The Year of the Amoeba

"Why does the amoeba always get blamed?"

Exactly 365 days ago, about this time of day, Ernst got attacked by a pool amoeba, or so he thought. As it turned out, it was a retinal vein occlusion, which means his eye was bleeding way back where the sun doesn't shine. In this year, I have been both amazed and frustrated at the complicated and delicate structure of the eye, and grateful that there are doctors who specialize in all the things that can go wrong in this tiny part of our body.

This is your eyeball, be good to it.

Three laser procedures and $3000 of "co-pays" later , it looks like he has seen the last of his amoeba problem. Or so we hope. What a frustrating year it has been. In order for his eye to heal, he was given the warning from the retinal specialist to curtail any heavy lifting. No heavy lifting for a guy whose backyard has Heavy Lifting Required written all over it. Despite that, we have managed to keep most things alive, put in a basketball court/dance floor, start the out-building addition, plant some fruit trees and keep the pool pretty much amoeba free.

Because of the delicate nature of his eye situation, it was vital that Ernst bring his blood pressure down even more. What does a low-fat vegan do to improve his diet? I was teasing him he needed to become a Raw Air Vegan, but fortunately that wasn't necessary. I am so proud of my former Bacon/Milk Shake/Butter/Cheese/Pork Loving Husband. He has managed to change his diet once again, this time cutting out sodium even more and lowering his fat intake even more. The results have been dramatic. For once his stubborn body has given up and surrendered and said, "OK, you win, I'll lower your blasted BP, I'm raising the white flag, I'm defeated". I think if a body could stick out its tongue on its own, it would do so, but instead this time it is Ernst 1 - Body 0. I've had to go from making really yummy vegan food, to cooking sort of bland vegan food that's crying out for salt, but you do what you have to do, and we had to do this. We have become those weird people in the store aisle, squinting at the food labels, doing the calculation of sodium and fat grams divided by the serving size, times the calories, minus the weight, plus the calculation of RDA requirements over the square root of pi (not pie). We hope this is the year of anything but Amoebas.

Raw Air Vegan Amoebas