Day 37

Another pleasant and largely uneventful day. Bought some new clothes because if I have to be in the hospital at least I can have nice pants to wear and Kate and I went out for tea afterwards.

Here is a picture of Ellie and my feet together. See if you can tell which are whose.

Pretty incredible, huh? Our pediatrician always said you could tell who belonged with whom at the beach by noses and toes.

(spoiler: mine have blue and Ellie's have green nail polish).

I also started some weaving over the weekend and lots of people have asked lots of questions about my loom and weaving at various points. Here are a couple of pictures of my loom, getting dressed.

The warp has been pulled thru from the back and partially threaded on the heddles. The chair behind it is a typical sized Windsor chair so you can see how big the loom is.

The whole warp coming over the warp beam in the baack, thru the lee sticks (the wood), thru the heddles (the white stuff--that's where the harness magic occurs) and then thru the reed.

I am just goofing around with learning a new technique so the warp and the cloth are not that interesting right now.

So, here is an interesting leukemia related thing (which is what you come here for, right?). Most people who know me very well know that I have a tremendous sweet tooth. I really have met very few adults with as strong a sweet tooth as I have. However, since having chemo, sweet things taste weird to me. For instance, Starbuck's mocha and every kind of ice cream I've tried taste like it has aspartame in it. Starbuck's mocha in a jar tastes ok as does a made at the store iced caramel machiatto. Chocolate, even the really high quality chocolate I usually buy in Portsmouth at Byrnes and Carlson, tastes too sweet and not just too sweet, but wrong too sweet, almost like I can taste the sweetness at the back of my tongue and it just throws me off. It makes me kind of sad because I have liked chocolate and other sweets so much.

I can understand intellectually that whatever I'm eating is something I liked, but it just tastes wrong, different. Interestingly, I have liked lemon tarts, poached peaches, fruit of every variety and have almost exactly the same non-sweet taste that I went into chemo with (except that I have for sure eaten more meat since my diagnosis than in the twenty five years preceding).

I decided today at dinner that I am just going to plan on eating potato chips or something for desert every night and give up on the sweet thing for now.

I wonder if it's that some tastebuds have been killed off or have regrown in a different place or if it might have something to do with the bacteria that lives in my mouth as I was on broad spectrum coverage for three weeks. There's probably a nice PhD project or two in this for some one. Maybe people's dietary preferences could be changed by manipulating their oral bacteria.