UPFs

 The What Not to Eat programme on Ch 4 last night was again an eye opener.  The biggest for me was showing how prepacked sliced ham was made, it made me want to gag.  The ingredients used (poor sub standard fatty pork, including cartilage and bits you definitely wouldn't cook up and put on your plate to eat, as well as the other powdered stuff that you wouldn't have in your own kitchen) and the method - basically mincing everything then squishing it all together tightly in a press, steam cooked in a can and then sliced when cold to put into plastic packets, was the stuff of nightmares.  How anyone would want to eat prepacked sliced 'ham' after watching that I don't know.  I almost never eat it now anyway, except maybe chopping a couple of leftover slices and putting it in a quiche, although husband often does.  But even he said he wouldn't want to after seeing that, so we've agreed we're not buying it anymore.

Husband then said "But we don't really eat many UPF foods anyway do we?" - he's clueless about that sort of thing, he basically thinks UPF refers to McD's burgers, doughnuts and cans of fizzy pop and not much else.  I went through our fridge and read out the ingredients list to him of some of the things in it, he was very surprised.  I have to say I was also quite shocked - at least half of the current items in our fridge can be classed as UPFs.  Shocked and ashamed, quite honestly, I've really let things slide over the past few months.

I explained to husband that UPFs are foods that have a long list of ingredients, including things that aren't strictly necessary like sugars (in all forms), salt, flavourings, colours, fats - all things to improve the taste and appearance to make us like them more so we buy and eat more of them.  And then there are all the ingredients we've never heard of and wouldn't use ourselves when making something.  I also pointed out to him that it's not only the ingredients, it's also the manufacturing process - basically, if it's made in a factory and by huge machines, then the chances are it's a UPF.  He won't remember, of course, but that doesn't really matter - as long as I'm more careful from now on, read labels assiduously and endeavour not to buy things like that, then we'll be alright and he doesn't really need to know.

It is spurring me on to buy and eat better foods, another proactive thing to do towards improving both my and husband's health.

Poor girls, changing coffee and UPF pastry!

 Sister has the RSV virus and also a bacterial infection which the hospital doctor said could easily become pneumonia without quick and effective intervention.  She was given a couple of doses of strong antibiotics via cannula in hospital, then sent home after a few hours with more strong antibiotics.  Husband's daughter had a burst cyst in her bile duct, causing a lot of pain and sickness.  Also given antibiotics and painkillers, allowed home but has to have further tests.  Poor ladies, hopefully on the mend soon, they're both still feeling like crap although glad to be home and in their own beds.

I've fallen out of love with my cappuccino and latte coffee sachets that I've been having for years, they just seem to taste very chemically and artificial now, they even seem to have a slightly odd smell.  Perhaps my taste buds have changed....after I lost my sense of smell and taste following the covid or flu thing I had back in October, it's only recently started coming back - or maybe it's my tastes changing as I get older.  Anyhow, I've decided to go back to ground coffee in a cafetiere - which is a good thing, as I won't be buying the UPF cappuccino sachets anymore.  Husband doesn't like ground coffee, but then he hardly ever drinks any kind of coffee, he's a tea man.

Still working my way through the current stock of UPF foods - yesterday I made a potato, cheese & onion pie using readymade frozen pastry and half a jar of bought lasagne white sauce, I added mustard, sage and thyme to the sauce to make it more palatable and interesting, as on tasting a spoonful out of the jar the sauce was very bland.  The other half of the sauce we'll have with filled tortelloni today, I'll add some (bought) pesto to the sauce to perk it up.  Frozen veg on the side.  Upon reading the ingredients list on the pastry pack yesterday, which I'd never actually done before, I was quite shocked to see it contained quite a long list of suspect ingredients, such as palm oil, emulsifiers, sugar (it wasn't even sweet pastry, just ordinary shortcrust, so why does it need sugar?), flavourings (again why?) and colour - erm, why?  It's just pastry!  I think I'll go back to making my own.

I guess I'm realising that all of these UPF things I've got into the bad habit of buying over the past few months are just for the sake of convenience - and laziness, if I'm honest.  It's not like I don't really have the time to make things like pastry and sauces from scratch - I just need to organise my time better. 

Still planning, and some anxieties this weekend

 Thank you for the comments.  Regarding taxis.....I know that will be an option for some trips once we've got rid of the car, however, two things:-

I've discovered that some taxi firms and charity minibuses won't take dogs, except if they're in a pet carrier.  We gave away Betty's carrier some time back when she outgrew it, and she's too heavy for us to carry now anyway, even the vet examines her on the floor as she's too heavy to lift onto the table.  She's only medium height, but is a very chunky, muscular, heavyset dog, a right heffalump.  So that's something I'll have to investigate further.

Re the 'spur of the moment' trips - some transport firms require booking in advance, and even if we found one that will take us straight away to wherever we fancy going, like a picnic on a sunny day, e.g., we'd still have to arrange for transport back home again, so that again takes away the spontaneity of it (how do we know how long we'll be out?  Or maybe the weather changes...).  Do you see?

I expect I'll work things out sooner or later, I do like to think about all eventualities, I'm a planner!

Both my sister and husband's daughter had sudden emergency ambulance trips to A&E this weekend, so that was a bit worrying.  They're both home now after being treated, given meds and discharged (which took several hours for both of them), but was quite worrying at the time.  Neither of them are out of the woods yet, but are relieved to be home, hospital A&E departments are not nice places to spend hours in nowadays.

My lovely cleaner Hayley is back today after her Christmas/NY break.  I'll be happy to see her, having to change the bed linen, do a full house hoover, etc I found very tiring - and painful with my bad shoulder and back.  I'm still ploughing my way through the Christmas cheese mountain - not that it hasn't been a pleasure 😂, I do love cheese but probably eat far too much of it.  We're nearly back to normal levels though.  Also still using up UPF foods, doing quite well with that.  I'm looking forward to eating clean, healthy whole foods and making my own bread and pasta sauces, etc, again.  So things are gradually getting back to normal now.

The weather is distinctly warmer today, and most of the week.....rain showers forecast though.  Can't have everything!

Overwhelmed last year, feeling anxious this year

 This is going to be a hard one to write, so please be gentle with me!

But first, I'd like to reply to some of your comments.  Annabeth, you mentioned free NHS hearing aids - which sound brilliant, by the way - from Specsavers.  I've googled it and apparently it's only by referral from your GP and not all areas participate in the scheme.....and of course ours doesn't 😒.  But I will be ringing my GP this week and asking for a referral back to audiology, there's apparently an audiology clinic at our local community hospital so I won't have to travel to either of the big hospitals.  Happy Introvert, husband's most often repeated question, several times a day, is "What's for dinner?" - he's very food focused.  He also asks me nearly every day what we're having for breakfast, despite the fact that I rarely eat breakfast and tell him that every time he asks and just suggest he has whatever he wants for breakfast.  The suggestion for not telling him about appointments until the actual day is a good one though.  Ruta, husband's cardiologist and consultant psychologist both said that his CI is caused by his heart condition (his poorly heart not pumping sufficient oxygenated blood around his body and to his brain, and the small blood vessels (too small to have stents fitted) being blocked).  So not caused by his meds, but thank you.

As I've said, I've been making all sorts of plans and doing a lot of thinking these past couple of weeks.  Over the weekend, I had a good hard think about last year, and I realised with the benefit of hindsight that it had been an especially hard year, meaning I felt completely overwhelmed.  When husband was first diagnosed with CI 4 or 5 years ago and was immediately discharged from the service, we weren't really given much information about exactly what it meant and how it would possibly progress - they just sent us a handful of leaflets a week or 2 later.  So we didn't really know what to expect.  Back then, although his short term memory was already failing, he didn't really have many more pronounced symptoms, these all started to come on quite gradually at first.  Last year, however, they were definitely getting a fair bit worse, all his symptoms - memory, concentration, difficulty with understanding instructions, confusion, failing to recognise photos of relatives, major personality changes - all seemed to escalate over the year, often leaving me with feelings of despair.  The fact that some friends and family don't understand and don't see him as being much different I find hugely frustrating as well - they just don't seem to get the fact that they only see or talk to him for a short period of time, just an hour or 2, which does not show the clear picture.  One close relative doesn't really understand at all, although her husband, whose mother has Alzheimers, understands very well.  Other relatives and friends think I'm exaggerating or worrying about nothing, as husband's problems are more mental than physical and, on the surface and for brief periods, he seems ok to them.    But, as has been said many times both by me and those of you in a similar position, they don't live here!!  They don't see him all the time!  So they think I'm just being a drama queen.  Last summer, in an effort to cut down on the amount of pressure and sheer volume of stressful stuff I was having to cope with, I made the decision not to buy birthday, anniversary and Christmas gifts anymore, I just found it so stressful to think up, source, buy, wrap and send gifts and felt it was pressure I could do without.  I did it across the board and told everyone my decision, most people understood (or said they did), a couple were quite sniffy about it and even said they didn't see why I couldn't do it anymore.  Ce la vie.

Now I'm trying to make plans and work things out, I'm feeling slightly less overwhelmed - it's a lot of work and not easy to find out/do some things, but I'll get there eventually.  The thought of what lies ahead, though, I do find quite scary.  Especially having no car - husband has now accepted that he has to give up driving this coming summer when his current insurance, tax and MOT run out.  As I've said before, things like food shopping (we're starting to have it delivered), getting into town and back, finding out about local charity or volunteer schemes to take us to GP appointments and the like, are all relatively doable.  It's the lack of spontaneity, e.g. when it's a nice day thinking 'let's pop out for a coffee or picnic, dog walk on the beach or car boot sale' that worries me the most.  Not having the freedom to do spur of the moment things, without planning in advance - which of course takes away the spontaneity.

And having to cope with everything if husband does get some form of dementia - I wasn't really cut out to be a nurse, I haven't got the temperament or patience.  But it's amazing what we can and will cope with when we have no other choice!  It's bloody scary, all the same.

How to deal with frustrations

 I'm still focusing on using up as many of our present stocks of UPF foods as I can, so we then endeavour not to buy any more, except for minimally processed 'good' foods like baked beans.  I've decided I'll start making my own bread again, as bought breads, even the sourdoughs that I like, still have ingredients that we wouldn't find in our own kitchens.  

I've also been working out strategies for coping better with husband's....foibles, shall we say.  I KNOW he can't help it, he doesn't do things deliberately to annoy me (although it does feel like it sometimes!), it's down to both his worsening cognitive condition and some of the medications he takes for his heart failure, and he's largely oblivious to what he's doing/saying and how irritating or frustrating it can be.  As you've probably gathered by now, husband talks ALL the time, except for when he's asleep (thankfully!), he talks at me constantly, he commentates on all TV programmes or those little reel videos he watches on his computer, he gets quite irate at a lot of things on the news and voices his opinions loudly.  He still insists on watching the TV news 3 times a day though, even knowing it's going to annoy him.

Now, I'm partially deaf, diagnosed probably over 10 years ago, and husband of course knows this....but he forgets constantly.  I cannot hear him if he's talking at me from another room, or if there's some other noise going on in the same room, e.g. the ever-present TV or radio, or an appliance in use in the kitchen, so I generally call out "I can't hear you" - I'm aware that he's saying something but can't hear the words clearly.  This happens numerous times a day, which I find more and more frustrating as the day goes on.  When he's coming in from outside, as soon as he opens the back door he's talking at me, regardless of the fact that he can't see me and therefore doesn't know where I am, I may well be in my bedroom or the bathroom.  So now I've decided that instead of constantly telling him I can't hear him, I'll just say nothing, simply ignore him, until he realises that I can't hear him and comes to find me.  Before anyone asks, yes I do have hearing aids, NHS ones, which are clearly the cheapest and most basic type (they're not adjustable) and find them totally useless for enabling me to hear better - all they seem to do is to magnify the background noise which I was previously unaware of.  The batteries don't last 5 minutes either, I seemed to be constantly having to change them, and they're obviously small and fiddly.  So I don't wear them.  I've no idea if NHS hearing aids have improved since then, I suppose I ought to ask my GP for a new referral back to audiology.

The other thing I find most frustrating is husband's terrible short term memory - when you've answered his same question 5 times in one morning it does get very wearing.  So I've decided to try and answer him calmly, then quickly go to the bathroom or bedroom, shut the door and roll my eyes, thump a pillow and mutter under my breath until the frustration is out of my system.  Again, I know it's not his fault, but it doesn't half get annoying when it happens literally all the time, every single day.

There are other things about his behaviour that irritate me but I'll focus on just these two things for the moment....once I've mastered those (which may take some time 😂😜), I'll move on to the next couple of things.  Wish me luck!  

Bright sunshine today but still very cold, we had a hard frost last night.  However, from tomorrow the temperature is forecast to rise quite significantly, and last all week.  Bliss!

Determined

 I think husband enjoyed all his birthday food, he even said thank you, which is a rarity these days.  This is the card he got from his daughter:-

Made us both laugh, so apt, every time she and son in law (who's an IT technician) come to visit, they have to sort out problems husband has been having with the TV, his phone or computer, I'm not much help 😂

I've been thinking more about UPFs, especially in the light of wanting to take better care of myself this year, and being more proactive - my word for the year.  I do really want to cut down drastically on the amount of UPFs we buy, for the sake of our health for both of us, with what's known now about the effects of nasty chemicals etc in our food there's really no justification for buying them.

Things like cheese sauce, soups and pasta sauce which I'd got into the bad habit of buying the past few months - they are really so simple to make, I know what's in them and they probably cost much less to make.  The only benefit to buying readymade ones really is that they are exactly that - readymade - so no effort and time saving.  But these things can easily be made in bulk, portioned out and frozen, so after the initial job of making them, pulling a frozen one out is no effort at all.  Some of you might remember a while back that I bought a load of frozen and chilled ready meals for husband, so I didn't have to cook separate meals for us both, in view of me being veggie/pescatarian and him being a carnivore.  Well, most of them he wasn't really that keen on, based on the weird taste (his words), insufficient meat or small size, not enough to satisfy his big appetite.  So that experiment wasn't a success.  I intend to get back in the habit of batch cooking curries, minced beef dishes, pasta bakes containing beef, gammon or chicken, etc, for him, so he's always got a few homemade ready meals in the freezer.

We'll use up whatever UPFs we've got, then I'll try not to buy them again.  Each time we have one of our remaining processed foods, I'll have a think about whether I can make it from scratch myself in future - I'm pretty sure I can with most things.

So that's a proactive project for my new year and goes towards my goal of looking after myself more, I'm determined to do it.

Well, the storm wasn't that bad here, quite strong gusty winds and rain for an hour or two in the middle of the night, but no damage or anything blown over, no sleet or snow either.  Other areas not so fortunate looking at the news, I hope all my lovely readers are safe.

Birthday food and UPFs

 Seeing as husband wasn't forthcoming with what he wanted for birthday food, I made the decision for him, choosing a day's worth of food I know he really likes.  So we're having toasted cheese crumpets for breakfast, then fried egg and beans on toast for lunch - simple stuff but things he loves.  For dinner I'm doing him chicken pieces marinaded in barbecue sauce, with fried rice cooked with lots of added veggies - I won't have the chicken but will have bbq sauce and grated cheese on my rice.  I bought apple turnovers with fresh cream for afters, and a pack of Guinness zero alcohol as a treat.  I'm sure he'll be pleased with it all.

We watched the first of a new series of What Not to Eat a couple of nights ago, it's presented by Professor Tim Spector and a GP, it's all about ultra processed foods and what they do to our bodies.  It was quite horrifying actually, and a bit of a wake up call as quite a few UPFs have been finding their way back into my kitchen recently - mostly for convenience because of me falling out of love with cooking as I get older.  There was a family featured on the programme, a couple and their 4 young children, both parents were overweight, the wife more so than the husband.  They lived almost entirely on UPFs - white sliced toast or sugary cereals for breakfast, the wife had chocolate brownies for lunches, the husband had pot noodles, white bread cheese sandwiches, crisps and chocolate for lunch - every day.  The whole family had takeaways or fast food 5 times a week, they said they tried to cook proper meals twice a week but admitted that didn't always happen.  And the husband and wife each had two large bars of chocolate as a snack - 2 bars each - every single night.  Each of the children had a basket full of sweets, chocolate biscuits and crisps they could snack on when they got home from school each day.  I was absolutely gobsmacked at the sheer amount of total crap 'food' the whole family ate all the time - and it was completely normal for them.  Of course the two doctors got them onto healthy eating, cooking real food and getting the children to eat fruit instead of crap, and monitored them for 6 weeks, resulting in both parents losing nearly a stone in weight and lowering all their bad things like gut inflammation.  It was quite an eye opener and has spurred me on to stop buying UPF foods - we'll eat up what we've got but will try not to buy any more - well, within reason.  Even the Professor said that some processed foods are relatively ok - like tinned beans, e.g.  I do tend to rely on bought sauces - jars and packets, mayo and bbq sauce - which is daft really, as it's so easy (and cheaper) to make them and no nasties go in them.  So that's going to change.