Suzanne Graham

I'm searching for some positive things to say about spending the past two days at the hospital. One of them is that hospital food has really improved.

My Dad has never gotten over the UTI that he had last summer. His doctor has tried several antibiotics for drug resistant bacteria. Each time Dad finished a course of antibiotics, they waited a week and did another urine test. He would e-mail saying, "I failed another test," and back on antibiotics he would go. When he failed the last test, I called his doctor and said I thought he should see a urologist. He had an appointment for the first Wednesday in December.

When we left their house on Saturday after Thanksgiving, he was happily waving good bye. Saturday night he sent me an e-mail detailing things we had accomplished on our Thanksgiving visit and making plans for the Wednesday appointment. Sunday morning my Mom called to say she could not get him to wake up. EMS took him to the hospital, and I grabbed my bags and started for their house. During the night the UTI had exploded into a full body infection. He was dealing with pneumonia, kidney failure, and a possible heart attack.

He is a critically ill man. I have had to talk with the doctors about his "directive to physicians." I have to walk a fine line between having my Mom at the hospital to see him during the brief ICU visiting periods, and making sure she gets enough rest so that she doesn't get sick herself.

In high stress situations, I ask myself two questions: What is God trying to teach me? and Where are the hidden blessings? I've found two of the latter. One is a big improvement in hospital food. Vending machines have bottled water and juice not just soda. The snack machines are still filled with things I can't eat because they are made with wheat and peanuts, but at least I can get something to drink. Today Mom and I went to the cafeteria for lunch. I wasn't expecting much, but she has knee and leg issues and walks with a cane. It was a much shorter walk to the concourse than it was to the parking garage.

We had a delicious and healthy lunch. I had grilled tilapia with onions and red peppers. For side dishes I had green beans, zucchini, and carrots. The green beans were fresh and cooked to perfection. This is not the bland, overcooked, mushy food that hospitals used to serve. If I hadn't known better I would have thought I was in an upscale restaurant.

The second hidden blessing is that I am truly thankful I have not found a job yet. It leaves me free to stay with Mom and Dad while they need me. If I had found the perfect job a month ago, I would now be negotiating for time off and wishing I could be two places at once. As always, God's timing is perfect.

I don't know if Dad will recover. It depends first on whether they can find drugs to knock out a very resistant bacteria and second on whether his heart, lungs and kidneys can recover from the damage done by the infection. We wait.

My husband and I are making progress. DD read my blog and Chanur’s comment. She e-mailed recipes and helpful suggestions. The theme of her e-mail was “Take care of my Dad, I want him to be healthy.”

One night he apologized for his bad attitude. He said, “If I have to choose between good taste and good health, then good health is a slam dunk.”

If you want to know the truth, I’m sympathetic to his plight. First of all, he has no sense of smell. Maybe it is genetic, or maybe it is because he has had sinus trouble most of his life. But most food has no flavor for him. That is why he likes pepper and vinegar, even though they are avoid. He can taste them. That is why he would rather have cheddar cheese than tofu. Unless a food has a strong or distinct flavor, to him it “tastes like cardboard.”

I’m also sympathetic because I’m the one who has changed – not him. When he married me I knew nothing about nutrition and could have cared less. I was a typical American cooking lots of desserts and serving white bread at every meal…you get the picture. Just before our first anniversary, I read my first health food book, and changed our way of eating overnight. Then five years ago I found the BTD and changed everything all over again.

It’s sort of like when two secular people get married, then one of them accepts Christ as savior. While I will pray fervently along with the new Christian that his/her spouse will also receive Christ - I do sympathize (just a little) with the spouse. He (or she) was content being a heathen. He married someone like him – who liked to party, or sleep late on Sunday, or whatever. Now he is under pressure to change, to give up bad habits, to surrender his life to God, to go to Bible study instead of clubs. I know he will be better off, both now and in eternity, if he becomes a Christian, but I can see that from his perspective it’s not fair that his marriage has been upended.

When HH & I married we were both unhealthy Christians. I changed, and I’ve been dragging him along ever since. I can’t blame him when occasionally he rebels or digs in his heels.

Here is the new plan. I’m going to set things up so that he can make his own casseroles. I’m going to fix a grain or a noodle dish (which I usually won’t eat). I’m also going to fix a meat (fish or turkey) and several vegetables. He is going to mix what he wants in a bowl. I’ll have some kind of beneficial or neutral sauce to go on top. He thinks this will work. I think it will work too.

Pardon me if this is a bit of a solemn blog. You don’t spend nearly two weeks nursing someone you love back from the brink of disaster without a lot of introspection.

It is hard to see a once vigorous man – one who used to effortlessly toss me in the air and catch me – one who loved to climb mountains and ride horses – unable to sit up in bed or stand in a walker.

It forces me to face the reality that we live in a fallen world (Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight. Genesis 6:11) and we are all heading toward death (For the wages of sin is death. Romans 6:23).

Our culture glorifies life and youth. We fill magazines with pictures of healthy, happy youngsters. We watch movies of people living immoral lives and practicing all kinds of unhealthy habits without any consequence. It’s a lie.

We are all aging. The earth is decaying. Everything in this world is moving toward death. The Bible predicts it, and when you spend a while in a sick room, the truth slaps you in the face.

One day a friend was going pretty hard on my Dad and other elderly people who stop taking medication. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I follow a pretty weird and restrictive diet so that I don’t have to take medication every day. When the BTD worked, I didn’t talk to my doctor. I stopped the medication that was no longer needed.”

Later, as I thought back over my own words, I asked myself, “Why do I stay with the BTD?” It’s certainly not an easy diet, though it’s also not as hard as it seems for the first month. I don’t do the BTD, thinking that I will live forever. That won’t happen, and I know it. I’m not even sure I would want to live to some extreme old age. It would get pretty lonely when all my family and friends were gone.

I stay with the BTD because I want to be active, productive, and independent for as many years as God gives me. I don’t want to slowly decline to a point where I can’t move and I can’t think. I don’t want to be on prescription drugs, if there is a way I can have the same results naturally. I believe that the BTD gives me the best chance to stay healthy and energetic.

I quoted the first half of Romans 6:23. It sounds pretty bleak. It is the 2nd half of the verse that brings hope: but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. My Dad and Mom are declining because this is a fallen world. But because of their faith in Jesus Christ they have hope. They will have new resurrected bodies where there will be no more disease or sorrow. (There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. Revelation 21:4). Best of all, I know I will see them again. Until then, I count out vitamins for their daily pill boxes, and I eat right for my type. We want to live for God as long as he leaves us on this earth. But as recent days have reminded me; this is just a temporary home.

The pastor of our church is a cycling enthusiast. He keeps himself fit, and watches his sugar intake. Beyond that I don’t think he is a fanatic about nutritional things, and I don’t sense he is aware of the Blood Type Diet. However he made a point in his sermon Sunday that was very applicable to the BTD.

He has been preaching a series on the 10 commandments. This week was on the 6th commandment – Thou shalt not kill – or more literally translated – you shall not murder. He started off by saying that he wasn’t going to limit his sermon to homicide, because as far as he knew no one in our church had committed that crime. He said he wanted to get us thinking about other ways that we may take a life.

It wasn’t the liberal cliché type of things like capital punishment and self defense. Those are clearly allowed in the Bible.

He said that emotional sins like anger and bitterness, which shorten our lives, violate the 6th commandment. Ouch! A guy cut me off in traffic today and my temper flared. I would never have thought of that as a violation of the 10 commandments, but I see his point. Stress and lack of sleep also contribute to disease which take many lives prematurely.

I would have expected him to mention smoking and drinking – after all this is a Baptist church. But he barely mentioned those two habits. Instead he focused on gluttony, which, he said, progressively kills us.

So to the degree that I know what food is good for me, but I willfully choose to eat junk, I am slowly killing myself. If my lack of will lets me drift with the flow of popular, but nutritionally worthless foods, I am guilty of my own murder.

Sometimes the BTD becomes about ME – my health, my energy level, my quality of life. But it’s really much more than that. God made me for a purpose. I need to take care of the body He gave me, so I can serve Him effectively.

I have blogged several times that beets are not my favorite vegetable. I love beet greens, but could easily pass on beets. Sometimes I've eaten the beet greens and juiced the beets. Sometimes I've cooked the beets for HH, who likes beets.

Because beets are super beneficial for teachers, DD wanted to try them. Beets are neutral for Hunters and Type Os, however, they are beneficial on the Type O Aging diet in the D'Adamo Health Library. I agreed to try them again with an open mind.

While I was cooking the beets, I asked DD to look in the BTD Recipes and see what she could find about seasoning beets. DD said that she had been thinking about them, and that she thought we could season them with ghee and honey.

I took one bite and said, "These are great beets!" Both DD and I liked the honey flavor. HH, I confess, prefers regular beets with more of a vinaigrette dressing. I do not think it would work to combine the flavors. However, it would be easy enough to cook beets and serve them with two separate toppings.