I miss food.

I have not had a drop of food since election night 2020. Yes, since November of 2020, no food has passed my lips.

A fluorescent yellow bag of liquid drips into my body over 16 hours providing me with nutrients I need to live. The couple of times I have been without it due to one mishap or another I have felt worse the next day.

Most of the time I am not physically hungry. Being fed Total Parental Nutrition(TPN) takes away the hunger. At least the physical hunger.

Mentally, I am starving. You do not realize how much food plays into every day of your life until it is taken away.

To feed my brain, I watch cooking shows, or Youtube food shows where someone is eating at restaurants to review. It’s like a bit of torture that helps a bit.

Or I read menus of restaurants and dream of what I would eat were I allowed to eat. I even know the foods I want when, and if, my body adjusts to allow me to eat again.

I want two hard boiled eggs, a slice of buttered toast, preferably rye, and grits with butter and salt. I want an Impossible Whopper with french fries. On the side I want mayonnaise and ketchup mixed together to dip my fries in. I want cheese pizza for dinner.

I really want a large bowl of broccoli with butter and salt, but it may be a long time, if ever before I can eat broccoli again.

I need to sit down at a restaurant with my husband and order too much food because we haven’t been to a restaurant since before the pandemic. I want to go out to eat with friends and share drinks and laughter and talk to them.

My mind wants food so badly, that I dream of it at times. I dream of Ethiopian food, picked up with injera and spooned into my mouth. It is my favorite non American food and I adore the whole ritual of sharing with one another and eating with your fingers.

I have lost some weight while on TPN. I am likely to lose more following my surgery. We don’t know how much of my intestines will be left so my ability to eat depends on that.

It’s funny, I changed my diet to vegetarian, plant based, lots of vegetables, no meat at all, only whole grains, and I ended up with this. It’s like when I quit smoking and two years later was diagnosed with renal cell cancer.

It’s bullshit. It is as if the harder I try to care for myself the worst off I end up. I am just hoping that in the end, my body is healthy, I can eat the food I enjoy now, which focuses on vegetables. as someone who grew up extremely picky who ate a very limited number of foods I am hoping I don’t end up forced to life like that.

Let’s hope I don’t end up with a body that won’t digest whole foods.

Just a little while ago my lovely nurse hooked me back up to the yellow bag of food for the night. I can her the IV pump pushing it into my veins and through my body.

It is keeping me alive and helping to heal my intestines so we continue on in hopes of a return to normalcy.

Me, Tony, and our little house in CB. Oh, but my home is something for another day.

Thank you for reading my rambling thoughts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 5th, 2021 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.