that aspect.

He is clearly still in a lot of pain, compounded by his anxiety about the pain. I almost think he has some kind of PTSD from all of the pain of the initial trauma, plus the limb being manipulated in the E.R., and then just being in so much pain for so long (he was on pain meds all night on Friday night, but nothing but the morphine seemed to help much, and they were hesitant to give that). Now, anytime we go to move him, he freaks out, crying and screaming before we even touch him. Afterward, he often admits that it didn’t actually hurt (although sometimes, despite our best efforts, it does). I’m not sure how to help him past the psychological issues.

We’re not pushing movement right now, other than wiggling toes and flexing the ankle, but we do have to move him sometimes (e.g., to sit on the toilet — we have a thing for him to pee in; we could use a diaper for bowel movements, but we would likely have to move him just as much, if not more, to clean him afterward, so potty it is!), at which point he usually screams bloody murder and tries to push us away.

We confirmed that the seemingly odd/awkward position he favors, with the leg angled outward, is not a problem, and they gave us another script for more oxycodone (they were really stingy the first time around); as much as we would like to wean him from the hard stuff, acetaminophen and ibuprofen just don’t seem to be cutting it yet.

After consulting with the hospital staff, we decided that the coordination required for a walker, much less crutches, was probably too complicated at this age. The expectation is that he’ll start bearing weight on the leg as he’s ready, first crawling, then pulling himself up and walking with assistance, and finally walking unaided, so, basically learning to walk all over again, but a faster progression (theoretically — we’ll see with this naturally cautious, and now anxiety-ridden, child — he may just decide it’s safer to crawl everywhere for the rest of his life).

Share this:

Note: In the above picture, the coleslaw is accompanied by my first attempt at a barbecue jackfruit sandwich, which will be the subject of another post. Now, on to the recipe!

CURRIED COLE SLAW

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: