Frustrated caregiver

rozaroo said:

Eating
I was told to start with smoothies & carnation instant breakfast to which I added fruit. I had an ulcer which caused me grief but managed to gain weight during treatment & recovery. We kept a ledger of actual feeding times & the amount I took in daily & stuck to it. I had a difficult time keeping down the canned nutrition but would take gravol & it helped me quite a bit. I started off with tasting a variety of foods slowly, I would get turned off quite easily & seriously didn't see the point in eating something I detested as it wouldn't
stay down anyway. Taking sip's of water & flat ginger ale through the day helped a fair bit. At four moth's my taste returned & all was well after that. It simply takes time & we are all different. If something doesn't work one day forget about it & try it again at a latter day. There are still a couple of food item's I used to love & now dislike lol. This is a learning process & I found that stressing over it actually made it worse.

sweetblood22 said:

Be Patient.
Really, 3.5 weeks isn't very far out at all. Unless you have gone thru treatment you just really have no clue how hard eating can be. People do it every day and they take it for granted. They take the saliva, the swallowing, their appetite, the lovely textures of food, the taste and smell, and everything else we patients lose for granted. The people that would want to take liquid nutrition away from some one that still feels like they need it, is an idiot. I'm sorry to be rude, but I cannot help it. Let me grind up some sawdust or some bran and some ground up dirt and glass mixed with something burny like acid and say here- eat this. That is sort of what it's like to try and eat food after radiation (can't comment on chemo cause I didn't have but I understand it's also not pleasant and both are bad when together). Now take that ground up concoction and try to swallow it dry, because that's what it's like with no saliva trying to choke food down.

I took me a very long time to have "some" pleasure eating again. It's still not easy at 21 months out. My friends who really know me knew that if I could eat, I would be eating. I was a live to eat kind of girl and this was by far the worst thing I've ever been through.

It takes time and you need to go at the pace that your body is comfortable. Not what anyone else says. But you do have to keep trying. I can eat things now that I couldn't eat just two months ago. I started with ice cream, smoothies, Greek Yogurt, oatmeal, sweet potatoes, bananas, avocados, creamed spinach, and soups prepared in my HealthMaster that are smooth and airy.

sweetblood22 said:

Thanks graci
This is one of those subjects that gets my hackles up and I have to try and not over react to it, which for a fiery little sicilian this can be a difficult thing. I just bugs me when people tried to tell me to just eat and that I had to force myself thru the pain (which was a ten with 75 mcgs of fentanyl) and and the blood, and the pieces of my mouth slouging off, and to just numb my mouth, which didn't work. And I would have to listen to them say that if it was them, they would keep eating. Yeah, ok. I want to see your mouth and tongue looking and feeling like mine was and you keep eating, when you are spending hrs over the sink with your mouth bleeding. Then when I was trying to eat and found out I had a stricture, I had people tell me that it was all in my head, and that I was just to tense and I needed to relax. Huh? I tell you some days I was almost moved To violence and wanted to bop these people on the head, hard. Just sayin......