Sept. 20, 2015 - 5:48 a.m.

Let's Meat Again.

Two months ago, 8 pm, basement community room, St. Mary Anathema RC Church:

Dangerspouse: "Hi. My name is Dangerspouse, and I am a...a........vegetarian."

Group: "Hi Dangerspouse."

God help me.

NewWifey(tm) still has not managed to eradicate the C-Diff hordes that are turning her lower GI tract into a log flume ride for food. I think she's spent more time driving the porcelain bus in the last six months than I've spent accidentally looking at Kendall Jenner's ass. So, hardly any breaks at all.

This has got to stop. It was fun for a while eating mounds of fettuccine Alfredo covered with bacon in front of her and making her cry, but enough is enough. I mean, I'm not getting laid!

(To her credit, NewWifey(tm) gamely offered to saddle up and take one for the team. But...have you ever smelled C-Diff? Go ask the nearest nurse and see if she doesn't involuntarily retch before you even finish your sentence. It'd be like fucking a vat of surströmming. Not only that, but if she's riddled with spores "down there" I don't want to end up with mushrooms growing out of my dick. Don't get me wrong, I'll put up with an awful lot when it comes to sex. But not dick crops.)

So yeah, she has GOT to pull out of this. Trouble is though, pulling out of C-Diff is about as easy as pulling out of Afghanistan. You approve surges - more vancomycin - but the insurgents keep coming back with their IED's and RPG's and deadly spores. So there you go again shitting your brains out for 3 days straight while your husband makes fun of how bad you smell.

What now, then? She's already had three attacks, and the doctor said it's entirely possible she may have more. "Oh, and about 11 thousand people a year die from it" he added helpfully.

Time for Plan-B. Or Plan-BM, as the case may be.

As some of you helpfully pointed out both in my notes and with private e-mails (thanks!), the highly unsavory sounding "Fecal Transplant" option has had some success eradicating C-Diff once and for all in patients who are not seeing improvements. That's the upside.

The downside is, my wife has to have a load of someone else's shit pile driven into her ass.

Ok, in reality it's not like they take a toilet plunger, load it up and ram it home. There are actually three (officially) approved options: 1. a payload of poop delivered via colonoscope, 2. go in the other way: through the nose and down, and 3. in pill form, the hilariously-named-as-long-as-you're-not-the-one-swallowing-it "crapsule".

It shows how much C-Diff must suck that NewWifey(tm) didn't blanche at any of those options. Her only question was, and I quote, "CAN WE DO IT THE FUCK RIGHT NOW??!"

Well no, they couldn't. They wanted to give her one more dose of meds. If she had another attack after that, THEN they'd go for "Option Number-2".

Guess who will be the donor if they decide to go that route?

Yup. Turns out the best candidate is someone who shares the same environment, who is exposed to all the same micro-nasties as the patient, but who doesn't have C-Diff. That person's gut must have the right C-Diff fighting armada swimming around keeping the hordes at bay, and that's what the patient needs.

Guess what also turns out to be true?

Vegetarians give the best poop.

Don't ask me why. I heard the doctor speaking, but once I heard the word "vegetarian", I was stricken with hysterical deafness. I think it had something to do with magic, basically.

So there you go. In order to insure that my wife gets the absolute best possible issue of my lower GI tract, I have been eating nothing but vegetable matter the past two months.

Greater love has no man. Word.

Lemme tell you though, and I can't believe I'm typing this: it hasn't been the soul destroying culinary death march I thought it was going to be. It really hasn't. I like veggies well enough - as a garnish. I cook them just as well as I cook everything else (read: "perfectly"), and when I thought about it, a lot of the dishes I already enjoy on a regular basis are already pretty much meat free as it is. Risotto, along with other rice dishes like biryani, paella, congee, and others are already staples that get heavy rotation. Pasta in various sauces, from alfredo to primavera and on and on all stay plant based. It's squash season, and I do a ton of dishes with the numerous varieties, from pumpkin ravioli, to acorn squash and raisin curry, to roast butternut and pear soup, to dozens of Asian kabocha recipes. I love love love lentils in all their myriad colors and flavors. Indian and Pakistani dahl/daals ROCK. I can make bread in my sleep - and eat it then, too. And that's only the very, very tip of a very, very large iceberg lettuce.

So ok. I'm a vegetarian. At least until NewWifey(tm)'s shit don't stink at fighting Gut-ISIS anymore.

Again, this started two months ago.

Here are my actual, honest, observations about living la vida greenbean.

Positives:

1. Like I said, I haven't suffered. I eat lots of foods I love, and I know how to prepare them well.

2. I am a friend of Bob's Red Mill (to keep the AA reference going). I've discovered I enjoy an entire world of grains and seeds that I'd heard of before, but never bothered to try. I mean, I brought a bag of whole teff grains home on a whim, ground some and mixed it with water, let it ferment, and four days later I made my own injera! Yeah. Bob made my world very, very grainy.

3. A real feeling of smug superiority descends upon one when one doesn't kill one's fellow creatures - many if not all of whom may be sentient beings with feelings of empathy and even love.

4. I put a bumper sticker on my car that says, I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate vegetables."

4. Some of those PETA chicks are actually pretty hot.

Negatives:

1. I put on 10 pounds. In two months.

Wait, that's not entirely accurate.

I PUT ON 10 POUNDS! IN TWO MONTHS!! WHAT THE FUUUUUCK?!?!

That's more like it. But yeah - two and a half pounds a week like clockwork. Seriously, what the fuck? I thought vegetarianism was, like, the CURE for putting on two and a half pounds a week like clockwork. What the fuck?? Was I chowing down on tofu in my sleep or something?

2. It's expensive. Good lord, is it expensive. Check this: the Price Chopper supermarket near my house has frying and roasting chickens on sale this week for 88-cents per pound. That's cheaper than sawdust. Spinach? You're looking at 6, 7 bucks a pound, easy. And spinach shrinks like my dick when I see Caitlyn Jenner, so that pound of leaves barely covers 4 sauteed tofu squares when all is said and done. Not to mention, fresh veggies don't store well, and rarely can be frozen. I actually had to dip into my beer budget for this diet. My beer budget! If NewWifey(tm)'s life wasn't on the line, that would have been a deal breaker. It almost was anyway.

3. I have never farted so much in my life. And I'm a guy. (Granted, this could have gone in the "Positives" section.)

4. Fiber deserves its reputation. I spent more on Charmin in the past two months than I have on gas for my car.

5. I am hungry all. the. time. This may be the single most negative of all the negatives (other than Caitlyn Jenner). I am at a loss to understand this one. I eat TONS of food, but it's never enough. My blood sugar/insulin resistance/humors must really be out of whack with all these complex carbs and 40 inch fiber strands its being forced to process around the clock. I swear to you that half an hour after eating so much food that my shirt collar starts cutting into my neck, I'm so hungry I'm ready to join the Donner Party just for the buffet. I am hungry all. the. time.

But all in all, despite the negatives, it's been better than I expected. And I don't think those negatives are insurmountable. If I tweak my intake so it skews more towards protein instead of carbs, that'll ease the hunger mania. I hope. And I can cut down on costs by buying clearance produce - of which there is always some on offer - and pre-make meals that can be frozen. And I'll just learn to own those farts. They are pretty damn impressive after all.

So yeah. I'm proud of myself that I've handled it so well. In fact, I was even considering making the veggie life a long term proposition.

Then last week, the phone rang.

"Hi, Danger? It's your wife's doc. We just got her latest lab results back, and it looks like that last round of vancomycin did the trick. It's come back negative for C-Diff. There's a slight chance there may be a recurrence, but right now I don't think we're gonna need your - "

I slammed the phone down and ran to my car.

An hour later I got back from Price Chopper and made this. Then ate it. All of it.

Fuck vegetables. Fuck vegetarians. I don't even want to see a garnish on my plate for at least a month. Unless it's made of meat. Sweet, life sustaining flesh. To err is human, to forgive bovine. Mmmmmmmmmm.

And those PETA chicks really aren't so hot anyway. Fuck 'em.

G'night kids. Don't let your meat loaf.

Ciao!

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