She has had a well respected career as an artist. I have yet to meet her but I’ve talked to her on the phone. My dad didn’t have any contact with his family after he left as a teenager, for good reason, and my dad’s mother was the cause of the estrangement. My dad reconnected with his sister when I was eighteen, which is why I’ve not met her. Bev’s a great human being and I think my dad has benefited from the contact and he’s learned a lot about his childhood that he blocked out.

So, Beverly was recently diagnosed with heart disease, and had to have open heart surgery. That in itself if difficult enough to go through, but what makes it worse is that anesthesia doesn’t work on her. It just has no effect and she can’t be put under for surgery. Topical anesthetic doesn’t work either. The doctors were a little freaked out, and decided to just let her be.
When the sausage was cooked through, I added a can of crushed tomatos, two cans of tomato sauce, garlic, basil, salt and peper, and let it simmer for about 1/2 an hour. I tossed it with the pasta, served it with garlic bread and it came out great. I will try it again in the future. It needed a lot of flavor though, so I would recomend lots of seasoning if using it. I bet it would be good in a spicy dish. Try it, you know you want to!

posted by Crystal @ 1:48 PM 0 comments
Thursday, August 24
Cheesecake Problems Fixed thurs Aug 24th

Hi everyone. I just got done baking a few cheesecakes. Yummy, my favorite dessert. It can be done so many ways with so many flavors. I made a white and milk chocolate swirl one for a friend of my mothers. I layered the two flavors to form a bulseye look. Some one had mentioned doing the technique in another forum, so I tried it, and it looked very pretty. I made this in an 8″ removable bottom pan. I like these better than springfoam, they last longer and bake more even. I find that many people have problems when baking cheesecakes. Here is my list of common fixes for cheesecake problems.

However, Bev of course wanted to live and not have heart problems. She insisted on having the surgery. And so she did, completely awake, with no relief for the pain. I can’t imagine what that must have felt like, it’s just mind boggling. She came through the surgery fine, but my god! I’m just flabbergasted. I had never heard of anyone doing that. The only thing similar is when soldiers went through amputations without anesthetic during the Civil War. But that’s still a big difference from having your chest pried open and having someone fiddle around with your organs while you’re awake.

My dad was really concerned about me as well. I’ve never had to be put under for anything so we don’t know if anesthesia works on me. There’s a good chance that it doesn’t. When I had my wisdom teeth out I required several times the amount of novocaine as other patients, and my dentist expressed great marvel at that fact. When I had a precancerous skin tumor removed from my back, the topical anesthesia didn’t work very well and I could feel the scalpel dig into my skin. When I was in the hospital with my kidney stone a couple of years ago the paramedics gave me as much morphine as they could but it didn’t quell the pain at all (the pain periodically subsided and then I was in morphine heaven, but it didn’t do anything for my pain receptors). Vicodin just makes my skin feel like it is crawling with fire ants. Percacet makes me feel stoned, but doesn’t help with pain. Ibuprofen takes forever to kick in. Aspirin makes me nauseous. Aleve does work, but if that’s the only thing I could take as a painkiller for surgery, I don’t know.