Ice cream man...

I seem to remember this time being a complete mixed bag as far as wellness goes. One day I would be okay followed by three or four days of feeling terrible. I had lost a significant amount of weight since treatment began. I think I started at diagnosis at a burly 15st 7lb, I was now a sniff over 11st with the large part of this weight being lost over the last few months. I would get up in the morning and look down at my bony legs and the ribs sticking out of my back and wonder if this would ever return to normal again. I was still finding it very hard to eat and was relying of the fortified milkshake supplements to get by each day.

My swallowing reflex was barley there and with each gulp there felt to be an ever present feeling that I was going to take the fluid directly into my lungs. This gave the whole experience of taking food onboard a sense of uncomfortable fear which was very destructive as I found myself not wanting to eat at all. The monthly clinic visits I attend have a nutritionist as part of the team. I'm weighed at the beginning of each session to see how much weight I've lost over the month, or to see if things have stabilised. It was noted that I'd been steadily losing weight as the months were slipping by. The nutritionist took us to one side and suggested different ways to eat that would allow me to maintain my weight enough to be able to have my food tube removed. It was early days at this point, but it left me with a strong motivation to eat as much and often as I could in order to get the weight back on, or at least the same at each monthly weigh in.

Because I was limited by my mouth throat and the lack of ability to swallow I had very few food choices. Top of the list was ice cream, it was cooling and easy to swallow. The only issue was the taste, it was like eating cold salt! I would persevere though and proceeded to do a liter of Haggen Das (1100cal per tub!) every evening. I can image for some this sounds ideal, I can assure you its not. It was sickly underwhelming experience. One that has stopped me ever going near the stuff again, even now. On the flip side the weight started to creep back on. The next monthly weigh in I was a whole pound heavier! While the nutritionist was happy it struck me that eating like this is a bit of a daft way of going about things, after all I didn't want to well just so that I could develop another condition down the line. It was time to review the situation and find another way getting the weight on and getting the food tube out.