Killin It! (softly) OR Confessions of a germophile

Today is officially 12 days into my first round of chemotherapy. It's right around now that my white blood cells should be at their lowest quantities, leaving my body most susceptible to infection. Also, any side effects from the drugs/poison should be subsiding around now. My body would generally be recovering, getting ready for the next dose.

As far as side effects are concerned, all is quiet over here. I had a few days of serious fatigue right after my infusion, but I'm not ready to concede that they weren't just from stress. Since then, I haven't had any side effects at all aside from food beginning to taste strange. Mushrooms taste rotted. Bread and most cheeses are flavorless. The smell of garlic or red wine turn my stomach about 50% of the time, but I still appreciate the taste of both. I crave pizza 24/7 and sweets are heavenly, but I'm supposed to be aiming towards a more healthy, vegetable-based, nutrient-rich, balanced diet (so I can't sit around eating pizza and haagen-dazs all day).

The "don'ts" of chemo are many and inconsistent, though. My oncologist placed no restrictions on me. My infusion nurse gave me a booklet of guidelines as to how to manage with my weakened immune system. But she also proceeded to provide me verbally with a laundry list of things I'm supposed to avoid:

• Like your eggs cooked soft? TOO BAD!
• Like your steak rare? Can't have that either.
• Hold fruit under running water for two minutes. You've got nothing better to do.
• Hot foods must be eaten scorching hot and cold foods, freezing cold. 
• Don't let your food cool at room temp. Put it straight into the fridge. 
• NO buffets. 
• NO salad bars.
• NO food that's been sitting out: hot, cold, or lukewarm.
• NO blue cheese. 
• NO sushi.
• NO raw oysters.
• NO leftovers more than 3 days old. 
• (At Woodlief) Did you just fill that bottle with tap water? NOT FOR HER!!

With that last command, I was surprised she didn't do a Dikembe Mutombo-style "not in my house" rejection move on the bottle itself. I've got quite the zealous little southern lady in my corner. 

Buuuuuuut. 

Everyone who knows me knows how cavalier I am about food. I've never actually gotten sick from food. Ever. I used to rinse off old, slimy lunch meat, pop it in the micro for 5 seconds, then make a sandwich back in my college days. I'm not someone who naturally thinks about the consequences of eating a little dirt. As a matter of fact, I think it's healthy. I strongly believe our society's obsession with "cleanliness" is causing all manner of health problems. The Hygiene Hypothesis is one of my religious doctrines. 

The rules are proving impossible to remember as I move through my daily life. Just today, I ate my eggs with runny yolks, had a few mulberries straight off a tree during my walk, rinsed my bottles with tap water before I filled them from a filter, and had a dinner of room temperature naan with some haleem I'd made and left cooling on the stove for a few hours. 

Given my track record with taking my own advice over that of more concerned parties, I definitely plan to take a lot of the advice I get from the professionals around me into account. I'm going to work really hard to follow all the rules in all the literature I've recieved. But you have to draw a line somewhere between "this will probably save my life" and "this will probably worry me to death" and not all advice is sound or coming from a place of science.

But I promise to pass the mulberry tree and leave it unmolested from now on.