Mmmmm . . . Bacon! {Years Ago}

I promised last week that I'd be sharing "Years Ago" stories. The story that comes to mind this week isn't quite a "years ago" story, but I can guarantee that it'll be told for years to come.

Shortly after we moved to Colorado, Lauren's transplant medicines and her new anti-fungal medicine for Valley Fever quit playing nicely with each other and started beating up on her kidneys. She ended up spending a week in the hospital waiting for her kidney function to improve and making a switch to a totally new set of transplant medicines.

When she first went to the Emergency Room, she wasn't tolerating any food or formula at all. As her kidneys improved, she slowly regained part of her appetite. Unfortunately, there weren't a lot of allergy safe meal or snack options in the hospital. We found out that the bacon and jello are safe for her combination of allergies, and she proceeded to order it at every meal.

Every single meal.

Sometimes she'd have a bit of cereal, some chicken fajitas, or a few bites of rice with her bacon and jello, but she always had the bacon and jello.

One evening, a friend of ours came to visit, bringing her daughter and another friend to cheer Lauren up. Lauren's dinner tray came up with six pieces of bacon on it. I'm not exactly why they sent that much, but she thought it was great and her friends were incredibly jealous that she got to eat that much bacon at one meal.

As her hospital stay continued, her transplant team asked me to keep a food diary so they could see her nutritional intake. I was a bit embarrassed to fill it out. Thankfully, all of her doctors just laughed when they saw how much bacon she had eaten in a day. (Yes, that's a total of 10 pieces of bacon, 4 containers of jello, and few bites of her other food.)

Perhaps what makes the hospital bacon story so likely to be remembered is that this wasn't the first time we've taken notice of Lauren's bacon obsession. A little over a year ago, I took the three kids to a pancake fundraiser breakfast for the college ministry at the University of Arizona. Lauren went through the line and got bacon. Then, she went through the line again. She went through several more times while I was busy talking, and I've heard estimates that she had eaten close to a pound of bacon by herself. Thankfully, one of the other adults put a stop to her bacon binge by handing her a huge tray of bacon so offer it to people who were still eating their pancakes. With both hands on the tray, she couldn't shovel any more pieces in her own mouth.

The college ministry got a hefty donation from me that morning.


B is for Bacon and is the second in my "Years Ago" stories that I'm telling as I blog my way through the alphabet. I'd love to have you join in the fun -- either by blogging this week about something starting with the letter B or just by visiting all of my friends who link up. (Click the graphic below to go to this week's linky page.)

©2009-2015 Through the Calm and Through the Storm. All rights reserved. Photos and content may not be reproduced. http://throughthecalmandthroughthestorm.blogspot.com