Black and Yellow
This week’s bag is not too different from past yellow and black bags but I was careful to make sure the lines were all parallel and it came out nicely.
This week’s bag is not too different from past yellow and black bags but I was careful to make sure the lines were all parallel and it came out nicely.
I recently recognized that I had some wheat germ in my freezer. That sent me to the Internet looking for cookie recipes with wheat germ in them. I came up with six very different recipes and started trying them. I discovered that the “healthier” the cookies seemed to be, the worse they were when done. I don’t make very many really bad cookies but a couple of the recipes were just terrible. Too much wheat germ, whole wheat flour, flax and other ingredients to make your cookies seem like they are made of sawdust.
The second result of trying out all these recipes was that, ironically, I ran out of wheat germ and had to go buy more.
This is one of the jewels of my wheat germ search. They are easy to make, have a wonderful texture, and the mixture of oats, wheat germ, dates and processed nuts and coconut provides a wonderful flavor that is not too much of anything. If you are looking for a chewy oatmeal cookie, this is one to try.
Internet
48
1 cup butter, softened
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1½ teaspoons vanilla extract
½ teaspoon coconut flavoring
1½ cups rolled oats
1 cup wheat germ
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup flaked coconut
2 cups chopped pecans
1 cup chopped pitted dates
Directions:
1. Heat oven to 325 degrees.
2. In large bowl, cream together butter, white sugar and brown sugar until smooth.
3. Beat in eggs, vanilla and coconut flavoring.
4. In a separate bowl, combine oats, wheat germ, flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
5. Stir dry ingredients into creamed mixture.
6. Place coconut and pecans in a food processor. Process until the mixture has a texture of course meal.
7. Stir the coconut mixture into the other mixture.
8. Stir in dates.
9. Scoop 2 tablespoon balls onto cookie sheets covered with baking parchment.
10. Bake 8 to 10 minutes. Allow cookies to cool on baking sheet for a couple minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely.
A thirty-one-year-old woman came in by ambulance after attempting to kill herself. She was five months pregnant with her 17th pregnancy. She said she had given birth to 2 children, had 3 abortions and 11 miscarriages. She was very depressed from the recent death of her boyfriend, who was the father of her unborn baby. She said she had recently lost sixteen other close friends and relatives to death, for a total of seventeen. This, coincidentally, was the same number of pregnancies she reported having. When she started to have some vaginal spotting earlier in the day, she was afraid she was going to have another miscarriage so she decided to kill herself.
She started by drinking a lot of alcohol, smoking excessive amounts of methamphetamine and taking an overdose of her antidepressant medicine. She then lay in the bed where her boyfriend died, hoping to join him.
When she didn’t die, she lit fires around the house and wrapped herself in a blanket, which she also lit on fire.
The fire department and paramedics arrived after the patient called a friend and revealed what she was doing. The emergency personnel found the house filled with smoke and flooded from a broken water main. The patient was in the bathtub, face down in a small amount of water. She was wrapped in a partially burned blanket, though she was not burned. When she arrived in the emergency department, she was wet, smelled of smoke and seemed intoxicated.
Because she was pregnant, had suffered some degree of smoke inhalation and possibly had some degree of near drowning, she was admitted to the hospital for overnight observation.
Last weekend, I gave my wife’s very nice bag away to my sister-in-law with a promise I would make a new one to replace it. In order to be good to my word, I spent some time this last week carefully making a bag that, with all due humility, is the nicest bag I have ever made. I was very careful at each step of construction. I wanted it to be prefect for her and, though there is no such thing as perfection in this endeavor, it is, for sure, the best bag I have ever made.
Orange with black trim. Large and symetrical
This is detail on the inside: zippered pocket with pen slots. A carabiner for car keys.
From the end, a black stripe up the side.
A 40-year-old Cambodian woman came in by ambulance complaining of whole body stiffness and inability to speak or move her neck. This was her third visit to our emergency department in a week.
Her first visit came after she was involved in a minor motor vehicle crash. She was rear ended, resulting in minor damage to her car. She developed a migraine headache after the crash so she came to our emergency department to make sure she was OK. She was found to have no serious injury and her headache had resolved by the time she left.
The evening before I saw her, she was at Bible study and was reading aloud from the scripture. As she did so, she progressively lost her ability to speak. Her voice became quieter and she had trouble breathing. She then developed stiffness in her neck that spread to her jaw and then her entire body, making her unable to walk. After a few minutes, this resolved but she came to the emergency department to be checked again. She was interviewed and examined by a doctor and sent home, with reassurance.
I saw her on her third visit the following day. Once again, while reading, she developed difficulty breathing and body stiffness. Her family called the ambulance to bring her back to the emergency department.
As I walked into the room, I was very impressed by how miserable she was. She was stiff and shaking from head to toe. She was unable to open her mouth normally or move her neck in any direction. Though she could hardly talk, she was screaming hysterically. Her heart was racing away.
I ordered something to help her relax. I also ordered blood tests to make sure she didn’t have something unusual, like a low blood calcium level, that might explain her muscle rigidity. Fortunately, the blood tests were all normal.
When I went back to check on her, the sedative had worked perfectly to cure her stiffness and inability to speak or move her neck. Her pulse rate had returned to a normal level and she was ready to be discharged. However, she was hesitant to leave for fear she would have the symptoms again at home when she read. I proposed an easy test and asked her to read something.
As soon as she started to read, she freaked out. She started to holler loudly and have the same stiffness and shaking she had when she first arrived. He pulse shot up again as well.
After more time and another round of sedatives, her symptoms again resolved. I was finally able to get her and her very concerned family to see that the only explanation for this was a panic attack and that, with time, she would be able to return to reading again.
An 84-year-old man came in with a nosebleed. He was upset and said to the nurse, “I’m bleeding to death! Get a doctor in here to give me a shot of coagulant!”
A 42-year-old woman came in with her jaw jerking from side to side. She said this had never happened to her before and she was unable to control it. When her jaw was closed, she claimed that she couldn’t breath though she was passing air through her nose with no problem. All of her symptoms went away after she was given some Valium.
An 18-year-old man came in after having had a seizure. When he woke up, his only complaint was pain at three sites: a recently applied tattoo, a newly place nose ring and where the IV was in his arm.
A mother brought her 10-year-old daughter in for vomiting. Her main concern was that her daughter might be sick from radiation fallout from the Japanese tsunami-induced nuclear reactor melt down. As I tried to reassure her, she gave me that fearful, “you must be an idiot” look I have seen so many times when my patients (or their mothers) refuse to take my reassurances.
A 22-year-old Vietnamese man was hit in the face and cut with bottle. He had dark blood on his face and in his ear. It turned out he had no injury and the “blood” was teriyaki sauce.
A 79-year-old woman came in with constipation. She was given an enema, which resulted in a bowel movement, which, she said, was “bigger than having a baby.”
Last week, I shared some interesting complaints with which some of my patients presented to the emergency department. Here are a few more:
35-year-old-man complained of excessive salivation after eating bad meat.
37-year-old man complained of excessive salivation after drinking milk.
20-year-old woman was hit on the thigh by a lime that was shot out of a homemade gun designed for that very purpose.
“This is a 15-year-old female who was struck with a can of Pringles potato chips and a water bottle by her 10-year-old sister tonight. This caused her to fall over and land on her elbow. The paramedics were called and she arrived here by ambulance.”
A daughter, speaking of her 67 year-old mother: “I woke up and found her on the floor unresponsible.”