Taste Bud Trouble

One of my favourite things in the whole world is food, so when I figured tastes and even certain smells would throw me into a full-on nausea session I was the least impressed. Literally from the second I started receiving my first session of chemo my senses were completely messed up. I was given macaroni cheese in the hospital whilst hooked up to my chemo and I sat and looked at it in disgust. One of my favourite pasta dishes had been placed in front of me and even the smell of it was making me gag. My mum actually sat and ate most of it whilst I attempted to eat the sorry looking orange jelly.

On the 5 and a half journey back home the following day, my younger sister bought one of M&S’s finest prawn salads. Now usually I would love a prawn salad and a cold lemonade but after an hour in a warm car I swear I will never eat another prawn salad in my lifetime. This continued for up to four days after my treatment and has done with my following treatments too. Now for me it started to become quite comical and my family would compare me to a pregnant lady. My poor mum and dad would list foods trying to get me to eat anything under the sun and sometimes all it took was the thought of a certain taste or texture and I would be instantly feeling nauseous.

This was all fun and games until it got to the stage where I was losing my appetite and being physically unable to eat. After my second session of chemo there was a full 36 hours where I was completely unable to eat food. My problem was my tongue. For some reason thistime around my tongue had changed shape and was overly swollen causing it to look like there were slits all down the sides of my tongue. This was extremely painful and resulted in me not being able to eat any food with any kind of flavouring.

When it finally got to the stage where it was getting frustrating and I was slowly gaining an appetite again but still unable to eat due to the pain I had to think of something. Water was the only thing I could manage and then RICH TEA BISCUITS! Now of course my mouth was still sensitive so I couldn’t eat the biscuits dry, I could only dunk them in my tea until they almost fell into the cup so they were pretty much mush. I lived on this extremely exciting diet for a couple of days.

Finally, I was building up an appetite and I was ready to move on from rich tea biscuits. I moved onto more exciting things such as… DRY PASTA. Yes, you heard it right, boiled pasta with the smallest amount of butter, nothing else. This was more filling that the biscuits and was like a proper meal for me so it was great. No strong flavours to send my taste buds into shock and it wasn’t hard or crunchy making extra work for my mouth.

As rubbish as it sounds, it does actually get better. After those really crap 5 days my mouth recovers and I am then no longer restricted to what I can and can’t eat. I obviously have to be careful with really flavoursome dishes as my taste buds can just go crazy whenever they fancy so I tend to avoid sour and spicy foods. So, in all honesty I’m not going to let my cancer stop me enjoying food, that could never happen.