Surviving Colorectal Cancer, Part 21
Drinking Gourmet Coffee is Helping Me Recover from the Stress Caused by My Cancer.
The good news from medical checkups for both Maria and me in late March of 2024 was a liberating experience and relieved much of our stress.
In April, we became determined to enjoy a better life together as long as possible and we started thinking of items to add to my survivor bucket list. Going to see my three sons and their families back East was still #2 on my list.
For an immediate modest goal without the rigors of distant travel, I wanted to start drinking gourmet coffee.
Nothing gives us more pleasure early in the morning than a great cup of coffee, or sometimes two. In our 10 years of marriage, we’ve always tried to find a great early morning coffee wherever we traveled in the United States and Mexico. Often, we gravitated to Starbucks before having breakfast or brunch in a restaurant.
At home, we upgraded to a Cuisinart drip coffee maker and invested in a Nespresso machine. We tried various ground coffees from Costco and began buying Nespresso capsules of gourmet expresso and decaffeinated coffees to serve guests who wanted a cup of something different than the ground regular coffee.
For me, even the best coffee from Starbucks, Costco, and Nespresso can’t match the experience of gourmet coffee brewed at home with freshly ground coffee beans.
However, as a recovering cancer survivor, finding gourmet coffee without getting out of the house can be challenging.
Luckily, Maria’s youngest son knows a family in the coffee business. They source the beans from coffee plantations in the area around Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico and roast them in Guadalajara. He bought a 1kg bag of beans as a gift for us and we started grinding and brewing it when we ran out of the big can of Colombian coffee.
Wow. I may never drink canned coffee again.
The coffee roasted by El Rinconcito del Café (see photo above) is 100 percent Arabica coffee from Huatusco with a strong body and medium acidity. The note on the label in Spanish said it has a fragrance of chocolate and a sweet background that surrounds the senses. Oh yeah!
We brewed it for breakfast in our drip coffee maker. We used our French press if we wanted single cups after our mid-afternoon meal. It was magnificent both ways.
Drinking the coffee from Huatusco reminded me that we enjoyed some gourmet coffee in Veracruz at Gran Café de la Parroquia on a vacation trip several years ago. I went to their website and found that they sell their specialty ground coffee online, and I plan to order a bag to enjoy it again.
To expand my search for gourmet coffee beyond Mexico, I started looking for people and publications on Medium with articles about coffee. I found and clicked to follow a few. And I created a new Medium publication called OnlineGourmet. It encourages writers on Medium to share their articles about gourmet products, especially coffee.
Just as important, the publication encourages writers to post links to online vendors. That’s because buying online is important to me and anybody else who can’t get out and about very often. Hopefully, the publication will help others find and buy gourmet coffee.
My first follower was CoffeeFoodNetwork, which features coffee and coffee-related products including grinders and coffee makers. I clicked to follow back and subscribed by email. I’m continuing to look for other coffee lovers and vendors to follow on Medium.
I also created an account on Instagram to learn what coffee aficionados and vendors around the world were brewing and drinking. The link is OnlineGourmet01. For starters, I posted a couple of photos of the coffee from El Rinconcito del Café. Unfortunately, their coffee isn’t available to buy online yet.
Creating my new account on Instagram was like wading into the shallow waters of the vast Internet ocean. I’m being cautious because I don’t want to get sucked into the Internet undertow. I’ve been there and done that before I canceled all my social media accounts due to cancer, and I don’t want to do that again.
I’m not trying to build a huge following on Instagram and I’m not following everybody who follows me. Yeah, I follow some family members and close friends to share personal photos but not many. Mostly, I’m trying to find some very good gourmet coffee that I can buy online.
In the first week, I found and started following a couple dozen people who love gourmet coffee or sell it.
The Instagram account for CoffeeFoodNetwork has a video with their suggestions for some of the best coffee beans in the world. Their number two suggestion is Kona coffee, which I first tasted and enjoyed during a business trip to the Big Island in 1979. Maybe I’ll order some from Amazon to enjoy it again.
Several online sources list and rank the best coffees in the world. For starters, I’m following CoffeeReview.com, which lists ratings for gourmet coffee dating back to 1998. Their listing for each coffee also includes a hyperlink to the website of the roasters who sell online. That’s exactly what I want to know.
Meanwhile, I’m going to brew and drink gourmet coffee more often based on recommendations from friends and online contacts.
Life is too short to settle for less.
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About me: In June of 2022, at age 78, I was diagnosed with Stage IIIc colorectal cancer. After five months of aggressive chemotherapy and radiation, I had successful surgery in January of 2023 to remove the tumor followed by successful surgery in May to reverse my colostomy.
My oncologist and my wife both urged me to write about my experience as a cathartic way to come to terms with being diagnosed and treated for advanced colorectal cancer and trying to recover. To celebrate my 80th birthday in October of 2023, I began posting articles on Medium.
I hope my articles will motivate people to have thorough colon cancer screening starting in their 40s and continuing into their 80s and also help other colorectal cancer patients deal with everyday life while trying to survive five years or more.
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