a ground-breaking (fruit) discovery

Several years ago, I was dating a guy who visited my Chicago apartment. We were hanging out in the kitchen and he opened the freezer and jumped back: “What is that?” he said. The man was 6’5” — and seemed scared. It was a pile of brown, frozen bananas. A whole slew of them. He was visibly repulsed. Shortly thereafter, we decided to end our short-lived romance.

See, I save bananas when I don’t eat them. If you put them in the freezer, you can eventually make banana bread or frozen fruit drinks out of them. And it feels so wasteful to buy bananas and then throw them out. I feel downright guilty about it.

But as anyone who knows me knows — and A. learned this on our third date — I am very picky about my bananas. They have about a two-day window where I can eat them. Brown spots make me gag.

So what happens, then, is that the entire freezer fills up with bananas. We’re talking two to three years worth of bananas. Cause I don’t even really love banana bread. My roommate, who is very flexible, was embarrassed when, at a party she hosted, a few of her friends were scrounging for alcohol late night — and they noticed the 50 or so bananas. They teased her incessantly. Also, her brother and sister-in-law saw them and said: “It’s more socially acceptable to have a severed head in the freezer.”

So before we had another party, N. practically begged me to throw them out. And I did — I filled up a garbage bag full of hard, brown, frozen bananas and hauled it out to the trash can. And I didn’t even feel bad about it.

But since then, a banana or two (or four) has creeped into that freezer. I’m ready to claim innocence if accused: “How did those get in there?”

Then, last week, I made an important discovery. A ground-breaking discovery. I discovered that if I trick myself — like a mom tricks a child — by mixing the fruit into other concoctions I eat regularly, I will eat it. Every day for the last week, I’ve had muesli with my Wallaby organic vanilla yogurt (I’m picky about that, too) and a sliced-up banana and some blueberries for good measure.

I gotta say, I’m really proud of myself. I’m trying — really trying — to eat better (just like the USDA recommends in its new nutrition guidelines) and am thinking about everything I put in my body. My next goal is to cut down on my sugar.

Now, who wants some banana bread?

on vigilance

There’s a lot of breast cancer in my family. And when I say a lot, I mean doctors raise their eyebrows when they hear about it. So today, I walked into the Georgetown Breast Center for a risk assessment to chat about how to be vigilant.

And let me just say: I know I’m lucky. I personally pay for very expensive health care. Just for me. It costs $300 a month. But that allows me to just walk into a respected place like the Georgetown Breast Center without a referral and get a mammogram that same day. Most insurance companies won’t agree to pay for a mammogram for women at my age (33). But not only did my mom have breast cancer, but four of her sisters have had it — three of them in both breasts. And both of my grandmothers had it, too. My mom and aunt tested negative for the known genes (BRCA 1 & 2) related to breast cancer, but there is probably a gene that hasn’t been discovered that runs in my family.

Today, the nurse practitioner and doctor felt me up — and the technician prodded and pulled and squeezed my breasts and clamped them down into the cold device. After my mammogram, I sat in the waiting room in my white gown and jeans across from a woman in her early 40s, I’m guessing, also in a gown and jeans, whose eyes were red and splotchy. She dabbed her tears with a tissue. And I was in that awkward position of trying to look away, but I couldn’t help but staring, and wanting to reach out to her and comfort her, but knowing that as a stranger, it wasn’t my place.

And then the imaging technician called me back into the imaging room: “The doctor wants two more images,” she said. “She sees something here” — and she pointed to a small round spot on the black-and-white film. In the moment, I tried not to worry — I remembered my doctor saying that 80 percent of the time a mammography shows something suspicious, it’s benign.

But 10 minutes later, when the radiologist called me into the room to go over the results, I looked at her searchingly. She seemed nervous and didn’t smile. And then she said, “Your films are normal.”

There is nothing happy about cancer. There is little you can say to someone who has it to make them feel better — it’s scary. But it can be beat if caught early. I know I have many more years ahead of me of getting screened — and waiting and hoping for that response: “Normal.”

if you’re scared, I’m scared, too.

As soon as he said, “I’m scared,” I was scared, too.

We had just returned from a weekend from A.’s hometown in New Jersey, laughing at the Jersey accents (at one point, during a pizza and beer dinner, a hockey teammate of A.’s said, “Why am I sweatin’ my bwalls off?” which made us exchange glances and giggle.)

But by about midnight, A. was running a high fever and tossing and turning. He said he felt like he was hallucinating and his legs ached — they hurt so bad, he said. We were up all night and he groaned and groaned. After calling my parents for guidance and feeling shaky, I took him into the E.R. at George Washington Hospital. I would never forgive myself if he had a bug that attacked his neurological system — or something equally as crazy — and I didn’t take him in.

They didn’t make him wait. He hobbled to the hospital bed. The nurse gave him an IV of water and they ran tests.

As we waited for the doctors, and I sat in a chair at the foot of his bed, he finally fell asleep. And when the doctors did arrive, they didn’t seem too concerned, so that allayed my fears. His blood and urine tests came back normal.

So I took him home. And I slept on his couch for two nights as he recovered from a nasty bug.

And now, two weeks later, he’s happy and silly and goofy and fun all over again — and I’m so relieved.