Replies

Sent to all lists. You are not required to read or respond in any way. Honest.
Before anything else, thank you everyone for the prayers and good wishes and advice on this thread. I know most of you have been through some scarey times and worse, so I appreciate this all the more. Thank you all again.
And now I HAVE to tell you one more story and ...(OH NO, YOU SAY, BUT BEAR WITH ME HERE.) This will close this chapter of The Perils of MestaMachine.
Wben I was a little kid, my godfather had a TV repair shop near my house with a two burner cookstove in the back. One day I walked in and smelled something fantastic cooking .
In a giant skillet, he was frying a ton of ground beef,onions, and butter, and on the other burner was a pot full of boiling macaroni. He said it was a secret, magic recipe, but if I wanted some, he’d teach me the magic ingredient and I could even sprinkle it on all by myself.
It was fun and of course I wanted to learn the magic. He drained the macaroni and poured it all into the skillet and then he handed me a pepper mill and showed me how to use it and THAT was fun...the magic ingredient...black pepper while saying abra cadabra.
He mixed it all together and told me to put some more on and not to forget the magic word. He mixed it and looked at it, smelled it, and said it wasn’t enough yet.
After that, he ground enough pepper to turn the entire top black. It tickled my nose but I was starving, It smelled so good. He mixed it all together again, said the magic word, and put the lid on with the stove off and we just waited.
And suddenly he decided time was up and pulled the lid off and OMG. My mouth was watering and I watched him put a couple of little spoonfuls into a bowl and hand it to me while he filled a dinner plate for himself and dug in. Looked at his. Looked at mine. And he looked over at me out of the corner of his eye while I filled a fork full and jammed it in my mouth.
Stunned is not the word. I gasped and couldn’t hardly breathe. He laughed and kept eating. Said it was the magic working. Slowly, I took another small bite. Then another. aSKED FOR MORE and ate it all.
For the rest of my life, every time I made that macaroni recipe without the pepper, without fail, I would HAVE to pour pepper on at least a plateful and say the ‘magic’ word.
Pepper otherwise was just for sunnyside up eggs. I never used pepper on anything else except on rare occasions.
Why am I telling you this?
About a week before they postponed my first check-in date for the hospital, I started craving Walt’s Magic Macaroni. I just couldn’t find the energy to make it. The craving was so strong, I dreamed about it.
Hardraade knows this is true because every day I would tell him that as soon as I could, I was going to make some...and he would laugh.
4 AM one night I couldn’t stand it anymore and decided if it was the last thing I ever did, I was having me some of Walt’s macaroni. And I did. I made a whole deep chicken fryer skillet full to the brim, separated out a decent container full for Vaeh, then covered mine with enough pepper to choke a horse. I ate like a starved beast and the skilletfull didn’t have a dent in it. I ate it every day for breakfast, lunch, dinner, in between, early, late, kept adding more and more pepper. Then it was gone...and I was still craving pepper. So I made the biggest soup pot I had of homemade chickensoup. Same deal except I added pepper almost after every spoonful.
Noticed I still had to go to the bathroom, but not as often and it didn’t hurt so much, but it was still loose. The nausea was minimal, and I could handle it.
My legs were a severe problem. Times I could barely walk. The swelling was painful and so frustrating and after doing some research, I decided that the lasix I was taking was dehydrating me to the point that my muscles were swelling to try and grab as much water as they could. I stopped taking it completely.
STILL craving pepper, I made a huge tupperware bowl of potato salad and pepper, pepper, pepper. Had dressing left when almost all the potatoes were gone so made more macaroni, added some tuna fish, and kept eating.
The pepper craving was still with me, and having stopped taking the lasix, my hands and legs started feeling a whole lot better AND the bathroom trips became more infrequent and nowhere near as loose. Pepper on everything and that is the way I was when I finally went to the hospital a month or so later.
Today I dumped pepper on beets and everything else that went into my mouth. Oodles of noodles is a staple ‘round here...and I spent a good part of the day researching pepper and its relatives. Some of you probably already know about the attributes of pepper, but I didn’t. Surprised the heck out of me.
The REAL miracle was how I started craving Walt’s Magic Mac and the strong insistence that I simply HAD to have it no matter what. Walt, whose magic lives long after his death, and G-d’s allowing me to hear his message. I think it saved my life...proving once again that G-d does indeed work in mysterious ways.
I still have a long way to go to win this war, but with G-d’s help and you guys in my corner, one battle at a time works for me.
If you made it all the way through this, thank you. If you didn’t, thank you anyway. For everything.
You aren’t likely to see a post this long from me for a while. This took hours and hours. Dang.

Without further adieu, allow me to present
tada
PEPPER
http://suite101.com/a/the-top-ten-health-benefits-of-black-pepper-a193900