My Adventures with Heart Failure

The bracelets are beginning to take off! This morning, I met with the woman who is planning the Juvenile Diabetes Austin chapter's fundraiser silent auction, to donate a few of my Medical ID Alert Bracelets for the auction. Should be great publicity for them. The fundraiser is October 2 at Oslo on 6th St., if anyone's interested!! I donated three bracelets, two that say "Diabetes" and one that says "See Wallet Card," plus she bought a bracelet right then and there - and when we stepped back out of the conference room, people who had no idea why I was meeting with her instantly noticed and complimented her on the bracelet. It was one of the lime green ones. She was first diagnosed with Juvenile Diabetes, not the usual Type II that you see in adults, at age 32, and has some of the same problems I do with "you don't look like you're disabled" just because we're not morbidly obese, elderly, or crippled, if you'll pardon the blunt word.

And then after class, I ran down to the dentist to get a crown glued back on, which had fallen off Wednesday night. I'll actually need to get the whole thing replaces; it was one of my older crowns, probably more than 15 years old since it's not on this dentist's records, and it was still the silver amalgam, and the build-up under it had eroded somewhat. So that's $500 out of pocket next month; it would be $1000 if I didn't have insurance. Bleah. I need new glasses too; my first paycheck for the school year isn't till September 30, and I can't even think about the glasses till then. Thank Cthulhu the hearing aids are still in great shape and don't need anything more than their steady diet of batteries - one thing that doesn't need fixing. Well, and no recalls on the pacemaker, either :-) so that's another thing that doesn't need fixing. And nothing in my CHF interferes with dental work - unlike, say, people who are taking blood thinners, who have to worry about anything that might cause bleeding from the gums.

In terms of recipes, I haven't done anything new lately - it is too hot here to cook. I have pretty steadily been making ice cream, the recipes for which are in previous posts. I add a little nutmeg to the blueberry ice cream for more flavor, and a little cinnamon and ginger to the banana ice cream. And Sam gave us two MORE bags of pecans from the trees in their back yard, so of course I throw big handsful of pecans into each batch of ice cream. Locally picked pecans are so tasty! And the fat in nuts is the "good" kind, which may be not just not bad for you but actually helpful in reducing some kinds of problems. Anyway, around the end of September when the weather finally drops below 90° I should start cooking again and get some new low-sodium recipes up here.