A Happy Tummy and a Happy Heart

I’ll tell you one thing about Santa Fe (besides the fact that the greatest spa in the world is located there) -- the food there is g-o-o-d. Better than good, really. Really, really delicious.

After my uber-relaxing time at Ten Thousand Waves yesterday, we grabbed dinner at Maria’s New Mexican Kitchen, a restaurant that makes its own green chile on site and sticks to the recipes that its founder (her name is Maria, as you could have probably guessed) created fifty years ago.

Dinner was out of control delicious. I had vegetarian fajitas, and chowed down on them with Maria’s homemade flour tortillas. Although I generally avoid white bread/pasta/rice like the plague (these things break down into sugar, so they are almost as bad for me and any other cancer patient as eating candy), I had to try this tortilla. Holy cow, people. Incredible. I am happy to report that I used extreme discipline and didn’t even eat the whole thing.

Breakfast was even better than dinner, if you can believe it. We headed to Café Pasqual’s, and had a green chile-laden feast. My mom and I each had the makeshift vegan huevos motuleños  (we had tofu instead of eggs), which consisted of a corn tortilla topped with black beans, tofu, peas, cilantro, banana, and green chile. Spicy and delicious, I had multiple glasses of water with my yummy meal.

The culinary hits kept coming. As we crossed through Texas, we grabbed some incredibly good Mexican food in Amarillo at a restaurant called El Tejavan. Homemade guacamole, homemade corn tortillas, and beans and rice makes WunderGlo’s belly happy and healthy.

On the way to Oklahoma City, our destination city for the evening, I made some progress on a book I’m reading in preparation for surgery called Prepare for Surgery, Heal Faster: A Guide of Mind-Body Techniques. The first main subject it tackles is the process of relaxation -- how you can relax your body and mind to find an inner peace and tranquility that will heavily aid you in post-op recovery.  Part of this relaxation process, and one that stuck out to me, is to focus on the feeling of love, of a person or a pet or of nature or anything, really. The book says, and I quote, “The antidote is love. It is profoundly healing emotionally and physically.” The book goes on to discuss a study that supports the notion that the feeling of love helps supercharge the immune system. The book invites and coaches the reader to think about loved ones and to let your feelings of love flow freely through your heart.

Focusing on love, ladies and gents, is probably one of the easiest things for me to do -- and its one of the things that my family, friends, and all of you help me do every day, every hour, and every minute. I’m always grateful for the love I receive from my loved ones, but now we’ve got some support for the fact that that love is actually a part of the fuel that will help me beat the hell out of cancer and get back to fighting shape double quick. If this book is even halfway right about this love leads to relaxation leads to quicker recovery time equation, your pal WunderGlo will bounce back from Sugarbaker’s surgery in no time.

After Day 4 of my cross-country cancer-killing trip, I’ve got a happy tummy and a happy heart, and I'm more ready to face down "the cancer" at my February 3rd surgery showdown than ever before.