Haunted by Katz’s Pastrami on Rye

In case you’re already wondering where I’ll end up going with this, I’ll tell you. Save you a little stress. This will be a post about Instagram. So, now you know.

Onward.

I’ve never been to Katz’s Delicatessen in Manhattan. I’ve been to Manhattan (wow) but didn’t get to go to Katz's. But both my sons did. Even better, they went together. Sam was living in Brooklyn and John was visiting him. So off they went. I believe Sam went for the Pastrami and Rye and John had the Reuben. Katz’s is a very popular attraction in New York but it also pulls off the magic trick of apparently being beloved by many of the inhabitants of that city as well as the blow-ins. Many people know of it on account of the movie ‘When Harry Met Sally’ and particularly that scene where Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal have lunch together and Rob Reiner’s Mother says, “I’ll have what she’s having.” It’s quite a brag and lots of visitors probably go there for that reason alone. But, interestingly, Katz Deli doesn’t seem to trade on that at all. Not one little bit, as far as I can see. No. They trade on their food, and more specifically their sandwiches. That’s why my sons went there. They are both ‘foodies’ and they were both keen to experience the place, the food, and the sizable bill. They both enjoyed it and when they were home at Christmas, they told me about it and it sounded great and now I want to go there and try it and if I ever get back to New York again, I believe I will.

So there.

We come towards the point. Having heard some stuff about Kat’s Deli from my sons, I must have looked it up on the internet. Or maybe my phone just heard me mention it and did the rest. Whatever the reason, and the level of justified paranoia attached to it, my Instagram account sprung into action and showed me a little video of a person ordering their sandwich at the counter in the Deli, It went on to show the guy making the sandwich and that was very interesting to me so I watched it all.

Then another, quite similar video came up, then another, then another.

Now, some months later, if you provided me with the raw materials, I feel I could whip you up a Reuben with Cheese with relative ease. I am continually bombarded with videos of Katz’s people making their sandwiches. I have seen, literally, hundreds of them sail across my Insta feed.

I guess the simple fact is this: when the Insta algorithm figures out that you might like something, it shows you lots of that thing. Lots and lots of it.

And, in all fairness, the making of a Katz sandwich makes for a pretty compelling video. A huge chunk of cured meat is landed on the cutting board and the person making the sambo trims at least one third of the thing away in very few samurai-like sweeps of the blade. The cuttings are swept unceremoniously to the floor and the remaining chunkette is trimmed into slender slices with consummate speed and then piled extravagantly onto nice bread. A swipe of mustard, a huge gelatinous blob of melted cheese, if so desired, and up it comes.

Here are three things I learned from my Katz video watching, just in case you ever get there.

Leave a tip and you get a sample of the meat on a plate while your order is being magicked-up.

Go to the further counters for less queue length. (I don’t really know how this works in reality, but it does seem to be a thing.)

There is free drinking water on tap available somewhere in the back of the deli. This is the biggest secret I know.

Of course, Instagram doesn’t just show me videos of sandwiches being made. Other forced enthusiasms present themselves regularly, very few of them welcome. I am glad that the AI Cat stuff has now receded and hate that it has been replaced by copious bearded elderly men doing chair yoga. Swings and roundabouts.

The latest Insta Thing, for me at least, is people selecting and showing their favourite books. This is odd for a number of reasons. Mostly because the people making the videos don’t seem to generally care very much about the books and also the vast majority of them seem to select from the same tiny catchment pile of novels. ‘East of Eden’, ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, ‘Lonesome Dove’, ‘Crime and Punishment’, and ‘No Country for Old Men’ all keep on coming up and the people waving them around, after initially hiding the covers like they have some big secret to tell, don’t seem like people who have read these books at all. I kind of feel like I am missing something with these book recommendation videos but I don’t think it’s anything more than that these folk are trying to get hits and views and will use any device to get them, books being their current side hustle.

There are exceptions to every rule and there’s a young person called Rhia who turns up to discuss her favourite books and she is clearly passionate and clearly knows what she is talking about. Her books are riddled with little coloured bookmarks and she always seems honest about what she likes and doesn’t like. Rhia is the acceptable face if Instagram book reviews and no higher praise can I give.

Instagram is a good corner of social media, in my opinion at least. I see lots of friends there and love checking out the photos they share. But the ‘forced stuff’ is a bit too much sometimes. I makes me scared to glance at a particular ‘thing’ for fear that a plethora of clone ‘things’ will follow me around for the next six weeks.  

Fourth world problems… where would we be without them?

Up or Down?

I’ve written quite a bit about the more positive aspects of my recent waltz with GBS. I suppose I should also mention, rather obviously, that there were some less-good parts to the whole affair.

But, when I think back to my hospital and rehab stay, and when I think about writing about the worst parts rather than the best parts, I always stop myself short. Nobody needs to be hearing about all that, I reckon. Not in the level of grisly detail I could write it in. But there’s still a part of me that feels it is only right to cover it in some way. To not just leave a written record for myself that seems unremittingly positive and ‘almost-fun.’ There were definitely times when it wasn’t ‘almost-fun.’ Not even close. But, like I said, the telling of that end of things is just too sinewy and gristly to be getting too deep into.

But this week, I got to thinking that the sides of the bed might serve as a manageable metaphor for all that other unmentionable stuff. It’s a true part, it’s fairly sterile in the telling, and ultimately it seems like it started me on a path towards a ‘narrative-for-life-as-it-currently stands’ which is both positive and good.

So, let’s try that, shall we?

On my first night in the hospital, the attendant staff put up the guarding rails on both sides of my bed. This was apparently for my own safety, to stop me from falling out. But I didn’t like it very much.

Not having been in hospital for over 50 years meant there was a lot of things I didn’t immediately like, but with most of them I tried very hard to suck it up and keep going, as you have to really.

But the bed rails were a bit more of a problem. It’s not a phobia, not even a ‘thing’ per se, but I do have a mild dislike of being confined or pinned down. Tight, tucked in, sheets in a hotel room, for instance, will do my head in and I’ll have to go around the bed perimeter and pull them all out before I can get in. On top of everything else, the raised guardings on both sides of the bed had some air of finality about it that just didn’t work for me.

So, I bargained. I promised I would strive very hard not to fall out of the bed, and could they please consider leaving just one side of the bed open? They were kind, they were considerate, they left one side down. The fact that I had promised not to fall out might have helped but, in actuality, I was not able to move myself very much at all so the falling out was really a pure impossibility.

The bed rails were thick moulded plastic affairs, not at all like the chromium plated bars one might see in a Carry-On Doctor film. They were sleek and space-age and clean and bright… but still they were there to hold you in, and, for the first few days, I was glad to always have one of them down.

But by the time I was transferred to the Rehab facility (on a stetcher, in an ambulance… another new experience) a couple of weeks later, I had learned a lesson or two about guardings and beds… and me. Answering a series of written questions upon admittance, I was asked if I would like to have the bed guardings up or down at night. I immediately answered that I would like both of them up please. This was met with a little surprise. I was told that, at this point in my treatment, the raised bed guardings were regarded as a form of restraint and I would have to sign a release to allow the staff to do that for me. I took the pen and made my incoherent scribble without hesitation.

What had changed in me in those few weeks? Had I become beaten down by my time in the general hospital? Had I given up all traces of independence? No. It was quite the opposite. I had learned a trick or two and I had also become a little stronger.

The truth was that although my legs still weren’t co-operating very well, I had very good strength in my upper body. With the guard down in the night, even on one side, I couldn’t manage to shift or turn in the bed. But with both guards up, I could grab hard onto those moulded plaster handholds on both sides and drag myself around into a more comfortable position. In the night, if I slipped too far down the bed, I could haul myself back up to the top, inch by inch, in a mere matter of a couple of grunting, sweating, minutes.

I had soon realised that this confinement was to my advantage and the pleasure in being able to move myself just a little bit outweighed the discomfort of being closed in.

This situation didn’t last for long. The regaining of some command over my legs came back much more quickly that anyone expected and, pretty soon, the bed guards were not an issue anymore. In fact, they no longer existed in my world.

But now I find they come back to me sometimes, in my head. Not as any fearful negative thing but more as a lesson in resilience and resourcefulness. I see how scary things can sometimes be lassoed and mounted and tamed to one’s own advantage. And, on a somewhat wider perspective, I see how I sometimes get to choose my own narrative, not just for the bed guardings but for this entire episode of my life.

When it comes to the telling of this story, I could have chosen the ‘pity me, I was locked up in my bed and couldn’t move’ narrative but, instead I choose the, ‘I turned a shitty thing into something good for me’ narrative.

On the wider scale, when it comes to my overall illness, I could have chosen to tell myself a story which goes something like, “I am damaged goods now. I have 24/7 nerve pain. I walk well but with care. My legs sometimes feel like they are encased in lead. I get tired and distracted. I am not the man I was 4 months and 1 week ago.”

To hell with that. No. I choose another narrative.

I am doing great. I can do everything I could do before. I have made a brilliant recovery, and, over the coming months, I will only get better and better. And even if I never get fully better, I will be able continue to live my wonderful life on my own terms.

I am a lucky, lucky guy and that’s the story I will continue to choose to tell myself.

Would you like the guards up or down? Would you like your story served up or down? Different questions, same answer.

Up, please.

Positive Reports from the GBS Front

There’s a sizable part of the me that doesn’t want to return these posts to the Guillain-Barré subject ever again.

I am cultivating a sort of a ‘Move On/Get Over It’ mentality about it all. But it’s not entirely as straightforward as all that. I tell myself that I owe it to the narrative to update it a little as I go.

What do I mean by that? Well, when I was first diagnosed, four months ago this week, I started to hunt through the internet for other people’s experiences of what I was about to experience. It was helpful and unhelpful, all at the same time. I think how the people who come after may do the same and they may eventually stumble on to me and my own posts on the subject. And if those posts of mine were to just stop at three months out, doing good, would that not be a cop out and a lack of respect for those who come after? Along the way, I have benefited greatly from hearing, first-hand, the experiences of others. It is statistically highly unusual that I would have two lovely people in my immediate circle who have gone through what I have gone through.

So, in summary, here I am, updating again.

Four months out, four months in, take your pick and I am doing great.

Great.

Except it’s not entirely that straightforward and not entirely that simple and that’s why I think it might be worth revisiting the subject yet again, even if you are totally fed up of it.

So, how am I really?

Okay.

In almost every respect I feel that I am done with Guillain-Barré Syndrome and it is done with me. I go to work every day and I do well. I walk everywhere with a good steady gait and can manoeuvre around and through the everyday obstacles of the town very well. My reflexes have come back and I can once again feel the resonance of a tuning fork on any part of my body that you might care to place one. My consultant doesn’t need to see me anymore. If you meet me on the street, I don’t think you’d know that anything had happened to me, which is very pleasing indeed.

But, for the readers who may come afterward, experiencing the same stuff, I have to say that there are still some unavoidable residuals. The main thing that I am currently left with is what the fancy-ass people would call ‘Peripheral Neuropathy.’ This persists in both my hands and my feet and, sometimes I fancy but can’t be sure, in the tip of my nose. In my case this stuff presents as a constant numbness, prickling, and tingling in these areas as well as a sensitivity to touch and a rather contradictory feeling that my hands and feet are bound up in some kind of invisible cloth.

With all of that comes an element of fatigue and distraction that is much harder to describe and nail down. In truth, it’s harder to know if that part is real or not – a real part of this journey – or whether it is just a part of the normal course of getting older. This self-doubt is one of the hardest parts of all to navigate. If I get worn out, if I stumble momentarily, if I forget obvious stuff, am I just playing a game with myself, pretending to still be a bit sick, for sympathy or something. I know in my heart that’s not the case but the mind plays its tricks… or, at least, mine does.

But the nerve pain, as described above, is the main thing. And, because I got this little gift as part of my GBS, there is an increased chance that it will all go away over time. They say it often eases and fades over months and then, one day, it is gone. One friend who has travelled the same road reminded me that the symbol of the GBS Society is a Turtle. Slow progress and patience are the watchwords of these latter stages. They say that nerves regenerate at 1mm per day so, inch-by-inch (in old money) the inside of me is getting better every day.

But to those who follow behind and who may find these posts here, I will say that it doesn’t always feel like that.

Whatever repairs are going on inside of me, they are not manifesting themselves in any notable improvement yet. The tingling/buzzing/numbness/pain is unaltered to date and, on some days, I feel like my age (62) might go against me in this and I may ultimately be left with some lifetime residuals from this adventure.

And, you know what? If that turns out to be the case then so be it. I can do everything I need to do. I can get through my days and if I’m a bit more weary than usual at the end of them then so what? This will improve… or maybe there’s a small chance it will not. Either way, I can manage it and live with it and enjoy life with it.

So, in summary, I am happy with where I am. I certainly feel some of that rather clichéd increase in appreciation for the life and the health I have, and I also feel some increased empathy for those souls whose lives are so, so much harder than mine.

So that’s the update. Ask me on the street how I am and I’ll tell you I’m fine, it’s over, I'm done with it.

Ask me here and maybe I’ll tell you that little bit more.