Food?

Last few days have been a strange part of this journey. I left the hospital following our most recent meeting with the speech therapist with my heart set on eating! I got home and immediately got stuck in. Bethan made me a bowl of Ready Brek wit a dash of Golden Syrup in it just to boost the calories. It's was terrible. The taste wasnt bad, it was just the excruciating burning sensation in the back of my throat that seemed to overpower any pleasure I might have got from each tea spoon full. I abandoned the Ready Brek. It was getting late so I opted for an early night, it had been a long day. The folowing day I decided to to take a step back and see if I could manage one of the milkshakes that I'd been putting into my feed tube. These shakes are on perscrition and come in several different flavours, but most importantly they pack about 400 calories per milkshake. This means that if I can consume four a day I'm well on the wy the total calorie intake I should be getting. I half filled a glass with ice a poured out a shake topping it up with a little milk. It wasn't to bad. The ice cold strawberry flavour milk seemed to go down okay with very little pain, and the flavour wasn't too bad either. So... The new strategie is to try different solid foods each time I eat, if it dosn't out then back it up with a shake.besides losing a lot of weight through this process I have become very week and prone to passing out. I was layed on the sofa talking to a freind on the phone the other day when I needed to clean my throat. I excused myself and stood up to go the the downstairs bathroom. I made it to the hallway and all of sudden got crushing tunnle vision and my legs began to buckle beneath me like a new born foal. I woke up on the hallway floor with a very worried looking young Joel stood over me and the telephone in pieces next to me. It made me aware that I nee to take things very easy while I'm in his state. The next day I started out with a milkshakes which went down fine. Bethan and the kids went out to Truro leaving me to take it easy at home. I made myself a bowl of Cherios with lots of milk. I let the milk soak the cereal through until it was pretty soggy. It worked... I had myself another option. One of the downsides to taking food orally is that is seems to have changed the situation with my saliva output. It's as though all this swallowing is washing my saliva away leaving my mouth very dry and uncomfortable. I feels like a bit of a step backwards compared to how good things felt just a week ago. I had read this on other patients blogs and journals. There seemed to be a lot of people saying that the recovery from Radiotherapy is very unpredictable and is very often a case of two steps forward one step back! My next contact with the hospital is on the 15th May. I have an appointment it the clinic to see the specialists. I think they want to do a basic visual check over to see how things are going. This will involve a camera going up my nose see what's going on behing my nose. I still feel very nervous about all this. I think it's not having any re assurance that things are okay. It's been quite a long time since we've been told that things are all good, I just feel like I need that again and soon.