drink your thai food

I have been re-learning how to eat without my jaw and teeth. I suppose I knew how to do this when I was about 9 months old, but that was a long time ago and my mom was right there to help me. The other day I put some ricotta cheese in tomato soup, blended that, and felt pretty good about it. Friday I went out to happy hour, drank beer through a straw and had the humbling experience of drinking soup through a straw in public. It would have been okay, but the cheese they put in it got all stuck in my teeth and I really struggled through it.

Until yesterday I had had one real food experience with blended lasagne that was too thick and quite discouraging to consume. Yesterday my sister and I tried again with some peanut sauce stir-fry as I am already tiring of milkshakes, yogurt smoothies, soup and Ensure. This is what it looked like before:














This is what it looked like after we blended it:


















It looked gross, it's true. But it tasted great! I was so happy to taste something normal. I got it down in about a half hour and felt much more positive about my future 5 weeks.

I am actually feeling a lot better. I am practically off pain medicine and my lip is healing up pretty well. All the scabs are gone from my hands and I have regained feeling in the top of my thumb. Hopefully I will regain the feeling in middle of my lower lip someday. Here's a self-portrait from the other day.














It's easy to be self-centered when your body is broken. In an effort to stop worrying about my own trauma and drama for a couple of hours, I made an appointment to have my first volunteering time with a woman who is blind. I have always had some sort of compassion well up in my heart when I see blind people out in the world, doing their thing in the face of such an adverse disability. I finally got up the momentum to call up Community Services for the Blind and Partially Sighted and ask if they took volunteers. They paired me with a lady in my neighborhood that recently moved to the area. She was 67, totally blind and needed help with bills and shopping and that sort of thing.

I was a little nervous meeting her for the first time, having never hung out with a blind person before. I didn't really know how to lead her or how we would exactly go about things. We decided that she needed to go to the grocery store most, so I picked her up at her apartment building (which was a HUD subsidized building that smelled like cats and nicotine) and we went to QFC. I was immediately taken with her. She is about 5' tall, has a tiny voice and cracks jokes non-stop. She went blind from Glaucoma 8 years ago. We went around the store, me pushing the cart and her holding onto the same handle and following it. I looked at her list, found where things were and read off all of the brands and prices and varieties. Sometimes she wanted to feel how big or heavy something was.

All in all, it went pretty well. I was quite tired of talking by the end of it, but we had gotten her lots of things to eat and had a nice time doing it. I took her home, helped carry the groceries up and that was it. Next week I am going to help her do some more unpacking and set up her stereo. Her apartment was really quite disgusting, so there may be a little chance to clean up and help get her organized. I can't imagine what a difficult time she must be having in a new city with no one to help her. Luckily she has a good sense of humor and strength about life. I think we will get along just fine.