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So I'm laying on the floor of my guest bathroom in a fetal position, and my wife is standing over me, asking if she should call nine to one one. No, I said, I just need to lay here a while. A pumpkin pie tried to kill me. I'm jimpoling. This is my view from the middle. In some past episodes of this podcast series, I talked about the cancer surgery I had and the thirty radiation treatments that followed the surgery. The cancer's gone, but since the ordeal ended in June of twenty twenty three, I've been dealing with a boatload of minor side effects. I say minor because compared to many people who have gone through it, my pitdly little maladies are insignificant for the most part, but the fact that the cancer was in a parodic plan just forward of my left ear meant the radiation treatments affected a multitude of areas around my head and neck. I received proton radiation, which has fewer side effects than traditional radiation, but still not devoid of all of them. Odd thing is, before the surgery and the treatments, the doctor's read off a litany of potential side effects from facial paralysis to the extent that I may not be able to control my eyelids, to painful mouth sores, among other things, none of which actually materialized, but the side effects I did and do have were never mentioned. Just to give you an idea, I spent about ten months with barely any functioning taste buds. Nothing tasted right. The Thanksgiving turkey tasted like rubber, the Christmas ham is like shoe leather. Banana pudding, which I always loved, tasted like wallpaper paste. Pepsi cola might as well have been transmission fluid, and breakfast cereal. Well, I swear I was eating sweepings out of the backyard. So what happens when you can't taste anything, Well, you don't eat anything. What happened when you don't eat anything, Well, you lose weight. I lost sixty three pounds as a result. I went from a thirty six waist to a thirty two, and none of my clothes fit. Friends at church would take my wife to the side and, in a low whisper, ask is Jim okay? It looked like I just walked out of a concentration camp. Strangely, enough of it. The only thing that tasted normal to me was spaghetti sauce, so I found myself eating a lot of pasta dishes. The taste buds have mostly returned to normal now, but you'd be surprised how difficult it is to put the weight back on. I know, I know what you're thinking. I've heard it from everyone. Gee, I have the opposite problem. This is what they lamant when I share my weight gaining difficulty. Now I stop losing weight, but gaining it back is slow and go at best. And I still have that Auschwitz survivor. Aura about me. But worse than the taste bud thing is the dry mouth. They surgically removed the parodic gland, which is a major salvory gland. Then came the radiation tree, which did a number on the rest of the salvary glands. The result is chronic dry mouth, which is no joke. I have coughing fitsts because the dry mouth leads to dry throat. I have to carry a bottle of water or soda or something with me wherever I go, and a vaporizer in my bedroom at night to stave off these issues. Before the surgery, the surgeon warned me I would never again have any feeling in my left ear lobe. This is because he had to sever the nerve to remove the parotid gland. By the way, I had an awesome surgeon. There was an incision that started from behind my left ear and continued to a point about three inches down my neck since they had to remove and buy out the lymph nodes in my neck. But I dare anyone to even detect where the incision was. Now, that's how good this guy is. As I'm recording this episode, it's been two years since the surgery and I still have no feeling in a two inch square area on the left side of my face. My whiskers can't grow in that numb area either. The doc quipped that I had very expensive laser hair removal in that No, Maria, he's a funny guy. In the the area is slowly getting smaller and some feeling and whiskers are coming back, but at this rate, I doubt if it'll get back to normal anytime within the next year or two. For the longest time, I couldn't whistle. I know that sounds a little out there, but it was kind of a gauge as to where I was in the recovery that let's see if I can do weah, well, sort of, yeah, maybe, kind of. I don't know. There have been times in my life where I have been accused of being a big mouth. Well, they can't say that anymore because as a result of this, I can't open my mouth as wide as a normal person. Getting my mouth around a Wendy's hamburger is nearly impossible, even though Wendy's single. I have to do jaw exercises every day, which is a spectacle to watch. If you ever catch me doing it, it's called Tristmas. By the way, I tell my doc that it's beginning to look a lot like Tristmas. He laughs and laughs and then sends me a bill. Oh. In those jaw exercises, if I don't do them exactly right, I get TMJ. That's pain in the jaw and throat muscles. It makes you feel like you have a sore throat all the time. Oh, and I can't forget that I had four molars on the left side of my face removed because they were in the path of the radiation beam. They told me they had to take them out otherwise I could get jaw necrosis. From the radiation. They heard me all over the hospital and they told me that. And speaking of teeth, in my sixty eight plus years on this planet, visits to the dentist have never been a big problem. There was a time when I didn't go to the dentist for more than ten years. I really didn't brush all that well, and I hardly ever flossed. But then I would go to the dentist and I would have one little pin pricked cavity. That's it. Now, because of the dry mouth, tooth decay is a new norm for me. I do home fluoride treatments at least three times a week. I'd brush at least twice a day and floss at least once a day, none of which I was diligent at doing before all of this cancer stuff. But now I go to the dentist every three months, and I'm lucky if I can get out with fewer than four cavities. The dentist says, it's probably just the new normal for me. Shsh okay, So enough of my whining about this stuff. All these things are just annoyances inconveniences, and they don't really affect my life all that much. I meet people at the cancer center all the time that are a lot worse off than I am, and things could have been worse for me. The radiation could have impeded my speech, or my voice, or the eyelid thing. They said if I couldn't close my eyelid that they would implant tiny little weights in them that would help me do So can you imagine? I do believe this to be one of those God things I've talked about so often. If any of those things would have happened, I wouldn't be speaking to you now. So maybe God does want me to do this podcast. But I digress. So what does this all have to do with a pumpkin pie tried to kill me? You ask? Well, good question. You know that whole thing where I couldn't taste anything that essentially ruined my Thanksgiving dinner in twenty twenty three, as well as my Christmas and New Year's dinners. The Thanksgiving turkey could have had Good Year stamped on it, since it tasted like a rubber tire. The Christmas Day ham was tasteless, and yes, so was the pumpkin pie. So when Thanksgiving twenty twenty four rolled around and my taste buzz were pretty much back in action. I was more than looking forward to the things that I had missed out the year before, and one of those things was that pumpkin pie. Now, normally we just buy the pumpkin pies they make at the grocery store bakery. They're pretty good. I usually completely engulfed the thing with whipped cream anyway, like a little pumpkin pie with my whipped cream. But on our Thanksgiving shopping trip to publics, they had Marie Collander's pies on sale, Buy one, get one free. These are the pies that are frozen when you buy them, and you pop them in the oven for an hour. So I got a pun pumpkin and a chocolate pie and put them in the freezer. I baked the pumpkin pie on the Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving. Now that night, my wife and I had shrimp scampy for dinner, and afterwards I got a piece of that pumpkin pie that I was finally able to taste and had been looking forward to. My wife, full from dinner, opted not to have a piece. I doused the wedge of pie with whipped cream like I always do. This was about seven pm on the night before Thanksgiving when I had that piece of Marie Collander's pumpkin pie. At about eight pm, my wife and I were watching TV in the living room when all of a sudden, I started to feel strange. My vision was blurry and the room started to spin around me. I muted the TV and asked my wife if she was feeling okay. She said she felt fine and wanted to know why I asked. I said, I wasn't feeling right. I thought maybe the shrimp scampy had gone bad or something, but since she was feeling okay, I ruled that out. Well. The next couple of hours were a YouTube event. I felt exponentially worse by the second My wife came and stood over me as I sat in my recliner, I said, I think I need to get to the bathroom, which is just a few feet down the hall. When I got out of the recliner and nearly fell flat on my face on the floor, I felt like I was riding the teacup ride at Disney's Magic Kingdom. My wife did her best to hold on to me as I made my way down the hall to the bathroom. Now I'll spare you the graphic details. Let's just say I thought it was going to die, and I was afraid I wouldn't. My life passed before my eyes there in the next few minutes, as did the contents of my stomach, including the now infamous Marie Collanders pumpkin pie. Bill Cosby you remember him. He was a comedian before he was an accused date rapist. Anyway, he did a comedy bit once about people who drank too much and had an intimate encounter with the toilet bowl. You would not be surprised if you saw your shoes come out, he said during the routine. Well, that's the way I felt at this moment, all dignity it was out the window, as everything that was in your stomach goes down the drain. Anyway, after everything that was once inside me was now outside of me and heading down through the house plumbing, my wife asked if she should call nine one one, No, no, I said, I just want to lay here and wait for the room to stop spinning. So I curled up into a fetal position on the guests bathroom floor, totally immobile, and stayed that way for almost an hour. Every time I would attempt to move even slightly, it would make the room spin around me like a NASA centrifuge. I actually felt sorry for my wife and all this. She felt helpless, but I didn't want her to call an ambulance. After all, it was just an apparent case of food poisoning from that crazy Marie Calendar lady. What did I ever do to her? Besides I volunteer it or Land a regional medical center once a week, so those people at the emergency room sort of know me. I'd never love this down. But after about an hour on the bathroom floor, I started to slowly get up and start moving again, albeit very precariously. I walked out into the living room and kind of fell onto my recliner. This was about nine PM, about two hours since I ingested a piece of what was apparently the Marie Calender's pumpkin pie from Hell. By the next morning, I was write his rain again and ready to experience the Thanksgiving day turkey. My wife asked me if I still wanted to go ahead with dinner, and I said yes, of course, I'd been looking forward to this. I can taste things now. I went to the refrigerator and found what remained of the now infamous Marie Calender's death pie and unceremoniously tossed the entire thing in the garbage can. Thanksgiving dinner was terrific. Oh, and being the cranky old geezer I was, I decided to look up the Marie Calender's complete email address. They're owned by a company called Canagra Foods. I emailed them and told them what had happened. I heard nothing until about three weeks later, when I received a letter in the mail snail mail, acknowledging that they received my complaint. No apology, no glad you did and die, no hope you're feeling better. But they included coupons for more Marie Calendar products. Yeah right, we weren't able to knock you off the first time around, so here's some sense off coupons so we can try again. I don't think so. But there I was in the middle, in the middle of the bathroom floor, this time, my wife standing over me with her finger poised to dial nine to one, pin one, and me holding on to the porcelain altar, praying that the pumpkin pie guys would come and put me out of my misery. Next time, I think I'll just stick to the apple pie. I'm Jim pulling and that's my view from the middle. In the next episode, is it true that once a guy retires he becomes that cantankerous old dude who lives down the block. Well, probably get off my lawn. Next on my View from the middle. Have a story to tell about being in the middle, Let us know, emailed Gim at my View from the middle dot com. That's Jim at my View from the middle dot com.