Radiation Week 3: Eating and Drinking Issues

Rounding into the third week of radiation, and the tumor is definitely shrinking. My bite is no longer misaligned, and the pressure is gone. Hurray!

Alas, with the good comes the bad. Fatigue, check. Dry mouth, check. Loss of taste, check–even moreso than last week. I’ve still got a little bit of sweet left, but far less, and salty and savory remain gone. And now I’ve also got raw patches on my tongue and inside my mouth to go with the sore throat, so I’m avoiding anything sour, tart, or acidic. I’m using an anesthetic rinse and gargling with a baking soda solution every other hour, but these only marginally ease the discomfort. Eating has become quite painful.

I’m trying to be conscientious about eating and drinking, but the combination of no taste and pain makes the intake of nutrition an unpleasant chore with no joy to it whatsoever. My last vitals check last week shows I’ve lost a little weight. Not much, nothing to be alarmed about, but a trend I need to make sure I don’t continue. I’ve been switching over, once again, to soft foods and protein shakes, even researched a new food substitute, Soylent, but it’s very new, still being sampled by healthy people, and I’m disinclined to be the first cancer patient trial.

And an odd thing I’ve started doing, as experiencing food becomes less enjoyable and more of a distressing duty, I’ve switched to seeking out other ways to positively experience it. I spent hours on CandyBlog, looking at the pictures of delicious candy and reading the reviews, read this lengthy article on one person’s scientific search for the very best chocolate chip cookie recipe, and spent an afternoon browsing pretty food pictures on Pinterest.

We’re halfway through. Another two and a half weeks of radiation to go. These are going to be long weeks.