Marinated Mushrooms

I had a gall bladder attack on June 1st. The worst part of it was the fact that I didn't know what was going on. Chest pain, so intense that I had difficulty breathing. It didn't let up for a good half hour. I started thinking, "I could die." I need to call someone. D wasn't home, so I called to my children. They came running into the room - and started to do exactly what any child would do when confronted with their parent in horrible pain and in need of help. They started to worry that I was going to die. They called D. They called Grandma. No one answered their phone. We were one step from the call to 911. They called Grandma again, and she answered. By the time she got to our house, I was feeling much better. Like I said, I didn't know what to expect. Prior to the attack, I thought that I had been having allergic reactions to MSG - really horrible stomach aches, which I had learned to mitigate with Naproxen. I also cut out prepared food, like anything that came in a box ready to heat from Costco. I'm sure that helped, because I was also avoiding the excess fats that often appear in prepared food. The fact was, however, that the stomach aches didn't disappear. The attack diagnosed my problem with certainty.

Dietary issues of some kind, in my opinion, plague just about everyone I know. Circumstances create problems for even the well meaning caretakers of a human body. The problem is that there is just too much to know. You can be doing just fine by anyone's standard, but each body is just a little bit different. The list of things that can irritate a gall bladder is interesting to say the least. Fat is the biggest culprit, but iceberg lettuce is there, too. Everyone says, "I thought salad was supposed to be good for you." Vegetables ARE good for most people. Things that are difficult to digest, like lettuce and broccolli, just aren't nice to ME. In the ER the doctor told me that the hormones involved in childbirth had a lot to do with the onset of gall bladder disease. Hormones, huh? How do you factor hormones into your diet? Now that's a dietary issue if I ever heard one. For a while I couldn't eat much at all. A little broth with crackers. Cantalope was way over the line that first month. It was very easy to limit my choices - digestive distress is something we all like to avoid. I just did what felt good, which wasn't very much. It was very effective in the weight loss arena, although I wouldn't reccomend the scare your pants off diet to anyone.

Just yesterday, I discovered that one of my favorite indulgences of all time is actually no indulgence at all. I was walking down the aisle in Costco and saw something new. Marinated mushrooms! My gall bladder started talking to me. There's one more thing YOU'LL never be able to eat again! Having learned to talk back, I said to my diseased part, "It's not going to hurt to look at the nutrition information." Long pause. . .What?!?. . .No fat of any kind! Not one single gram in the entire jar! These are akin to pickles. Only water, vinegar and spices - and the mushrooms of course. I remember having felt so guilty about my love for the things - 'surely something so delicious and savory HAD to have a lot of fat. They must be marinated in something horribly fattening. But they are so GOOD!' Here's where I admit that I also thought cucumbers with vinegar were also fattening. It only goes to prove one thing. Fifteen year old girls are not good judges of what is good for them. (Note to self, remember to teach children about what IS actually good for them while instructing them in what is NOT good for them.) More than twenty years after my first love affair with marinated mushrooms I'm glad to say, "I'm back babies! I could just eat you up! And I will."