Category: Torg Life

Food Inc: What Exactly Are You Eating?

I wonder if those who farm and those who raise animals can confirm or refute what I saw in Robert Kenner’s documentary, Food Inc? For example, the film reports that chicken farmers often take out large loans so that they can go into business with companies that then begin to make demands on the farmer for upgrades and farm practices.  The farmer must either comply or cease to do business with the company, an act which would surely lead to bankruptcy for the farmer.  This means that farmers lose control of what happens on their own place.  The film reports that today’s chickens are slaughtered in half the time weighing twice as much as compared to animals of the past.  I saw chickens that are raised in total darkness and farmers who wake each morning to go out and clear their buildings of dead birds.  Many of the chickens were so big that they couldn’t support their own weight.

Kenner interviews farmers who feel that they must buy their seeds from one company or else stop farming.  The once standard practice of seed cleaning for the next year has all but ceased.  Because seeds have been genetically engineered and patented, any farmer whose fields have been “contaminated” with the patented seeds risks legal prosecution.

The film claimed many other bits of information that were shocking to me:

  • The USDA doesn’t have the power to shut down plants that have repeat offenses of contaminated meat.
  • U.S. meatpacking companies recruit workers from Mexico and then works with our government to bust small numbers of illegal aliens so as not to disrupt production.
  • 70% of the United States’ hamburger meat contains filler that has been cleansed with ammonia to kill E Coli.
  • The biggest predictor of obesity is income level.  It appears that cheap food is cheap for a reason.

It was my wife’s reading of Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin’s Skinny B _ _ch that has propelled my family’s revision of how we eat.  I know that in Robert Kenner’s documentary I’m hearing one person’s perspective.  I’d love to hear from others about their perspectives on our food supply.  I’m trying to become less ignorant about the food our family consumes, and as a colleague of mine is always telling me, I’m more determined to try and “vote with the way you spend your money.”

Dear Josie, (dad takes daughter to hit golf balls)

Dear Josie,

Last week I picked you up from preschool, and we went to the driving range to hit golf balls.  It was one of those places with softball cages, miniature golf, and laser tag inside.  You’re four now and it was your first trip.  I think your favorite part was right at the start.  You have a little pink bag with three clubs and the bag straps on like a backpack.  You liked carrying your bags into the pro shop like that.  A woman said you were “too cute.”  That was probably the highlight of the afternoon.

So that we would have less chance of bothering people and maybe not firing any golf balls their way, we went to the far end of the line of mats to hit.  The entire range was netted in and there were flags and little greens to aim at.  You said you didn’t want to aim at anything.  You were just going to hit the balls.  You also remarked that it was too bad there were so many balls out there because it would be a good place to run.

Your golf swing varies.  Usually you hunch way over too far and if I try to help you stand up straight, you go all limp and fall back into my arms.  Most of the time, you have about a two-inch back swing that is not so different from your grandfathers, but occasionally you will do a huge, back-twisting one where you pause at the top of your swing and look at me as if it’s some sort of challenge.  In general, you “push” the ball out, twenty yards when you really get hold of one, a foot when you don’t.  I was impressed with how few times you whiffed.  Maybe only three times.  I tried not to think that we paid $13 for the bucket of balls when there were ten or so right in front of us.  We could hit balls for free at the beach, but if we went there you’d rather go play on the playground or look for creatures in the water.  I understand this.  I know to be very patient and am trying not to be “one of those dads.”

I’m not taking you to the driving range because I have great sporting aspirations for you.  I am taking you to the driving range because I’d like to be able to take you as soon as possible out to the local par three so we could spend some time walking up and down the fairways together.  I’m having a hard time at home when what you seem to want to do is play act Disney movies over and over or have me pretend to be the Evil Queen.  We are a lot alike, always on the mental and physical move, but at the moment, we haven’t found a lot to do together.

I think golf can be an enormous waste of time and money, but not if it’s you and me getting to walk and talk.  Golf would also give your mom a break.  You have boundless energy.  The more tired you get the more demanding you get asking to do something else, to play one more game, read one more book, or run a few more laps around the circle of our downstairs.  That’s something you, me, and your sis do together:  we run laps around our downstairs.  Sometimes we even set up obstacle courses.  If you happen to take a nap, your mom and I know we are in trouble.  We will run out of energy way before you.  You and your sis tired us out so much the other day, that we went to bed at 7:58.  I’m sure we were both sleeping by 8:15.  You occasionally announce that we are all going to stay up all night.

Sometimes between your golf shots, you sat down in front of the bucket right there on the mat.  You’d take a long time to put the next ball in position.  I felt like telling you to get up and hurry up, but I kept those thoughts to myself.  We alternated hitting five balls at a time, and when we got down to the last four or so, you asked me if we could go when the balls were all gone.  I said yes, and then you rapid fire hit the rest of the balls out into the range.

On the way back to the car, you decided that you wanted to putt on the putting green.  It was empty of patrons and so I said yes.  I tried to explain that on the putting green, you have to hit the golf ball much more softly.  It is here that you connected with some of your most powerful shots of the day.  You sent the first ball zipping off the green and into the wall of the pro shop behind.  You hit your first few balls completely off the green.  Then, after I tried to coach you again to hit the ball more softly, you hit your next few an inch or two.  Still very determined to be calm, I said it was time to go.  You dropped your putter and took off on a sprint away from me yelling that you didn’t want to go yet.  Once I caught you, you said that you wanted to putt some more.  Back on the green, you got the hang of it and you lagged a few putts up close and putted them in. You were very excited about making the putts and threw one fist up into the air when the ball rattled home.  On the way out to the van, you told me that you never wanted to hit balls again.

Love,

Dad

Colonoscopy: Part II

I’d call myself—among other things—a nervous urinator.  By this, I mean that whenever I’m a bit anxious, whether it be leading up to giving a talk before a large audience, getting ready to run a half marathon, or sometimes even before going to bed (what?), I feel as if I have to go to the bathroom even though I know I really don’t.  All of these feelings were amplified the Friday at 7:30 in the morning when I was walking past the men’s restroom in the empty second-floor hallway of G.I. Health Specialists of Trumbull, Connecticut.  My nerves were not at all related to what might go wrong.  I believe, to some degree, that a person gets to choose what they think about, and so I tried to interrupt myself every time I caught myself beginning to imagine a perforation or something worse.  Additionally, I think writing and thinking about events can sometimes draw those events into reality.  According to that philosophy, if I’d have thought too much about all that could go wrong, then I might have increased the chances that something would.  Call it superstitious, but that’s my theory, and I believe it works the other way round too, for good stuff.

Following my posting of “Colonoscopy Part I,” I received quite a few messages from people who have a colonoscopy scheduled and what they want to know is what to expect.  I’m thinking—with a nod to the pregnancy book by Murkoff and Mazel—that this piece needs to be more of a What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Colonoscopy. It won’t be the full out book-length version but I’ll go into a little more detail than I first planned.  If you’ve got your upcoming procedure and have a non-medical question, look me up on Facebook, and I’ll see if I can help.

First off, the day before the procedure, there is no eating.  I drank water, a couple cups of coffee, and many many bottles of Gatorade.  I was told that I could “eat” Jello and broth but what’s the use of that?  There’s like 15 calories tops in a serving of Jello.  The day before a colonoscopy is at best a day for a sugar high.  The very tricky part for me was that I was supposed to take the tornado-strong laxative at 3:00, the exact time that I finish teaching my last class which is followed by a commute home which takes over an hour.  The directions called for me to take two pills, wait an hour, and then start drinking this big tub of solution that came in a sort of colonoscopy care package.  The mixture, as my doctor explained, tastes nasty but the good part about it is that you forget that you are very hungry.

My original—VERY BAD—plan was to mix the tub of solution to drink the night before, leave it in the fridge, and then take my pills when I got in the car and be ready to sit next to the toilet by the time I got home.  I had been thinking that the time-delayed laxative would work on a schedule the way I do:  right down to the very correct and planned second.  Fortunately, my wife Megan (who knows even more than my old cross-country buddies that my intestines work on hyper-speed) talked me out of this idea.

My revised plan was to let my students out of class a little early, then take my pills halfway home, giving myself thirty minutes or so to make it into the initial vicinity of my toilet.  Even with this revised plan, I was unable to pull the trigger of popping the pills into my mouth.  In my mind’s eye, I could see traffic slowing to a stop just as the pills went down my throat.  Would I just go in my pants?  Pull over to the side of the road and look for cover?  I didn’t take the pills until I was rounding the final corner of my last curve on Interstate 95.

Fifty three minutes later—I timed it—I made my first trip to the bathroom.  That was followed by my first chugging of the cleansing.  I chose the cherry flavor and am not sure it was of any taste benefit.  It was like spraying potpourri into a stanky bathroom.  The stanky smell stays but now it hints of rotting wildflower.  I went to the bathroom ten or so times in the next three hours and drank from the tub every fifteen minutes.  I was chugging the stuff well over an hour.  I went to bed early and then rose to go to the bathroom around midnight.  Then I went again around 6:00 a.m. and right before I left for my 7:30 a.m. appointment.  Only the first and maybe the second was really anything like having a bowel movement.  Actually my hiney had turned into a kind of nuclear power water gun which I fired into our toilet.

In that empty hallway of my G.I. specialist, I stood there looking at the “Men” sign on the restroom door, then I started to go in.  Next, I told myself, you don’t have to go.  You’ve had practically fifteen bowel movements in the past twelve hours. I walked ten or so steps down the hall to where the office was.  I didn’t even have to go to the hospital for this, just a special room with what I’d imagined to look like a dentist’s chair or one of those ones where a women’s legs are put in stirrups so she can be examined.  (I think I remember something like this from when my wife was pregnant.) Of course in my imaginings I’d have to be placed face-down in this special colonoscopy chair.

I stopped walking to office, turned around, and came back to the restroom door.  I almost went in.  I’d heard that I’d be given something to help me relax and that short term memory loss was a likely side effect of this drug.  I thought of women being given this drug for childbirth.  I’d read or imagined that bit of info too.  As you can see, I read just enough about certain topics to be dangerous.  I thought of women howling in pain but forgetting later about what they’d felt.  I wondered about feeling intense suffering in the moment but not remembering that you’d suffered.  Would this be a benefit?  Would one want to remember their suffering or not?  It all made me feel as if I was in the Matrix or that other movie, Vanilla Sky. Did I want a dreamy colonoscopy or did I want reality?

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not trying to connect the pain of colonoscopy (there didn’t turn out to be any) with childbirth.  I’m just telling you what I was thinking about before I went in.  I was also thinking about my bowels and that if I was given something to relax then did that mean that my bowels would relax too?  I remembered that my doc had said he’d done thousands of these.  I figured whatever I might do had surely already happened over his experience.  I might or might not remember.  I decided to go on into the office and forget one last attempt on the can.

For some reason, I’d imagined that it would be my doctor and an assistant that would be in the office waiting for me, but there was a lot more action than that.  There were at least five or six people behind the desk, all of them women and obviously used to being up early on Friday morning.  I was asked who was picking me up and for that person’s phone number.  I told the woman behind the counter that my wife was picking me up, and then without yet realizing it, I gave the nurse my phone number.  She asked me if I had a living will or some other directive. I told her no and shrugged those questions off the way I’d shrugged off signing waivers before running marathons:  I tried not to think of it. I succeeded almost immediately.

There was one other man already there, a lot older than me.  I’m thirty-nine by the way.  Doc says if I was a few years younger then he wouldn’t have even bothered with the procedure; a few years older and he’d have wanted to do it for sure.  I was a tweener, I guess, when it comes to colonoscopies.  A woman about my age came in with her friend after that.  She got into a long thing with the nurse about her husband living all the way across the country in the state of Washington so he could work.  Talk about a long commute.

On the flat screen in the waiting room there were videos of colonoscopies being shown.  Mostly it was just fleshy pink insides with a light worming its way into a dark tunnel in the distance. I thought of this as a sort of “best of” compilation of the doctors previous colonoscopies.  I hoped that once inside I’d get to see my own procedure, perhaps even be able to make some suggestions towards the final production.

Sorry that this has gone on so long. I really do hope that Part III will be the last of this.

Colonoscopy: Part I

Before I tell you about a recent colonoscopy procedure I had done, I want to tell you about an idea I have for a story that I’d call “Modern Medicine.”  There’s this guy (hmmm, this is starting to feel very autobiographical) who had blood in his stool a couple times.  He’s pretty sure that he can control this little unpleasant feature of his bathroom  life by altering his diet, but to be safe he visits his physician.  After a gushy lubricated rectal exam, the physician says that the character’s self diagnosis is likely accurate, but that he—let’s call this guy “Larry”—should have some blood work done and also visit a gastrointestinal (G.I.) physician.

For some reason (and here’s where the fiction begins) Larry thinks his insurance will cover the procedure but it doesn’t.  Or he’s between insurances (not a great explanation because if I were in this position I would not be going to the doctor for a “maybe”) and ultimately he receives a $400 dollar bill for the blood work, let’s say another $100 for the initial exam, another $200 for the specialist, and then conservatively, $2,000 for the colonoscopy.  Possibly the story ends with Larry happy to receive a clean bill of health but somewhat put out that he is a couple thousand dollars poorer.  There are of course alternative outcomes:  perhaps Larry is one of the approximately 3% of patients who suffers heavy bleeding or within the smaller percentage of people who suffer a perforation and require immediate major surgery.  This would illustrate my thinking that sometimes going to the doctor can send a perfectly healthy person spiraling down a steep hill where their snowball of wellness boulders into a mass of trouble.  Although according to various internet sources there seem to be 1 in 3,000 or 1 in 30,000 people who die from a colonoscopy, this wouldn’t have probably served my story very well.  An ending of death—plausible if not probable—would be seen by most as overly dramatic.  Up next—possibly as a warning to keep you away from this blog—will be the story of my actual procedure.

Real Life in Fiction

If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway.
–Stephen King, from On Writing

     In my short story “Eye Contact” a woman texts her husband a kiss “mphwaa,” (or something like that—I need Megan here to remind me of how to spell it) and then goes into a hotel and commits adultery.  This this string of letters meant to be a textual kiss is something that my real-life wife actually sends me.  This character in my story has my wife’s sister’s red hair, and probably her taste in shoes and handbags.  The character is also a pharmaceutical rep, a job that wife used to do, and a job that my buddy’s wife does now.  It’s a profession which I know just enough about that I might be able to lay down the relevant details neccessary to convince a reader to fall into what John Gardner called, “the fictional dream.” 

     My wife used to be a little obsessed—I think she’d admit—about who was who in my stories and what parts of the stories had actually happened to me.  I tried to explain this to her, but I think that it took her discovering the little details of our life in my stories for her to understand how it all worked, at least how it works for me. 

     If my stories were milkshakes, then here are some of the ingredients:  actual details of people I know and places I have been, situations I have personally experienced, heard about, or seen on the news, and everything I can dream up.  All of that gets tossed into a writing blender and eventually out comes a story, part real life, part imagination.  

     Among readers, I’m recognizing two poles: one pole is where strangers reside.  These are people who don’t know me and who have never been to Winamac, Indiana where I grew up, Bourbonnais where I went to college, or any place else I have lived.  These people read stories with no suspicions about what character might be who, as if each character has a real-life secret identity.  Somewhere between the poles are the people who know the writer just well enough to think they know who is who.  I think these people are the most dangerous when it comes to logical leaps off the wrong end of the boat dock.  They might see the coach in my novel Love on the Big Screen and think that my fictional man is the actual coach I had when I played basketball (mostly watched from the bench) at Olivet Nazarene University.  The truth is, I’ve known a lot of coaches (having been one for eight years) plus there are all those coaches I’ve watched from afar: Bob Knight, Bob Huggins, Rick Majerus, Rick Pitino, etc. and so when I write a coach, I’m thinking about what will serve the story that is unfolding before me.

     Opposite the pole where total strangers gather round, is the actual person who is rumored to be a character.  I have a friend with the last name Zaucha, a name I used in my novel for it’s capability of transforming into the nickname “Zuke.”  I wrote that friend and asked him if he was cool with me using his name.  If this friend thought the character was him, then he’d rightfully be able to say, “Bill has told a lot of lies about me.”  And if my book was nonfiction, he’d be right.  I used Zuke’s name for a reason I just shared.  The rest isn’t him and someone who says I’ve said X or Y about him would be wrong.

     What’s set me to thinking about this?  I think it’s been that I’ve got a few author’s visits planned, and some emails have come in about some of my stories. I can see that people are going to leap to conclusions about who is who in my books.  I’ve heard writers say they aren’t welcome in their hometowns anymore and maybe this is where I’m headed.  I don’t think it should be a surprise that my stories are often happening in the Midwest, that many of the details I can lay down are ones I’ve either witnessed, heard about or actually experienced—maybe for example powering that little boat I used to cruise the Tippecanoe River on—and so I’m hoping not to face too many accusations that a story like “Eye Contact” suggests that my wife is dying her hair red and sneaking into hotels.