Previously on The Murder of Ted…
Ted reclaimed territory as my body struggled. I suited up, cranked up the heat, and fought to give him the melt stick, but with scans still weeks away, the biggest question remained: Was Ted finally dying, or was he fighting back?
This week: This week on Ted: Beans are back, my son joins Team Mummy, and a little faith helps this sleuth find her light again, even while Ted keeps fighting.
Thank you for joining me on this unexpected, uncozy adventure.
The Murder of Ted
A Series of Unfortunate Events, an Uncozy Adventure
Chapter Sixteen: Beans, Glorious Beans!
A good sleuth needs a sharp mind, plenty of energy, and a little luck. Unfortunately, Ted had been wearing me down on all three fronts.
Ted wasn’t playing fair, but then, villains rarely do. The last few weeks had been dark and dreary, but don’t worry things are looking brighter!
Chemotherapy and my restrictive diet had turned eating into a game of culinary roulette. I could never be entirely sure whether something that had tasted perfectly fine yesterday would taste terrible today.
Still feeling exhausted and miserable I asked if there was any way I could at least add beans back into my diet. I knew they were high in carbs but before Ted came along and turned my world upside down, beans had been one of my main sources of protein and a favorite food of mine.
The Paleo diet wasn’t putting any weight on and I was worried without the beans and grains it in never would come back. With previous diets for health reasons my body always responded the same way low carbs, high meat, extreme weight lose that take months to recover from. My nutritionist decided we should give it a try. The new priority was to get me to gain weight and keep my digestion moving.
Hopefully they would help and not give Ted to much fuel.
Beans were back on the table baby! And I was thrilled. It’s the little things in life that can bring us so much joy.
My light had flickered here and there. Through the grace of God and everyone’s prayers, I held on.
A renewed peace came over me. I could feel God’s light and a warmth that felt as though He was hugging me. I can’t explain it any better than that. I simply felt held.
The scripture says we must die to ourselves in order to live.
That had become a twofold meaning for me.
The first meaning was painfully literal in its own way. Thanks to Ted, I had been forced to poison myself with treatment in order to live. I was enduring things I would never have chosen, putting my body through extraordinary stress because I wanted to survive.
But the second meaning went deeper.
I was worried about Ted. I was afraid my career was falling apart. I had felt as though my world was caving in around me.
That, too, was a form of death.
I was watching the life I thought I could control slip out of my hands.
I wanted to keep writing and building my career. I wanted to make plans and know I could follow through on them. I wanted to believe that if I worked hard enough, organized carefully enough, and did all the right things, I could keep my world on its familiar path.
Cancer had shown me how little control I really had and God was teaching me something I hadn’t fully understood before.
With cancer, you must die to live.
With God, you must let your own way die in order to receive His.
That doesn’t mean giving up. It doesn’t mean I stopped caring about my writing, my family, or my future. It doesn’t mean I stopped fighting Ted.
It meant I was learning that I could do everything I was supposed to do and still not know what tomorrow would bring. I could work as hard as I could and still need help. I could be frightened and exhausted and still be held by something greater than myself, God.
Ted had been watching me for years, and he wasn’t going to change his ways.
But I was beginning to change mine.
I couldn’t control Ted. I couldn’t control the results of the scans that were coming in October. I couldn’t guarantee that my career would be unaffected or that my body would cooperate with every treatment.
I could keep fighting and trusting God’s plan.
There was another battle happening around me, too. It had added to the darkness.
Caregivers were losing hope and sometimes their frustration made us feel as if it were somehow our fault. As if we weren’t already pushing as hard as we possibly could.
I knew they were tired. I knew this was hard on everyone. Watching someone you love go through cancer treatment is its own kind of suffering, and caregivers can feel helpless when nothing they do seems to make things better. Cancer doesn’t just exhaust the person with the tumor. It exhausts everyone standing beside them.
We didn’t need anyone to pretend this was easy. We just needed them to remember that we were fighting as hard as we could.
If you have never experienced the joys of chemotherapy side effects, please don’t assume the cancer patient is being a jerk or simply being picky about food.
We don’t need to feel like we’re failing at being sick, too.
Mama Bear had been beside me through so much of this journey, but even Mama Bears need to leave the den sometimes. She needed a break. A real one. Time to rest, reset mentally, and spend a week with her husband.
So, Mama Bear and my son traded places. She got some much-needed time away, and my son stepped in to help shuttle me around to treatments when my husband had to be at work.
He started turning my bean dishes into meals I could actually enjoy, adding meat where it worked and carefully adjusting the seasonings. Spicy, salty, and garlicky flavors seemed to hurt my mouth sores and tongue the most, so he had to be careful with those.
He even made zucchini puffs and black bean burgers for me, despite not normally liking them himself.
It might not sound like much to someone who hasn’t been through chemotherapy, but when eating becomes a challenge, having someone figure out how to make food taste good is a pretty wonderful gift.
He made fun of my love of beans and falling back into my “vegan ways” as he called it. No one was happier about those glorious beans than me!
The beans gave me a reason to be hopeful. My son gave me a reason to smile.
My treatment days were still long, and lipoic acid was making me sick.
At my last appointment, I begged LW to let me keep getting the lipoic acid treatments even though I almost ended up in the emergency room. I suspect he thought I was crazy.
Here I was, already struggling with treatment, asking to keep something that was making me feel worse. But my tests showed lipoic acid was an important weapon against Ted. In my mind, it was a killer, and I needed every weapon I could get my hands on.
I wasn’t ready to surrender it.
Eventually, he agreed to let me continue, although he lowered the dose. That was a compromise I could live with.
Trish also figured out a way to make the treatment more tolerable. By administering the lipoic acid very slowly and carefully pacing the Zofran and Toradol, she helped take some of the misery out of the process.
I still felt as though I had the flu, but it was a much more tolerable bout.
In the world of chemotherapy, the word tolerable can feel like a five-star review.
We weren’t talking about feeling great. We were talking about finding a way to get through treatment without being completely flattened by it. Trish was good at helping me do exactly that.
My red bloods cells were beginning to swing upward toward the positive side but my bone marrow and my liver were starting to suffer.
The Valkyries were trying to lower my glucose levels with insulin as part of administering the chemotherapy. But my liver seemed determined to keep my glucose in a safe range.
Every time they finger pricked me, I would drop and then bounce back up, my liver appeared to find a way around their efforts.
If only he could understand that this was how we caught Ted!
He was protecting me, which was admirable, but he was also interfering with the very process we were trying to complete.
Eventually, he would lower his guard and reluctantly let my glucose come down.
The Valkyries were trying to do their jobs. My liver was trying to do his. And I was stuck in the middle, hoping everybody could agree on a plan.
Still, I couldn’t help appreciating that my liver was working so hard to protect me. His timing might have been inconvenient, but his intentions were good.
This weeks round of chemo brough an even more dramatic event. My hair was coming out by the handfuls. Lucky for me it slowed back down a couple of days later and since I have a lot of hair no one would notice.
On the ride to my next hypothermia treatment my son turned on the car heater and my heat seat while I was double robed in the super suit and a hoodie. Since my body was currently in the middle of a civil war, he would do his part to aid Team Mummy.
Ted seemed to have an army of his own. I had read that TNBC knew how to recruit young immune cells and brainwash them into service where they protected the cancer.
So, there we were in the middle of a Wednesday, in the hot Florida sun, cruising with the heater blasting, my buns roasting and probably the most ridiculous sweat suit one could wear during Florida fall. My son was sweating before I was and we had a wonderful discussion about never quitting.
My brain had decided that 104.5 wasn’t a good thing for me and was fighting the temperature rise as well.
“It’s not over when you lose, it’s over when you quit.”
I lost that round of Hypothermia, only 103.8 but we were close and guess what? I never gave up. Trust me I wanted to. I even told my angelic nurses
“If I start talking about tapping out don’t let me no matter what I say.” The heat can make you a bit delirious. I didn’t want Ted talking!
What is with my liver and brain? They think they are some sort of heroes. While I appreciate the sentiment, I was beginning to think my internal organs needed their own team meeting. Nobody seemed to have read the same mission briefing.
When Mama Bear returned, she was refreshed and renewed, ready to help me finish strong through the final weeks of this round.
My faith was giving me a peace I hadn’t fully felt in weeks.
None of this meant the battle was over, Ted’s creepy lake was getting darker, and it was expanding.
Ted was still watching, and there were plenty of unanswered questions waiting for us in October. But I was learning that I didn’t have to solve the entire case today and if those beans helped put a little fight back in me, then perhaps Ted had underestimated me!
Stay tuned for the next episode of Chapter 17: The Case of the Missing Autumn
Need a little cozy mystery comfort?
After all the twists and turns in my very uncozy investigation of Ted, I think we could both use a case where the biggest worries are suspicious neighbors, unexpected bodies, and small-town secrets.
Join Taryn O’Kelly, a party planner turned amateur sleuth who has a knack for finding trouble where she least expects it. There are quirky characters, unexpected twists, a little romance, and satisfying happy endings, without a single chemotherapy appointment on the calendar.
Start with Party Planning for Murder, Book One of the Taryn O’Kelly Mysteries, then follow Taryn through Frost and Foul Play, Cruises, Cocktails, and Corpses, and Sparks, S’mores, and Scandals.
And don’t forget, the antidote to the uncozy is a cozy mystery.
Until next chapter…
Happy reading.
As always, thanks for stopping by for some Salty Inspirations! -Michelle ❤️
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