Where I've Been, and Things I Lost In The Fire....Mainly Blood

  

 It's been a while. I had prepped several recipes to publish here and then we were interrupted by the Sonoma Fires. As I mentioned we evacuated to San Francisco for about 8 days and returned to find our house smoky but intact. We were very very fortunate as several friends lost everything.

   We were awakened by neighbors pounding on the door and ringing our bell at 3 am. When the doorbell is frantically ringing at that hour it never means anything good. Our across the street neighbor was telling us there was a big fire (actually there were about 14 fires) and we needed to get out. Now. Like right now. The picture above was what I saw at the end of our street on the East side of Sonoma. That was Gundlach Bundcshu and the Carneros fire.Those are flames over the tops of the trees. All the neighbors were leaving or gone.

 During the course of getting out of the house with the dog and whatever we could grab quickly at 3 am I hurt myself . No biggie, but I wound up in pain and so decided to take advil and tylenol to fix it. First big mistake. Taking them in a dehydrated condition with no food in my stomach second big mistake. I got pretty sick from that stuff after we'd evacuated to San Francisco and after a visit to the MD and blood tests. I discovered it caused bleeding in my stomach and I had gotten anemic. I was sent to the emergency room. The good news is that all my blood work and blood chemistry was normal.

The bad news, my blood which is normally 12 +was down to 8.2. Not enough for a transfusion, but enough to leave me weak and breathless and barely able to move around. I felt like I was on the top of Everest.
 That was two weeks ago. I am a zillion percent better than I was then and the doctor tells me it'll take about 2 months to build my blood back as I lost about 1/3 of my hemoglobin in that incident.  I am now on iron pills, B12, and Folic acid, and I 'm getting an endoscopy on Thursday to make sure I didn't give myself an ulcer. This is why I have been among the missing on this blog, I just haven't had the energy.
  So, as soon as I'm done with the endoscoipy on Thursday I will be posting one of my favorite Indian dishes Aloo Baingan and also an Apple Beehive.

and

Both were dishes I'd made the day before the fire and never got a chance to share.
   Meanwhile all of us here in Sonoma continue to recover.