“Pick a passion.”

That was the advice of a great neurologist I began seeing in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins several years ago. After looking over my medical records and my overall situation, he told me that it was likely my cognitive skills would suffer, my memory would be damaged and everything I had learned about writing would take a hit, so it would truly benefit me if I found something extraordinary to really sink my teeth into. It was one thing to get used to experiencing the frequent seizures, but it was something else to realize what the seizures were doing to my body and my life. I had to change the way I was living my life. And, changing my life meant something other than turning my car keys over to my husband.

For me, this meant looking beyond what I had known for the last three decades. I had graduated from college with a journalism degree. I had become a broadcast journalist and had moved into corporate PR. My hobbies were reading and reading. Yes, I exercised, but I wasn’t really passionate about anything other than work, my family and my dog…until my husband bought me a few cookbooks and I began reading those.

Then, I took a few cooking classes and began watching the Food Network (thank goodness for that channel)! Dinner for Andrew each night, and now for the three of us, including our 4-year-old daughter Hayden, has become such a festive occasion for me. I love creating in the kitchen. Cooking is an all-out hobby for me. It’s an outlet, a passion, truly a diversion from seizures and medications and the gloom of disease. It takes me into another world and allows me to be creative and constructive.

So…what’s for dinner tonight? Homemade meatballs with capellini! Hayden will help out with the meatballs–she LOVES getting her hands into that meat!

And to answer your emails even before they arrive in my inbox–my very favorite cookbook at the moment…Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything” http://www.amazon.com/Cook-Everything-Completely-Revised-Anniversary/dp/0764578650/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267455329&sr=8-1 Happy Cooking! And, feel good!