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EDITOR'S CORNER | An avocado with murder on its mind

You want fibre, I’ll give you fibre
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There’s a lot to loathe about how modern capitalism has enabled big box stores to kill local downtowns. But that’s the reality we’re living in, and any shopper on a budget will migrate to the best balance of quality and cost. And so we found ourselves in Costco earlier this month, surveying the fresh produce.

Always among the standouts are the avocados. I don’t think we’ve ever come home with one that wasn’t next to perfect, and on this day they were gorgeous. So we grabbed a bag and chucked it in the cart.

As high points go, trips to Costco have been about it lately. So far, 2023 has proven a largely miserable year. We’ve had thousands of dollars in repair bills for a 15-year-old car (buying a decent used car is still too pricey). Friends have become ill. My mother’s partner of 42 years passed away in late winter. And our beloved Labrador Retriever took sick literally the day after his 10th birthday, seeming in otherwise fine health up to then, and died in front of us two weeks later, a gut-wrenchingly horrible moment.

A few days after the dog’s death we returned some unneeded medication to the veterinarian, and offhandedly asked if they happened to know whether any reputable Lab breeders had a litter on the way. Yes, in fact, they did. And so later that afternoon we pulled up at a farm way out west in Haldimand, nearly bumping into Norfolk County, where we found not one but two litters of Lab puppies that had arrived close together in late January and early February. A few weeks later, we took home our fourth Yellow Lab and the first girl.

Here’s some free but quite valuable advice: If you are closing in on retirement age and are tempted to bring a 10-week-old puppy into the house, be really, really sure you’re ready.

We weren’t, or at least not entirely. Put it this way, training a pup in 1993, and in 2003, and in 2013, was somehow a lot easier than it’s proving so far in 2023. She’s a sweetheart, but not a big fan of her crate at night, which is a first for us and we need our sleep. Most puppies snooze 18-20 hours a day, and so far she’s excelled in not meeting that average. The cortisol racing through my system when stressed with her is in competition with the oxytocin released when enjoying a quiet cuddle when she's finally tired out. Heart attack, or serenity. Stay tuned.

So, back to that vaguely click-baitey headline about murderous avocados.

A week ago Saturday my spouse sensibly opted to escape the puppy mayhem and have lunch with some friends. While I know my way around a kitchen, with the pup in a hyperactive mood I opted to go for the simplest lunch—one of those nice Costco avocados.

Did I mention that these avocados also tend to be of ample girth, befitting of their Big Box distribution? This one may have had its own postal code.

The sensible thing would have been to eat half, at most. But I was hungry, and this was all I’d be having for the next few hours, so I scooped out the other half too. I was now half Boomer, half avocado. Worse, I ate it in a cramped position, sprawled on the kitchen floor keeping the puppy entertained until she decided to conk out again for awhile.

There is a lot of fibre—both soluble and insoluble—in avocados. It was quite possibly this, plus the enormous volume, plus my twisted eating position, that resulted in a massive bowel blockage that took me down about five hours later. Over the course of an hour or so that evening I got progressively more bloated and nauseous, lost all appetite, and eventually started heaving.

It was scarily reminiscent of my similar, far more agonizing experience (not including avocados) in October 2021. Based on that nightmare memory, we called for an ambulance. Long story short, good thing we did.

It was a blockage, all right. Whether or not specifically tied to the cantaloupe-sized avocado wasn’t clear—my previous bowel surgery increased the odds of more blockages anyway. A CT scan revealed that a kink in my upper bowel was preventing movement behind it, which provoked a fair amount of lightly processed stool to back up into my stomach. In went the IV drip. Down went the evacuation tube through my nose. You can imagine what was pumped up over the next few days.

After recent policy changes by Niagara Health, Welland Hospital does hardly any surgery now, so the next morning I was transferred to Niagara Falls. There I spent most of last week in bed, in a painful race against time hoping to avoid the need to be sliced open once again. (I had no idea that a bloated abdomen could hurt that much.)

Thankfully by Day 5, x-rays showed that the mass was starting to dissolve and migrate south. That evening I was allowed to return home on a liquid diet—alcohol specifically permitted, interestingly, though I waved it off for a couple of days.

As for the hospital stay itself, it was pretty grim. Yes, the nurses and doctors and the rest of the staff did the best they could, but it was clear that they were more overworked and under-resourced than ever.

“Isn’t St. Catharines an option?” I asked the EMTs on the Sunday morning, as they transferred me from Welland to Niagara Falls.

Nope, they answered. Entire wards remain closed-off due to lack of staff to run them. That’s our health system, 2023. The Ford government seems hell-bent on painting private healthcare as the panacea for all, and I fear that this campaign-by-starvation will eventually succeed.

Believe me, if you’ve never spent time overnight in a hospital room, not including in the E.R., pray to the deity of your choice that you never have to, at least not in Niagara, at least not until our healthcare system is properly funded and staffed.

Meanwhile, heartfelt thanks to friends who helped us and especially helped my spouse in so many ways, and who eventually sprang me from detention, and to our vet who made an important house call. I had some time on my hands while staring at the ceiling for those few days, time to reassess priorities, time to make promises to get more exercise, to make renewed efforts to cherish friends and family in this short life. I also came out of it weighing what I did as a high school graduate. It’s not the style of avocado cleanse I’d recommend.

See you next time.

 



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Dave Burket

About the Author: Dave Burket

Dave Burket is Editor of PelhamToday. Dave is a veteran writer and editor who has worked in radio, print, and online in the US and Canada for some 40 years.
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