Christmas and Kalbi

OK, I may have jumped the gun a little bit with my last post.  Yes, Dr. Gallina, the foot and ankle specialist, said that, as far as my ankle was concerned, I could start running.  But judging from some issues I've had last week, as well as a follow-up visit to Dr. Babiy's office today, I'm starting to wonder if I was being overly optimistic.

To recap, Dr. Gallina said that I probably just have a little tendinitis in my ankle, and that I could start running as soon as I wanted.  To be extra safe, and to let my butt issue recover a little more, I decided to get an extra week of rest during the Christmas holiday, and to return to running this Wednesday at the fun run. 

For Christmas, I went out to my parents' house, in San Jose, California.  Since I bought my ticket at the last minute, I ended up getting this awful connection in Phoenix.  Well, flight one landed about 25 minutes before flight two was scheduled to take off, and they were at two different terminals.  So as soon as I got off the first plant, I booked it from Terminal A to Terminal B--not super far, but far enough.  Well, by the time I reached Terminal B, I could already feel the tendinitis in my ankle acting up.  Not a good sign. 

And, the five hours of flying seemed to inflame my butt issue as well.  By the end of the first flight, my whole right leg was in agony.  And I continued to feel my butt soreness throughout the rest of the week.  The worst part was driving between my parents' house and my brother's house in Burlingame, about 45 minutes away.  Several times I had to brake with my left foot because my right leg--from the butt all the way down to the knee--was in so much pain and needed to be stretched out.  It was difficult to accept that I still hurt so much even after taking almost all of December off from running...

Today's visit to Dr. Babiy's office didn't help matters.  Dr. Babiy is on vacation, so I met with her colleague, Dr. Craig Feuerman instead.  Dr. Feuerman pretty much said that the ankle and the butt issue could both take months to recover from, and that I shouldn't be running in the meantime.  He acknowledged that Dr. Gallina said I could run, but that was just with respect to my ankle, and even then I should not keep running if I felt pain.  He agreed that the ankle was probably just tendinitis, and stated that I should be icing it frequently.  As for the butt, he thinks it's either a pulled hamstring, or a herniated disk.  As I mentioned here, a herniated disk is a frequent cause of sciatic pain, which may be the type of pain that I am experiencing.

I mentioned to him that Dr. Babiy performed an EMG, which showed no sciatic issue (and thus no herniated disk).  He noted that a negative EMG would not necessarily rule out a sciatic issue.  This is because an EMG is a "physiological" test--which shows whether I have symptoms of sciatica.  He contrasted this with an MRI, which he said was an "anatomical" test--which shows whether I actually have a herniated disk or not.  He said if I wanted to, I could get an MRI of my spine now to determine if I had a herniated disk.  Otherwise, I could wait a month or so to see of the pain subsided, and get an MRI in case it didn't then.  I of course opted to have one now because I am obsessive compulsive like that.  He also asked me if I wanted an oral steroid to help the inflammation go away.  I decided that sounded too scary and that I should pass.  Instead, I'll continue to take super doses of ibuprofen.  In the meantime, I continuing with physical therapy on both my butt and my ankle.

This whole process has made me feel really fortunate that I have health insurance.  I'm also glad I've found some doctors who are willing to perform tests to get to the bottom of what I have.  But still, it doesn't quite make up for the fact that I'm not able to run as much as I want to.

Speaking of running, so Dr. Feuerman told me not to run.  I guess this is against his orders, then, but I'm still planning on going to the fun run tomorrow.  I will take it very, very easy.  If I feel good, then I'll know that I can slowly but surely get better.  If I don't, then I'll know for sure that I just need more rest.  Keep your fingers crossed for me.

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I did a lot of eating when I went home for Christmas!  One of the more memorable meals was at the Palace BBQ Buffet in Sunnyvale, CA.  It was an all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ place.  For $12.99 per person at lunch, you get free reign over their raw meat bar, which includes kalbi (marinated beef short ribs sliced across the bone), lamb, chicken and pork, pig tongue, chicken gizzards, beef tripe, baby octopus, and and all sorts of other fun stuff.  And of course, there were all sorts of AYCE banchan too.  Yummmmm....

Here's a pic of one of the many plates of raw meat we got.  And a pic of my parents enjoying the BBQ'd goodness.

My brother and his wife had us over for Christmas dinner this year.  The picture below is just a tiny snippet of everything that they made.  Four salads: Japanese seaweed, mung bean sprouts, cucumber, and green papaya.  A fish ball and cucumber soup.  Sticky rice with Chinese sausage.  Green beans with pork.  Oysters two ways (raw, and steamed with black bean sauce).  And a few steamed dungeness crabs.  Oh, and a prime rib roast.  All very tasty.

Gone Fishing

My butt is still hurting.  I've decided that Dr. Metzl's diagnosis of a "weak butt" is not completely accurate.  My symptoms appear to be a textbook case of sciatica (minus the loss of bladder or bowel control).  I have a numbness / pins-and-needles sensation from the lower part of my back to right above the knee.  Sciatica is commonly caused by a herniated disk or piriformis syndrome.  I'm not completely sure what a herniated disk is, but it has something to do the the cartilage in the spine, and it can occur when engaging in heavy lifting with your back.

In playing back the last month or so in my head, and spending way too much time on mayoclinic.com, I had an "a-ha" moment.  The day before the Chicago Marathon, I had some pretty bad back pain.  I believe it came from lugging my carry-on bag from my house, on the subway and a bus to La Guardia, into the overhead compartment of the plane, and then onto another subway and bus to the hotel in Chicago.  The next day (Saturday), the back pain was so intense that I wondered if I'd be able to run on Sunday.  Fortunately, the pain subsided for the marathon.  But immediately after the marathon was when I started to feel the butt pain.  And now I wonder if that pain stems from a herniated disk that occurred when I was lifting my carry-on bag.  Damn me for being a cheapskate and taking public transportation everywhere that day.  The good news is that herniated disk/sciatica gets better on its own with some rest.  But still, I think an MRI would ease my mind a bit.  Can anyone recommend a doctor that I can go to for a quick MRI?

In addition, my left ankle is still giving me problems.  I don't think it's serious--probably a tendon issue.  But, while the butt issue is not debilitating, the ankle problem has really limited my running.  In the two weeks post-NYC marathon, I've run a total of 10 miles.  One upshot of this, though, is that I've gotten a chance to return to yoga, which has allowed me to both build up my butt muscles and stretch the problem areas.

Last Thursday, FaTai and Roberto came over for dinner.  I never really cook whole fish, but FaTai does frequently, and I love to eat it.  I stopped by Hong Kong Supermarket in Chinatown on the way home and I saw that they had live tilapia swimming in a tank, so I decided to get one.  Believe it or not, it was my first time ever buying a live fish, and the fishmonger's technique was a bit of a shock: first he scooped my fish out of the water with a net and put it into a plastic bag, then he took the bag with the flailing fish and hurled it against the wall.  The fish stopped flailing.  I think it was pretty much knocked out at this point, but just to be sure, he took the side of a cleaver and smacked it against the fish's head.  I have a feeling that fish had seen better days.

I also ended up buying some pork rib tips, tofu and a mystery leafy green vegetable.

Once home, I cooked up a batch of mapo tofu.  Mapo tofu is a traditional Sichuan dish with tofu and pork and lots of hot chili-bean sauce.  Literally translated, it means "pockmarked grandmother's tofu."  I always thought it was so named because the beans/chilis/pork resembled a grandmother's pockmarked face, but the references online appear to universally state that it was named after an old woman during the Qing dynasty who served this dish in her restaurant.  I guess it's more appetizing to have a dish served by a pockmarked old woman than to be eating her face.

The the leafy greens, which I just sauteed with garlic, came out pretty well.  I'm not sure what kind of greens they were, but the stems were a lot more tender than Chinese broccoli.

The pork rib tips were a bit of a mystery.  I didn't really know what I was going to do with them.  Fatai doubted me, saying that I would need 30-40 minutes to cook them well enough.   That immediately lit a lightbulb in my head, prompting me to pull out my new pressure cooker.  I first seared the pork a bit with some garlic, ginger and scallions, and then added some seasonings (soy sauce, fish sauce, sesame oil, Franzia), and sealed up the pressure cooker.  Eight minutes later, I ended up with delicious, tender, fall off the bone ribs.  A little Korean bulgogi sauce added some sweetness.  Yum.

The fish presented the biggest challenge.  I decided to "red cook" it, which means to braise it in a seasoned soy sauce base.  Fish is usually fried a little before braising to give it a moist but non-slimy texture.  I didn't feel like using a gallon of oil to fry it properly, so I kind of just pan-fried it a little in my wok.

After frying, I added some soy sauce, rice wine, star anise and of course Franzia, plus some leftover pot-roast juice for braising.  To make the most out of my braising liquid, I also added some shitake mushrooms, Chinese wood's ear mushrooms, dried lily flowers and tofu skin.  Here's the final product:

The fish itself came out really well.  I think pan frying it first helped it to develop its flavor.  The other stuff that I added to the braise (mushrooms, etc) could have used some extra time braising.  (The next day, I put it back in the pressure cooker for about three minutes, and it came out perfect).

We did a pretty good job on the fish, although none of us were brave enough for the head.  Good thing my parents weren't there...they would have been disappointed that we wasted a perfectly good fish face.