Dinner Out

Bob, me and the wig went out to dinner with friends last night. We went to a place called Blue Canyon, good food in a place as about authentic as my wig. Huge, huge restaurant where Bob got crab encrusted snapper, and I got black grouper on spinach risotto. I am obsessed with food, of course. So one of our friends, Linda, had some of my grouper (which was really very very good) and gave me some of her Lobster Mac 'n Cheese. Lobster Mac 'n Cheese should really require absolution after dinner. It's like fettucini alfredo in that it's too rich to make up a whole meal. But it does, and it's macaroni and cheese with lobster claws.

So why is the place about as authentic as my wig? Well, it's made to look like a huge ranch house--big peeled logs inside and out. It's been compared to the rustic lodges of Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. Only we live just outside Cleveland. The setting is carefully artful--it's perched on a hill overlooking the freeway but situated so that mostly what you see is rolling woodlands. But there has never been a big horn sheep in the area.

They specialize in beef and seafood. The seafood is lucky for me because since about my second chemo, beef and pork no longer taste right. Pork tastes as if it has gone off, and beef has this odd, metallic kind of dirt taste. I miss beef very much, but of course, what I miss is what I remember, not what I taste. I watched wistfully as steaks topped with exoticly-flavored pats of butter pass the table.

These days I try to plan dinner out with friends around my treatments. We have good friends--Pat and Gloria--who we used to meet regularly for dinner, but I haven't managed to schedule a dinner with them in ages. The window of fine dining seems to narrow each treatment. I can eat fine for two or three days after chemo, but I have no appetite and don't care what I eat and food isn't really...fun. And the last time, mostly I just wanted to take long naps. Then come five or six or seven days of weird adverse affects of chemo, which are mostly minor, but make me leery of planning anything. Which leaves only four or five days to pack in everything before the next treatment.

I keep reminding myself, it's only temporary.

Tomorrow I get a CT Scan in the morning, and then my doctor will discuss the results with me on Thursday before my next chemo.