Expiry Dates

Sometimes a little too much time on my hands gets me to pondering over scads of things that we do, eat and mix up; milk products for example. I really love them but have often wondered who first said, “Hey, let’s let the milk sit around until it spoils, separates and then eat the curds.”? Lately, with the rat poison thing, I have been thinking more about this.

In Peru, they make cheese the old way but putting the cow’s stomach’s liquid in the milk to coagulate the milk fat. In some areas they use llama stomach juices too. However, in the north of Peru there is a lizard that they drop into the milk and it produces the same affect. Now having said that, don’t you just wonder about the thought process that got someone to drown a lizard in milk in the first place? Just how many other critters do you suppose they dunked in the milk first or did they just get lucky with that first lizard they tried? Yet on the other hand, maybe a lizard just serendipitously fell in the bucket in the milk shed and started the milk a-clotting. For me this conjured up the image of a soggy little reptile treading milk, I don’t imagine he was built for swimming but probably kept his head above milk, heroically chugging until it started separating it into whey and curds. I imagine that density issues interfered what with curds bobbing in the whey until he finally succumbed to the variable compactness confusion, a poor, drowned, sodden little lizard. I suppose I wax pensive and I am dwelling a bit overly on clotting and curding these days…

Anyway, speaking of thickening milk with bacteria, yogurt fascinates me too. I love Peruvian yogurt better than the Swiss variety. Like most of these things, it comes with an expiration date or sell-by date just like its North American distant cousin. I say distant because the texture and flavor resemblance pales by comparison, a paltry puny relative and nothing more. Still South Americans have a certain obsessive relationship with expiration dates I have noted over the years. They will throw out a case of perfectly good milk because of the arrival of its expiration date. Though just an example, really anything with an expiry date as the Canucks and Britts say goes out of date the day after. Heck, my mother kept every prescription medication that we did not use in a big box in the hall closet for rainy sick days… She knew what they all did and for her; expiration dates served for a mere suggestion. Not in Peru or Chile though. The day after… aspirin has just turned to cyanide. Cough syrup turns to death potion at five minutes beyond the stroke of midnight.

I have had Peruvians tell me that I am risking my health by eating yogurt that has passed its date… Julie likewise asks me if the yogurt in the refrigerator has gone bad??? What does this mean? Just what happens to spoiled milk with more time? Does it get more spoiled? What are the health risks in eating more yogurty yogurt? Some say it goes all moldy… Hello-o-o! What is that green stuff on the Treasure Island, Gorgonzola or Roquefort? How many deaths or terminal illness get attributed each year to Kraft Roka Blue Cheese Dressing for example? “Mrs. Hasler, I regret to inform you that your husband succumbed to a hyper sensitivity to cheese mold…”

Today I went to Costco. They had great huge cheeses from Parma, Italy, aged parmesan cheese… they have dates on aged cheese, use-by or sell-by…all the same to a Peruvian. What does that even mean though? Isn’t the whole idea of aging the cheese that it gets better the longer it sits, or not? I need help here, what happens if you don’t eat the matured cheese by the date that FDA or Costco expiration police say you need to eat it? Does the increasing elderliness of the cheese somehow cause it to go south because the sagacious warehouse store daters say so and so as not to get into dutch with the feds? Phew, now there is a silver lining to health care and even bigger government! Somebody tell Nancy Pelosi! I can see it with roast chickens or putrefying pork chops you refrigerated what with salmonella and all. For me the jury is still out on the brown lettuce that we have thrown out in truckloads. Sometimes stuff just gets science projecty, i.e. really slimy, icky and even smelly like tortillas, celery and raw gizzards with green and often slimy mold, putrescine and cadaverine but aspirin, cheese and yogurt, come on now!

The Cure/Sponge Bath???

One of the fascinating things about requiring medical attention concerns new skills one has to acquire and new information about medicine. I have now had the learning opportunity of spending the better part of each day this week in the hands of surgeons, technicians and nurses who have told me a lot of things and taught me that yes, though not pretty, I can give myself shots in my stomach fat.

Years ago, after hernia surgery, a matronly Peruvian nurse surprised me early in the morning by announcing that she had come to give me a sponge bath! I laughed, actually thinking she was joking but, no, she was all business and got right to work. Not having had a sponge bath since babyhood, I had no clue how to receive it with dignity. Turns out, there is no way… always the helpful sort, and inherently timid about such things, I did what I thought she required of me. Diligently I strove to cover certain sensitive anatomical regions by shifting sheet and gown about strategically to keep these parts out of sight of the nurse to keep from offending her, as I supposed…, the comical bit here is that I actually thought I helped in my assiduous but deluded efforts.

All went along fine until she needed to work in that the neck of the woods in question, so to speak. My dabbling in the process impeded her professional efforts so at this point, she grasped the sheet firmly, snatched it from my hands and flung it deftly, arching it across the room to fall against the far wall. With this she very competently and clearly informed me that my help in the process was no longer required or welcome, as though it had ever been, and that I should just let her get on with her job. I submitted respectfully and dutifully if with little decorum to the rest of the sponge bath.

It did help me overcome my excessive bashfulness by the way.

In my last blog, I told about the ER but it bears repeating that the health care professionals seem to have considered it their responsibility to scare the you-know-what out of me. Though I don’t panic easily, I have gained respect for my current problem. No one has ever told me this often that I could die if I don’t do…, at least not so frequently.

In part, the strange element here is that the cure can kill me just as dead as the problem if I mess it up. Here is what I know. I have clots in my right leg. The clots can rip loose at any time and hurtle across my body to my heart, lungs or brain and snuff me out in a heart attack, embolism or stroke. I have to lie down with my foot higher than my chest until the clots stabilize and then they supposedly get absorbed back into my system.

Meanwhile, they give me medicine to thin my blood down so this does not happen again. I started off having to shoot myself in the belly twice each day with some stuff to kick start the blood thinning. Now I take daily pills called Coumadin or Warfarin to keep it thinner. According to the doctor, I get to do that for several months at least. Here is the kicker though; the pills are actually rat poison. No joke, it makes rats bleed out internally because of an overdose and I suspect that because of size differentials, my daily dose would dust off a rat. The doctors monitor me each day to tell them if my blood is getting thin enough or too thin. Meanwhile they tell me in each visit, if I have blood in my stools, unexplained blood in your mouth, nose bleeds, blood shot eyes, coughing up blood, chest pains, difficulty breathing and so on, get to the ER immediately. Oh goody, another cultural roller coaster!

Now, I have a little question here. Who, is the guy who decided, “Hey, let’s try rat poison and see if human blood gets thin?” Whatever happened to good old blood letting or did leaches just go out of fashion? But seriously, who thinks up any of this stuff?