When Beth cooks…um…

Well, there’s no other way to say this: When Beth cooks…she swears like a drunken sailor at a whorehouse.

“Stop doing that!” she’ll shout at garlic, minced and browning in oil. “Why are…wh…WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT!”

The garlic generally refuses to answer, mocking her in its overly slow or too quick browning fervor.

“Oh, COME ON!” is another common one, though that usually is directed at pancakes which flat-out refuse to flip properly or egg yolks which - in the great spirit of legendary renegades of past lore - break at inopportune times.

Our cat has actually learned to interpret the phrase “SON of a BITCH” as “there’s probably some tasty food on the floor for me to eat,” and it will summon him straight to the kitchen from all but the most well-hidden spots.

I’m obviously omitting the more…blue variations of phrase which emanate along with the generally sumptuous smells coming from around the corner.

I would help, but…well we have rules, you see. I am generally “in the way” in the kitchen, so no matter what I hear - unless it’s one of the two code phrases* - I don’t go in there. Dishes may crash, oil may spit, orange flames may shoot around the corner and catch the table on fire, and my job is to just keep my head down and pay no attention.

Yet I find the whole rigmarole to be quite endearing. She actually enjoys cooking, from what she’s told me, and she’s quite good at it. The results are with very few exceptions excellent. I also appreciate the efforts she goes to as - at least from what I can sense - while she enjoys it, it seems like a similar reaction to how mothers who just gave birth immediately forget the pain of labor.

*The code phrases are “Oh god, oh god, it won’t stop bleeding, WHY WON’T IT STOP BLEEDING!?” and “I’m ON FIRE RIGHT NOW!”

There are words you never want to read about a close friend of yours.

“Currently she is delusional” would fall into that category.

So would “almost comatose.”

“…receiving plasma…”

“…bleeding out.”

There’s no spin to those words. No positivity that can be gleamed from them. No way to read them and think that maybe, just maybe it’s not as bad as it reads; that the raw words don’t communicate the underlying hope that the doctors have for a complete recovery. There’s no way to tell yourself that - like sarcasm - optimism is difficult to read in textual form.

Words like that lead right to the heart of things: my friend is dying, even with some of the best doctors in the world on her side.

They haven’t found a liver for her, and her body is failing quickly. Her brain is beginning to swell. I’ve been told that if a proper liver isn’t found, she’s got about 48 hours from this afternoon to live. It needs to be from a cadaver, I don’t know why. There are lots of things I don’t know, and many things that I miss in the brief updates I get third-hand because no one but doctors are allowed in her room at this point.

I don’t know what to write here, I really don’t; the right words aren’t there for me either. There’s nothing to do. Nothing to say. It’s unfair, is all I keep thinking; it’s unfair and cruel.

She has 48 hours to get a liver transplant before her body shuts down completely; it’s already started.

I’m making coffee right now. Not brewing, but roasting the beans. I’m doing so with full knowledge that I’m using it to distract myself from thinking about other things. Roasting coffee takes a certain amount of concentration, so it’s a good distraction. There are sights, smells, and sounds that must be paid attention to. It doesn’t take so much concentration though, that when the inevitable sidetracks that the mind is wont to take during times of stress come about, you’ll quickly burn the beans. Roasting coffee requires just the right about of concentration: enough to distract, but a flexible when it comes to outright incineration.

A friend of mine is in the hospital right now. Well, truth be told she’s a family member more than a friend; if I ever described someone as “the sister I never had” it would be her. I’ve known her and her family long enough to where I don’t remember when we met and my parents consider her as much a daughter as my brother and I are sons. She was admitted last week with imminent liver failure – though the doctors used another, more medical term to describe it. I’m not a doctor, so I don’t know the full extent of it but I know that if there’s a good kind of “imminent liver failure” then she’s got the other kind.

She’s got the kind where my parents send me text messages to update me because she’s been transferred to another hospital in San Francisco with a more experienced staff. She’s got the kind where doctors aren’t really sure what’s going on, but since it’s progressing so quickly they’re damn sure she’s going to need a new liver soon. She’s got the worst kind of imminent liver failure a 28 year old could have: the fast-moving and mysterious kind.

I’m distracting myself from thinking about it. I’m distracting myself from remembering the odds I was told earlier or thinking about the words “survival rate” in any variation or combination. I’m distracting myself because I’ll admit that I’m a little bit lost when things are taken completely out of my control, and being that I’m 450 miles away in Los Angeles, not a specialist or a surgeon, and the most I know about liver is that I’ve eaten it before (not mine, something else’s) the only thing I can do is wait.

Wait for information, wait for word, wait for something to go in one direction or the other. She’s in the ICU and I’m not a family member (“the sister I never had” doesn’t apparently qualify, as my dad used the “as close to a daughter as I’ve got” already to no avail) so flying up there won’t do anything either; I’d just be doing the same waiting in a different – and purpose built - waiting room. Waiting for improvement or…the other thing. Waiting because waiting is all I can do now. Wait, and hope.

So I distract myself, so as not to drive myself insane with all the wondering and wandering my waiting mind can do.

I’m making coffee right now. Distraction coffee.

Waiting coffee.

Every once in a while, life does something that falls along the very gray lines of grandiose and the exact mix between terror and wonder: it smacks you in the face with something that in English we refer to as “Perspective,” and in other cultures is phrased as something that I find to be unpronounceable.

About two hours ago, I experienced this firsthand. I’ve been neck-deep in proposal-land (not as much fun as other “land”s like Disneyland or even Narnia) for the past two weeks; focusing on a variety of very interesting, but time-intensive projects. I’d put the rest of my life on hold, choosing to spend the vast majority of my time working through the intricacies of these various projects and spending all day or night for days at a time obsessing over every little detail to get them to the point where they’d pass my personal level of muster.

Today, as I was wrapping up a meeting with a partner on one of these projects, I found out that a very close family friend of mine that I’ve known since we were both about 6 was admitted to the hospital with liver failure. The conversation is a little bit of a blur, so all I was able to gather (read: “remember”) was that on the scale of how your liver is supposed to function, the average is around 30 Random Units of Medical Measurement (RUMMs), she measured 1100 RUMMs, and no one knows why including the array of medical personnel who currently buzz about her suite. The doctors are prepared to say that her liver is in danger of imminent failure and the likely scenario is that she will need a transplant immediately.

Now I tend to use humor as a defense mechanism and I’m totally prepared to say that I’m a little drunk off of a 2005 Cabernet right now (define: “other coping mechanisms of the Italians”) so that’s probably affecting the overall grammar/readability of the above couple paragraphs, but without getting too emo about the situation I’ll say this: perspective granted

I’m also more than a little concerned/scared/worried about her. In fact, were I not mincing words I’d say this: I’m scared shitless for a friend and close-enough-to-a-family-member who was recently admitted to the hospital for a very serious and life-threatening condition.  She’s with some of the best doctors in the world right now and they’re apprently baffled; it’s like an episode of House without the whimsy, wit, or knowledge that everything’s most likely going to be alright in the end (and that it’s not Lupus.)

I don’t know how this is going to end (which, being totally honest again here, freaks me the fuck out) and what’s worse is that even including those of us with medical degrees and years of training, I’m not the only one who feels that way. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking any of the doctors or questioning their intelligence, but the idea that even people with years of training who have seen literally thousands of sick people find this to be so unusual that there are no answers makes it somehow ever scarier from the outside. I can only imagine how she feels right now.

The likelihood is that I’ll be deleting this in the morning, but please forgive the sudden onrush of emotion right now; I’m working out my thoughts and working through my emotions using the best way I know how: a keyboard, the internet, a little bit of humor to dull the edge of the sword, and a lot of red wine to dull the rest of it.