Veggies, Fruits and Meet my Mom

Today I think I will write about my mom, since she's been on my mind a bit lately. I don't know, probably since it's her birthday this month. Shall we get started?

My mom was bat shit crazy. Ok, maybe not bat shit, but she was crazy. There are a lot of mental issues that run in her family. More on that some other time, or maybe later on in this post. There was something about her that just was just a bit off. I can't really explain it, maybe quirky would be a better way of putting it. Either way, as a teenager growing up with her, it made life...interesting.

You might notice that I speak about her in past tense, and that is because in 1995 she passed away. In 1984 my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, and my mom being herself decided that chemo and radiation was not for her. Now look at the above years. Subtract 1984 from 1995. That's eleven years my mom lived without taking mainstream treatments until the last year of her life. Almost a year before she died, she decided to try the chemo. It didn't work. I'm going to share with you her amazing journey, because it is amazing and it certainly had God's hand in it.

I don't remember the month, but sometime in 1984 when my mom told me to sit on her bed with her because she had something to tell me. (We just happened to be in her room.) I hopped up on her bed and said, "what's up?" I was around twelve years old at the time. She started to cry, and I knew it wasn't good. She told me that a couple of weeks before she had gone to the doctors and they had found a lump in her breast. She told me she just came back from speaking with the specialist. It was confirmed that she had breast cancer and the doctor told her that she had 6 months or less to live. BAM! Life as we both knew it ended that day.

 She made the decision to forgo the mainstream treatments, due to other family members dying while taking them. Her philosophy was that it was the chemo and radiation that killed the family members. She very well could have been accurate,  but I'm no specialist. In place of the mainstream treatments she went all natural. This woman was way ahead of the times, and it was hell for a teenager who liked to snack on junk food. She also kept having the tumors removed when they occasionally came back.

Let me explain a bit here for you. These fads you see now and days about, I don't know lets say, Pomegranate juice. She was doing this WAY before it became the norm or the fad. I don't know where she got her information from since there was no internet as we know it today, but I notice today, that everything, and I do mean everything she used to preach to me about health and nutrition is true. I remember when I moved to my dads house when I was 14, and while going through things and packing up I found the stash of vitamins that I hid everyday. There were a butt load of them! Can you tell I was not on the health food bandwagon yet?

My mom continued to try alternative treatments to cure her cancer, and during this time her being a woman who already was very religious turned ultra religious. She had a ritual so to speak. She would take her vitamins, go to the Chiropractor, eat all natural foods which included juicing, and pray like there was no tomorrow, because for her there might not have been another day.  She would go in for her follow-ups and 9 times out of ten there was no cancer to be found. That other one percent...yeah it was cancer. Usually when the cancer re-appeared it  was during the times where she wasn't eating her diet, and praying like she usually did. Many times she would come home and say they found a tumor, and go back on her routine, to have the tumor completely gone at the next visit.

She did this despite the fact that EVERYONE told her she was crazy and was going to die. She lost many friends because she refused to do the mainstream treatments. Family members refused to speak with her because of it. 
I  was stuck in the middle. Today I understand the reasoning behind everyone's insistence that she go mainstream. It was because it was what they knew. It was what everyone did. My mom's approach was new, and almost unheard of. They were afraid it wouldn't work, and they didn't want to see her die. cancer is after all scary enough to deal with without going outside the box. 

So for eleven years everyone held their breath as they sat there and waited for that day. We all new she would die from the cancer, just didn't know when it would happen. I used to think about when she died, as the day of relief. The wait was finally over, and I no longer had to stand there and wonder when it would happen. Looking back I realize that was the worse thing anyone could have done for her. How hard was it to keep going on when nobody believed in what you were doing? We essentially were planning her death. Actually, I just realized this as I was writing and am having a bitch of a time dealing with this realization. 

My mom had my brother when she was 43 years old and went into stage 4 cancer. I remember the day she told me she was pregnant, and I asked her if she was stupid.  How could she be so selfish to bring a child into the world knowing that it would probably kill her, and her child would grow up without her. Her answer to me was, "God decided that this was to be." Now don't get me wrong here, I believe in God, I really do. However in all honesty I certainly do not have the faith that my mom did, and her religiousness was driving me crazy. 

Through out this time her cancer had gone from her breast to her lymph nodes, to her bones, and in the end, into her blood. Let me click back a bit here, and let you know that she did make an appointment with the doctor who first diagnosed her and told her she had six months to live and when she told him how she was going to treat it he then gave her a month. Six years after that diagnose she walked in with her head held high and told that doctor to shove his diagnose where the sun don't shine. In a very religious way of course.

In January of 1995 I had my daughter. I called my mom who lived 4+hours away at 4:00am and told her it was time. She drove 260 miles to witness her first grandchild be born. She arrived 15 minutes after I was admitted, she asked if she could take a seat, and I asked her why she was walking funny she told me when the cancer entered her bones it had weakened two of her vertebrates and they were crushed. I asked her where my step-dad was, and she told me he was at home nursing something or other from surgery. She had driven herself all that ways with two crushed vertebrates! Hell fucking yeah she could have a seat! 


That was about the time where things for her started to really head south. It was also the time where she went on the chemo pack. I was at home one day when she called me from the hospital. She wanted me to call the nurses station because they weren't answering the call button. Problem here, I had no clue which hospital she was in. The only info she could give me was she was in Madison WI, and she was freezing. She could hardly talk she was so cold. After playing phone tag with several hospitals and churches to locate my mom or my step-dad I headed out to Madison without a clue as to where I was going, but with one goal in mind. Find my mom, and figure out what the hell was going on. I made the five hour drive in three hours. Little did I know she would be gone in two weeks.

By this time the cancer had entered her bloodstream and was having the worst impact on her than in all the other years put together. It was causing too much calcium to be produced and the side effects of this were that she was very tired and slept a lot. The doctors were able to keep it under control for awhile, but in the end it did a huge spike and essentially what happened was that she went to bed and never woke up again. She fought the cancer for eleven years, but in the end...the calcium in the bloodstream took her in a matter of months. ( Side note here. Just because a person has high calcium levels doesn't not mean they have cancer. What happened to my mom is very rare, and only some times happens with people in late stage cancer.)


She passed in November of 1995, eleven months after she witnessed her first grandchild being born. My little brother was only three years old. My mom taught me many things about taking care of my body and being healthy, and for years I scorned it and laughed at it. It's come full circle now, as I currently am having health issues, and bit by bit I am remembering the things I was taught. I am also kicking myself in the ass for not listening in the first place. Don't you know? Mothers always know best. Slowly I'm changing my life into a healthier one, and I'm sure just like my mom, I too will be ridiculed for going against the mainstream, and being a bit quirky, but it's  all good, she's got my back.

The Missing Meat Loaf Recipe.

Awhile back, I don't know like some years ago, I was on the quest to find a Meat Loaf recipe. I had never made Meat Loaf, but only ate it. 

So I went to my go to place for just about everything in my life. The great internet. I looked high and I looked low. I studied the recipes, pictured how the ingredients would taste together, went back and forth, finally I had it narrowed down to two. Close enough, I could work with that.

So I tried the first one, not very impressed. Don't get me wrong, it made a good loaf, but it sure wasn't like mom used to make. So the next time I tried recipe number two. Even farther off the mark with that one. Was wishing I just had my mom's recipes.

Let's fast forward three years to the present. I was digging through mom's recipe boxes, and what did I find? Not one, but two of mom's Meat Loaf recipes! I had the little buggers all along! Three years ago I never thought to dig through the recipe boxes. Sigh...

So of course I made them, well I made one of them, and it was just like mom used to make! (don't figure since it was her recipe) 

My mom loved to cook. Thing is, unless she was following a recipe to the T, it usually wasn't very good. I, as her guinea pig can attest to that. She collected most of her recipes from friends, books, and who knows where else. I'm not sure if there is any in those boxes that she actually came up with, but the ones I do have are one's I grew up on. I loved most of them, and I enjoy making them for my family so they can have a bit of grandma even though she has passed. 

So today I bring you:

Mom's Sour Cream Meat Loaf

For the filling:

1/2 c. chopped onions

1 c. mushrooms

2 Tbsp. butter or margarine

1/3 c. sour cream

For the loaf:

1 1/2 lbs ground beef

2/3 c. oatmeal

1 egg

1/4 tsp. pepper

2 tsp. salt 

1tsp Worcestershire sauce

2/3 c. milk

Ok here goes the directions, this could get a bit hairy carry. 

Filling:

Take the onions and mushrooms and brown them in the butter or margarine. 

When done, add sour cream. 

Set aside

Loaf:

Mix the beef, oatmeal, egg, salt, pepper, Worcestershire, and milk together well. Will be very moist.

Place half of meat mixture in your pan

Add the filling to the top of meat mixture.

Place remaining meat mixture over the filling.

Seal pan with tin foil.

Bake in pre-heated 350 oven for 1 hour.

Let stand 5 minutes before slicing. 

Well holy crap, hope that sounds right for you alls. If you have any questions let me know, I'll try to help you the best I can.