When an American Chef Needs Brain Surgery
她记得三岁时坐在阳光下的红色三轮车上，感到欣喜若狂。她对这是什么没有言语。那将来会来了。这发生在她七岁的时候，直到她突然停止，被强烈的偏头痛所取代。在她的三十多岁时，欣快感回来了，这次伴随着许多其他神秘而令人不安的感觉。到目前为止，她正在担任厨师，并即将开放将成为镇上最热门的地方。每周几天，她醒来就闻到了燃烧的橡胶的气味。这种感觉伴随着充满怀旧和焦虑的压倒性。她说：“我会听到我的心在脑海中猛击。”“我会因恐惧而出汗，感觉就像我在错误的时间处于错误的位置。”
She is setting up a new kitchen, hiring her crew and designing a menu, so she assumes this is stress. Deep down she fears it might be something else. But what? Demonic possession? Hallucinations? A descent into madness? She has no idea and no time to worry about it. There is a highly-anticipated restaurant to open, and the most powerful critic in the land is already polishing his pen and saddling his white horse. This is destined to be the defining moment of her young career. So she does what any good chef would, in pretty much any situation: she puts her head down and gets to work.
这是Allie Plumer的故事。
李子在罗德岛长大。在大学里，她开始在纽约绿色市场的传奇比尔·麦克斯韦（Bill Maxwell）工作。她的转变将从凌晨5点开始。“比尔是地球农民的真正盐，在大名厨师中非常受欢迎。我不知道我开始时羽衣甘蓝是什么，”她从她的家庭住宅中告诉我克兰斯顿，RI。“亚搏电竞我们要谈论的是食物和烹饪。这是我职业生涯的基础。”
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She worked at the Greenmarkets for eight years. Her first commercial kitchen job came in 2008. She kept on with Maxwell until his retirement in 2013, when she came into kitchens full time. Five years later, in 2018, a man walked into Lot 2, the restaurant she co-owned in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and headhunted her to open his new restaurant.
它在2019年夏天推出震耳欲聋的buzz and a two-to-three-week waiting list. If Plumer thought stress was the cause of her issues, she was now experiencing it at its highest level. Hell hath no fury like that of a perpetually slammed restaurant garnering rave reviews in the first few months of service.
"It would take me 45 minutes to put my chef clothes on and make coffee," Plumer recalls. "I should have been making my prep list and unpacking deliveries but I wouldn't know where to start. I was constantly forgetting things."
经过the fall she was having "brain spells" frequently throughout the day. "I'd be in the middle of chopping and I would put my knife down, walk into the dining room and put my head on a table."
她严重依靠自己的团队，但那支球队受够了。没有人知道她有什么问题，至少是所有羽毛岩，而且步伐从未放松。
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"I thought she was burning out. She would forget to order or delegate and if somebody else did something that wasn't what she told them, she'd get mad." says Trina Quinn, a former line cook. "You can't even run your own kitchen but you're gonna yell because somebody didn't chiffonade the parsley?" The head chef seemed to be losing her marbles and the relentless demands of service kept the pressure at full boil.
"It was an absolute shitshow," according to Quinn. "We didn't know what was going on though, and that's really unfortunate."
Quinn quit. "We had a great kitchen family and one person kinda ruined that. I definitely blamed her. During service we were barely getting by." At her exit interview, she listed Plumer as the cause. "You need one person steering the ship and it was sinking."
Within a week Plumer was fired. Unemployed, plagued by mystery symptoms, and depressed while locked down in her Park Slope apartment, Plumer turned 35 on May 4, 2020. She and her girlfriend Stacy Dover-Pearl celebrated with a Fudgie the Whale Carvel cake. The remains of that cake were still in the freezer four days later when she was rushed to the hospital. Plumer had just suffered her first grand mal (now calledtonic-clonic)没收。
And so in the midst of a pandemic, in the hardest-hit city in North America, at a hospital overrun with people dying of COVID-19, our hero was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
It is my natural inclination to go in the woods to suffer alone, because I'm just some weird animal at heart
"It is my natural inclination to go in the woods to suffer alone, because I'm just some weird animal at heart," says Plumer. It was Dover-Pearl who set up the GoFundMe on November 4. Until then, Plumer had been mostly silent about her diagnosis, telling only family, so this is how most of the people in her life—and the majority of folks in the industry—found out about her situation.
普鲁默说：“我的兄弟克莱顿（Clayton）和他的妻子凯蒂（Katie）在我长大的罗德岛（Rhode Island）宣布了这个词。”“我有大名人的厨师散布和捐赠。我喂养的演员。我在20年前去了高中的人。我开始做饭时有小孩的常客，现在正在上高中。拥有披萨的人喜欢艾米丽（Emily），不仅自己捐赠了一个巨大的大块，而且他还跑了一个特殊的比萨饼，一个月来筹集资金以供我康复。”
Other notable donors included Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale, Gail Simmons, David Lebovitz, Melissa Clark,Cherry Bombefounder Kerry Diamond, Joe Lo Truglio fromBrooklyn Nine-Nineand his wife,橙色是新黑色的贝丝·多佛（Beth Dover）以及她的联合主演艾米丽·塔弗（Emily Tarver）和艾玛·迈尔斯（Emma Myles）。
The campaign hit its goal of $10k within two days and was at $50k within a week.
Plumer's doctors helped her to navigate insurance and Medicaid. "I'm very fortunate that my doctors are doing most of the fighting. It's something I understand so little about, never having been at the mercy of the public health system. It's almost like this taboo thing, it denotes that you are of a certain level of economic status [and] somehow determines what type of person you are," she says. "As a New Yorker I don't often think of people on the public health system as being in the upper echelon."
对于厨师制造最低工资，请抽出时间来治疗任何疾病，更不用说长期康复了，这根本不是一种选择。
对于厨师制造最低工资，请抽出时间来治疗任何疾病，更不用说长期康复了，这根本不是一种选择。最重要的是，他们的雇主甚至都没有提供保险。Plumer说：“自从我在提供保险的餐厅工作以来已经很长时间了。”“我从来没有和一个厨师一起工作，后者在长期受伤后不必与父母一起回去。赚取最低工资并努力工作并不能完全使您能够保存的位置为您的未来而钱。”
As for what she hopes Medicaid will cover: rehabilitation and therapy, post-surgery monitoring like EEGs and neurophysiology tests. "I really have no idea how it works and my anxiety is to the max on this subject," explains Plumer. Since the surgery, certain topics are literally hard for her to talk about. She sums it up as best she can, "I would be very fucked if we hadn't done this GoFundMe."
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"It made me feel like a complete asshole," says Quinn when she learned of Plumer's diagnosis. "I always felt resentful of people who brought their personal life into the kitchen. But you find out something like that. I could have been a better person." She reached out immediately, sending Plumer a message.
"It's not about rehashing and apologizing for what happened in the past, though we did do that," says Plumer. "It was about her extending a hand. Hearing from Trina was great."
Lilia restaurant co-owner Sean Feeney knocked on Plumer's door a week after her first surgery. "I could still hardly communicate," she recalls. He brought food from his co-owner Missy Robbins and the Lilia crew for Plumer and her parents. The night before his visit he'd been on CNN advocating for restaurant workers. She couldn't believe he'd made the time to personally come to her apartment, and she told him as much. His reply? "Family comes first, always."
我们为这个行业摧毁了自己，但我们也在战es中相互照顾。
在餐饮业的极端不足的一年中，她游戏顶部的一位年轻厨师不得不部分为自己的脑外科手术提供资金，并在大多数同事退出的时候通过众筹康复。工作。这向我们展示了几件事：餐厅业务已损坏，但其中的人却没有。我们为这个行业摧毁了自己，但我们也在战es中相互照顾。
She went in for a five-hour mesial temporal lobectomy at NYC Langone the morning of December 10. What the doctors found was surprising. The thing that had shown up as a tumor on scans turned out to be something else entirely.
"It wasn't until they cut into my brain that they saw it was white and calcified, and what was to be removed was quite obvious. It wasn't a tumor at all!" (Insert gif of Schwarzenegger screaming "It's not a tumor!")
The scarring on Plumer's brain was caused by Focal Cortical Dysplasia (FCD) Type II. People can live their whole lives with FCD and never know it. In Plumer's case the part of her brain that was scarred and no longer receiving blood or working correctly had shown up as a tumor.
"It's actually a positive thing because there is no chance that the cut off part of my brain will grow back, which is great, but the damage that's done is done."
她的疗法旨在纠正这一点，因此大脑的右侧将弥补缺失部分。Plumer大脑的“冷”部分消失了，健康的部分很快就会开始建立联系并自身重新布线。她说：“我的大脑的右侧将学习和适应，但这需要时间，这并不完美。”
Remember the red tricycle? The feelings of euphoria, later replaced by migraines? Plumer also had learning disabilities as a child, as well as perpetual anxiety, and an inability to react in certain situations the way most people would. Uncovering this situation in her brain explained a lot. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that the non-conformist world of kitchens was appealing to her because she literally had a messed-up brain that made her something of a misfit in the regular 9 to 5.
She's been recuperating at home with her parents in Cranston, taking seizure medication and undergoing speech and memory therapy. Her hazel eyes are clear and luminous as river stones. If not for the stitches that snake along her temple line, and her trouble finding words when speaking, she seems as bright-eyed and well-adjusted as anyone who hasn't undergone the most stressful and terrifying experience of their entire life.
"I told my mom last week that going into work in a restaurant is like going from 0 to 60 instantly, like walking onto a road that has fast cars driving on it, and I can't even cross that road right now. It's not something I can fathom," says Plumer.
While her brain is healing she's had a lot of time to think and to explore the blank spots in her memory. "I forget what it is to run a dinner service right now, but before that felt like something ingrained in my soul. I can picture things in my head but have no recollection of what they are called." Dover-Pearl used to love Plumer's beef stew. "I can't even remember what cut of beef I used." The two look over photos of dishes Plumer made in the past. "I don't recognize most of them or know what was used to cook them."
She's been forced to consider her career in a new light and parse out the parts of it that mean the most. "Running the show in the kitchen is not the heart of me. Cooking eight things at a time behind the line while I'm being yelled at is not what I pine for," Plumer says. "Cooking with my staff and bringing them together, teaching young cooks how to make food, and seeing the pride on their faces. Seeing satisfied diners when we're crazy busy. To know that the dish that people won't stop talking about is something that I created from scratch. This is what I miss the most about our industry. It's a foreign language I can't speak right now. I don't know what comes next, but I'm not done with this line of work."
这位艺术家的注释：Tisha Myles在2011年清除了脑肿瘤。她是一名24岁的艺术专业学生，是一名食品跑步者，没有保险或医疗补助。亚搏电竞因为她是居住在加拿大的加拿大人，所以手术和随后的康复都没有损失。
