And Dan did the dishes! / Sock-it-to-me Salmon

I learned on Facebook that July 9 is my future daughter/law's birthday. On August 29 she will be my daughter/law. I have gotten used to saying "My future daughter-in-law" and love the way this sounds. So I invited Nicole and Dan over for a post-birthday dinner last nite. They arrived after 8 pm, after I'd picked up Scott at the train station.

Here's what we had for dinner, except I'm substituting for the sake of this blog a salmon dinner I'd made the other nite cuz I wanna preserve the recipe.

Fresh sockeye salmon with the following sauce painted on top:

-mayo, mustard, 2 cloves garlic, chopped fresh basil or other garden herb. Sprinkle with lemon when you take it out of the skillet where you've sauteed it in olive oil on low heat, covered.

Steamed fresh green beans n fresh carrots

Brown rice of your choice

Salad greens plus radish, cucumber, red pepper, Mann's sugar-snap peas, toasted pecans

For dessert we had vanilla-chocolate swirl frozen yogurt served with our choice of fresh fruit - strawberries or blubberies.

All this delicious food was in conformance with the new renal-friendly diet I began. I had a 90-minute consultation with Mary Ann Moylan, the nutritionist at the Willow Grove Giant Supermarket and learned what foods were best for my slowly diminishing kidney functions which will eventually lead to dialysis or a transplant.

Mary Ann is excellent and I highly recommend her. The cost is $20 which you recoup by getting a $20 gift card for groceries at Giant.

I also met thother day with a nurse-educator who apprised me of the rigors of dialysis. I took notes on the back of a huge envelope. Kathy offered me a sheet of paper but I said, Thanks, but this is my preferred method of note-taking.

When she met me in her waiting room, I was reading their bulletin board. "Ruth?" she said. We went back to her office. "I guess you had no trouble finding me," I said, "cause I was the healthiest looking person in the room."

The waiting patients looked exhausted, tired and old. Many had canes n walkers. Hard to believe that'll be my fate some day. You get increasingly tired when your kidneys don't work cuz you have all these toxins swirling around your body that you can't get rid of. I was thinking of puncturing little holes in my skin to let the toxins seep out.

Wouldn't that be funny if it became the preferred method? Deming Puncture Therapy.

Longevity on dialysis is the same as anyone else. Should you choose to forego dialysis when you're in End Stage Renal Failure you'll be dead within 9 months, going into a coma. All this, of course, because I was on Lithium for 16 years. I think an early bad sign I had was that I never sweated. I'd go jogging but barely perspired.

At dinner, Scott asked me if I went for a test drive in the Jaguar XJ8 sedan.

I did, I said. It was a smooth ride. The sound system was great. Excellent visibility. When I bought a new Toyota last year, which I returned the next day, I felt unsafe driving it cuz the windows are smaller on new cars and there are huge blind spots out back.

The Jag is a thing of beauty. Everyone but the dealer says it's high maintenance and not a particularly reliable car.

Needless to say, I didn't buy it. As a consolation, I drove over to Sloane Toyota on Easton Road to look at their pre-2003 cars, the ones with the big windows.

My new philosophy is: Live it up, girl! You may go on dialysis in the near future.