Oh how I can remember that wonderful taste of good ole, natural homemade tasting, creamy, Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream. I remember the taste. . .unfortunately not the last time I had it.
At the age of only 4 months, my Grandma Frazier fed me ice cream. And the mayhem started. I craved ice cream, like a child craves candy (odd how that works out huh? :) ). At family meals, I would practically beg, pestering my parents, almost to the point of annoyance, if I had eaten enough "good food" to go to the ice cream. This "good food" was what most people would love. Steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, the whole sha-bang. But NOT for me. I could eat ice cream all day long!
There is a particular brand of ice cream, that just leaves that light, fluffy feeling in your mouth. Almost as if nothing is actually there but purely flavor. This brand, known as Blue Bell, is the Ice Cream King in Texas, and other southern states. This is the brand I crave above all others. Especially the flavor Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream. Ah. . .just thinking about it makes me drool.
Well this continued for many years, and my craving for this magnificent, fantabulous ice cream never went away. I would persist in eating a bowl or two of Blue Bell every night forever it seemed. However, that was not my destiny...
When I was about to start the 3rd grade my dad started having a really hard time keeping his cholesterol down. When he went to the doctor, he was given a list. Not a good list. A bad, bad, naughty list. A list that I wish had never existed. Because, as I'm sure you guessed, this list contained items which the doctor instructed my father not to eat. And on this list, to my despise, was ice cream. So from that moment on, Blue Bell was not known to be around the Frazier Family household.
My father followed most of the prescribed instructions from the doctor, but his cholesterol was consistently coming out high. It just refused to come down. He had trouble for many years, desperately fighting to gain control over his cholesterol.
Finally, after many years, his cholesterol begins to drop. It needs to be lower, but the doctor tells my dad he can start eating a little of what he used to, but not much of it, and in small portions. I'm excited. I think I'm going to get my Homemade Vanilla ice cream back. I do, but not what I was hoping for...we have to buy the light version. "Healthier" they say. It's okay, though, I have my Blue Bell again.
This continues for a couple of years, but it still wasn't back to the way I would love to have it. I was not getting to eat it every night, because my parents slacked off, not buying it as much. I was at a loss, I didn't know what to do, and there wasn't much I could do. I felt helpless, like a squirrel trapped in an empty trashcan, nowhere to run, and nothing to eat, and no clue how to get back out.
Then, out of the blue, my father's cholesterol spikes again. He'd been eating good, healthy food, and yet it still rose. I could not believe it. We were back to no ice cream again!
But this time, the spike came with a price. My father was having trouble. He couldn't do much without getting extremely tired. So he went back to the doctor again. The doctor runs a stress test, making my dad run, and do other activities. He didn't do well on the test at all, and when the results come back, they weren't good. His stress levels were all off for his age and weight. So the doctor decides to go in a look at my dad's heart, see if the problem lies there.
The results terrified me. The arteries in the dad's heart were clogging up. In fact, one was 100% clogged, and another was about 80%. My dad could've had a heart attack at any moment.
The doctor's performed triple by-pass surgery on my dad in March of last year, 2008, during the week of spring break. Time just seemed to slow while he was in surgery, turning seconds into minutes, minutes into hours. The waiting room was completely silent. No one spoke a word. No one could. We felt like our voices would somehow carry all the way to the surgery room, somehow making the doctor mess up. So we sat there, silent, doing whatever it was we could think of to do in a waiting room, during spring break.
Relied struck us all, when the doctor came out to let us know how the surgery went. The doctor seemed very pleased, and told us that all of the by-passes were done, and everything ran great. He was off of the ventilator, and breathing on his own again.
The next few days of visiting my father in the hospital really had an influence on my life. I know realize just how harmful not eating right, keeping an eye on your cholesterol can be. To see the life and energy return to my dad, that hadn't been there before was extraordinary.
So even though I still have my massive craving for Blue Bell Ice Cream, a craving that will never go away, and hope never does, I have learned that moderation is a good thing. Perhaps not eating this wonderful creation from the heavens every day isn't such a bad thing, but maybe a good thing. And also, I've found out that, if you let yourself crave something for long enough, the satisfaction when you finally get it, is well worth the wait!!
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