Eating Woes

Posted by Roie R. Black on Mon 01 September 2014

As much as most of us enjoy eating, there might come a time when it is just something you have to do, not something you look forward to doing. Unfortunately, these days, that is me.

Swallowing

You might be aware that there is a small flap in your throat that keeps food from going down your lungs when you swallow. The flap opens up to let you breathe, then closes as part of the swallow process to cover that pathway, leaving the route to your stomach open for food. Git that?

Well, the work they have done in my throat has messed up all of that. Between the chemo, which shrinks everything in sight, and the radiation, that flap thingy is messed up, so swallowing is not working right.

This has happened before, but things were getting better before my last surgery. This time, after surgery, I had problems with anything too thin, like water, and anything too thick, like most normal foods. Thinks that were in the middle, or things that could be made thicker with an additive, went down OK, other things turned swallowing in to a cough-fest.

Well, slowly things improved. On my trip to play with model airplanes, I was able to give up the thickener and just did fine on my diet of Ensure and baby food. I could swallow anything in the baby food aisle, so that was my diet!

Trying Normal Food

When we were up in Kansas City to work on our other house, I tried to take a bite of pizza, only to find out there was no way I was going to swallow that. Sigh!

I went out to dinner in a restaurant with my friends back in Muncie, and tried a soup from the menu. That worked out well, and marked the first time in months I had eaten out. The food was still in that intermediate category of "mushy". When I got back home, we experimented wit more normal food, even moving into that category of foods that needed to be chewed to swallow.

Since they disconnected the left side of my jaw, chewing is a challenge. I have to make an effort to line up my jaw so I can even do that. With practice, I managed to get a hamburger patty down, using Ensure to wash it down as needed. Still it was progress!

We tried a few other things, even chilli, but it was way too spicy. Still, I managed to get things down. It was clear I was making progress in my swallowing.

Last Weekend

Cheryl went off the KC to visit the grandkid and her son, and work on the house. I was left to fend for myself, work on my course notes, and feed myself. I decided to experiment.

Friday, I tried a fish sandwich at McDonalds. It was pretty soft, and I had no problem with that. Saturday, I tried a quesadilla at Taco Bell, and that went pretty well also. Sunday, I tried a chilli and Frosty at Wendys. Big Mistake. While it might be a bug, about an hour after eating the chilli, my stomach went into open rebellion! I spend the rest of the day, most of the night, and into today with stomach pain that would not go away. I tried everything I could think of to relieve the pain, but in the end, just ended up walking around the house and wishing it would go away.

Part of me is sure that moving so fast from Ensure and Baby Food to real food caused this mess. But, it could also be that I picked up something during my first week back in society, with my students.

Regardless, I do not enjoy eating even more now!

Off to M. D. Anderson

Tomorrow we head out after my class for two days and M. D. Anderson and about eight appointments. The most important one, the CT scan happens on Thursday, and that is the one that has me worried the most, as it always does. All we can do is trust in God, and all of our family and friend to pull us through. More after we hear the results!

Comments


There are no comments yet.

Add a Comment

You can use the Markdown syntax to format your comment.

tags: Cancer, Food