Shucking Oysters, Shelling Peas

Title: Shucking Oysters, Shelling Peas Address: http://blogs.salon.com/0005036/ Author: Alexia Risso From: Sorrento Valley Blogging since: December 2005 Post Date: October 26, 2006 Post Title: Rieccomi

Shortly after I wrote the last post for this blog, I got a call from my sister in Rome. Dad wasn't doing very well -- he was having difficulty breathing and moving about. Could I make plans to return as soon as possible? A week or so after this phone call, a week during which Dad was put through a series of what must have seemed to him debilitating medical tests to determine the nature of his malady, we had the diagnosis: advanced-stage emphysema.

I wasn't particularly surprised at the news -- after all, the man chain-smoked his way through every single day of the past 80 years, and he's only 76. So, no surprise, but lots of alarm and dismay.

It wasn't really a question of: will he survive? I knew the answer to that -- of course he wouldn't: 20 years ago I'd read the Doors' bio and had concluded that they were right, that no one gets out alive. I wasn't going to joust with the inevitable. No, the real question was: over the next 15, 20, 30, 50 short years that remained of his life, would Dad somehow recuperate his appreciation for pasta, pizza, and bread? Because that is what emphysema did to him: it made him abhor many of the foods that he formerly loved. Questo si che e' triste!

Our family started to pick up on the change in Dad's diet preferences a couple of years back. Out of nowhere he started to refuse to eat primi. Mom'd spend the entire day making what she thought was his favorite dish, pasta al forno, only to have him stare at it. She'd make him steaming plates of tagliatelle and tortellini, but he'd only eat half a bite, then blow up his cheeks and distend his stomach as if he'd just finished off the entire quadruped population of a bovine factory farm.

At first she thought he might have acid reflux. Then she thought he might have developed some food allergies and encouraged him to see a doctor. This, too, was to no avail, because Dad is allergic to doctors.

Finally, a family meeting was convened. The four of us -- Mom, Thomas, Fay, and I -- examined the facts: he wouldn't eat pasta or pizza or bread or crackers; no fruit, few veggies, and since Fiorentinas were still banned, little meat. He was starting to lose weight. Only one conclusion could be drawn from these facts: he missed the States. He hadn't been back in a couple of years, we flawlessly reasoned, and his refusal to eat pasta and pizza amounted to a silent protest against a family system that would keep him stuck in the land of spaghetti, far from his beloved land of steakhouses. (Never mind that at his age he's still fiercely independent and fully capable of making any trip he chooses.)

In the space of a very few minutes, we had walloped ourselves into one of the biggest, fiercest guilt-trips ever attempted -- and had pulled it off admirably. (Conveniently, it hadn't occurred to the four of us to ask Dad for his opinion -- supposedly because he has always been so mulishly private in the face of our meddlesomeness. Also conveniently, we overlooked Dad's telling habit of wheezing and hacking because he'd been wheezing and hacking forever: we are a family that refuses to truck with anything as convenient as the obvious).

Anyway, we arranged a trip back to the States for him and, when he arrived, tried to mainline him with enough T-bones, porterhouses, and filet mignons to make him start to moo. It was at this mooing juncture that we figured it opportune to reintroduce pasta into his diet. Unfortunately, the reintroduction was a failure - after a mere forkful of gnocchi he blew out his cheeks and distended his stomach and started to undulate like those pastrami-sandwich-eating guys in the Tums commercials.

Okay, so he no longer likes pasta or pizza -- there are worse things, we whispered to each other. Not many worse things, mind you, but worse things.

It turns out that this negative reaction to carbs is a common symptom of advanced emphysema. When Dad was diagnosed, my sister Fay, a champion chain-smoker and a total spaghetti-head, reduced her smoking to half a carton a day. Mom went from a pack to half a pack. (Thomas and I quit years ago, so our relationship to all things doughy remains as tight and uncorrupted as ever).

I'm pleased to report that Dad hasn't smoked a cigarette in over two months and, although he remains highly allergic to doctors, he nevertheless faithfully maintains his appointments with his pneumologo. In fact, he only hacked into the phone once for a brief 30 seconds when I spoke to him on Monday, so some improvement is already evident.

Generally, I'm optimistic. One day, soon, he may well be able to sit in front of a huge plate of pasta al forno and eat heartily once again. And if he does start to blow out his cheeks, distend his stomach, and undulate it won't be because of emphysema, but because of heartburn. Heartburn I can handle, I'm less adept at handling heartbreak.