Since starting on cancer treatment, I’ve had strange reactions to certain types of food, & it hasn’t always been the most pleasant of experiences!
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Since starting on cancer treatment, I’ve had some really weird reactions with certain types of food, but in reality, my issues with food started long before I had cancer.
It was Dr Liz O’Riordan’s new book, ‘The Cancer Roadmap’ which gave me the idea to write about food as sometimes I feel that it dominates my life when it shouldn’t. Within the book, Liz writes about the importance of healthy eating & having fresh fruit & vegetables. I’m really strict on myself about getting the right amount of fresh food nearly every day. Since Lockdown, I’ve been having a weekly delivery of fresh fruit, veg & salad from the nearby Portobello Market. I eat whatever is in season which means that it’s less likely that the produce was freeze-dried & flown halfway across the world to reach my plate. It’s not too expensive every week & if I can’t eat full amounts that week, then I can make soups or juices in the blender. However, I’m disabled & need help to prepare & cook my meals. Like many disabled people, the council provides just enough hours for a Personal (Care) Assistant to come & bung a ‘ready meal’ into the microwave. Processed food is such a ‘no, no’ in a Breast Cancer patients’ diet. I’ve stated in my care plan for my Social Worker that I can’t eat ready meals & processed food, & when they dispute this, I have to bring out the scientific evidence. In all honesty, I’m lucky that I live with my partner who is a great cook. He supports me to maintain a healthy diet.
Yet I often wonder about other disabled people who live on their own & who have to follow strict diets for a variety of reasons. Also not everyone can afford to buy fresh food every day – according to ‘Statista,’ approximately 3.12 million people used a food bank in the UK in 2023 – 2024, & that’s an increase on the previous year. I can’t imagine that those statistics will decrease now that the Labour Party has committed to reducing PIP & other benefits. Food poverty is a serious risk to the nation’s health.
Many cancer patients will understand the experience of food tasting ‘off’ or not being able to eat a large amount due to nausea, sickness, a painful mouth and/or tongue, etc. I have increasingly bad issues with headaches, nausea & vomiting, & I take daily anti-sickness pills. I’ve always had a sweet tooth, but my pain medication seems to make that more acute. It’s a struggle to keep off the sweet stuff, especially chocolate (except that chocolate seems to give me headaches at the moment, so that’s a strange kind of blessing!) I’ve never been overly-large but I have put on weight that I can’t seem to shift. I know weight gain can be a side effect of cancer treatment & the menopause, but considering I feel sick 99% of the time, & don’t eat much, where is this weight coming from!
I can’t afford to gain a lot of weight as it makes it harder for me to move around in my wheelchair & also to stand & transfer with ease. Yet it can be harder to exercise when you’re disabled – something that I’ve covered in previous blogs with my guest writers Natalie South-Law & Miranda McCarthy. I’ll admit that I’ve been so tired recently that my swimming, gym & yoga plan has completely gone off the rails, but when I start my new work/life balance as a freelancer next week, it’ll be a golden opportunity to get back to exercising.
I’ve said that my issues with food go way back longer than when I was diagnosed with cancer. When I was a child, I’d hardly eat anything. I’d say that dairy milk made me feel sick, yet I was forced to drink it by my teacher (yes, I went to school in the days when each child had a bottle of milk to drink, daily!) I say that my stomach sometimes hurts after eating sandwiches or after eating lots of things on my plate. Having a stomach ache really put me off eating. There’s one infamous family story where my sister’s godfather teased me because I’d literally eaten one pea when we were eating at a restaurant on holiday.
The other memory I have is my classmates taking really small bites out of their sandwiches & then saying “This is a Suzanne bite.” I laughed along with them, it didn’t particularly hurt my feelings, but somewhere deep down I realised that I had a problem.
I was really scared of trying new foods & I always stuck to the same bland foods that I could tolerate. Fish made me throw up, so did eggs if they were on their own, such as boiled or scrambled eggs. I have another story involving being sick from food – this time from eggs in hospital where the nurses went against my mum’s advice & fed me boiled eggs for breakfast. I threw them back up again on the physio’s practice mats a short while later. I never got eggs again.
In those days food allergies weren’t really considered, so I was just labelled a ‘fussy eater’ for most of my childhood which really irritated me. However, when I was 23, I had an appointment with a new consultant at the Spina Bifida (my disability) clinic. The consultant explained that I wasn’t imagining all of the problems that I had with food. In fact, he confirmed that I had something call GORD – Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease. Basically acid from my stomach leaks up into my gullet. It’s basically heartburn & having a permanent sour taste in my mouth. Ah, ha! I had my answer why a lot of things, including water, tasted metallic! It causes other unpleasant issues as well but I’ll leave you to google them! Another reason for the metallic taste was my Sleep Apnoea – it’s only mild but I basically my sleep is rather stop/start at night. Because my lungs don’t fully empty of carbon dioxide, I wake with a headache & a bad taste in my mouth.
I had no idea that I stopped breathing at night until my partner told me. I was shocked! I got referred to a specialist heart and lung clinic & I tried a CPAP machine for a while to help me breathe, but my Sleep Apnoea is very mild & my body couldn’t cope with the machine’s adjustment.
With all of this going on, no wonder I couldn’t eat large meals or spicy food! I went back to my family with all of this evidence & I have to admit that it gave me a lot of satisfaction to be able to tell them that I wasn’t a fussy eater, or that I was making all my pains up! I switched to a mostly dairy & wheat-free diet – taking soya milk in my tea & hot chocolate, & eating sourdough bread.
When I was diagnosed with cancer & started on my treatment, I had a nasty reaction to mushrooms – I was sick immediately when I tasted them. I phoned my sister in a panic – she told me not to worry as when she was receiving Breast Cancer treatment, mushrooms made her sick as well. I still can’t eat mushrooms now but I did eat another of the eggplant family the other day, aubergine, & that went ok! I’m trying to eat more vegetarian & vegan food but the mushroom allergy is making this a nightmare because a lot of these foods have mushrooms as a main ingredient. I laughed when I saw on social media that Dr Liz had found two Irish brothers with a scam, claiming to heal cancer patients with their special kind of mushroom – my sister & I are proof that all mushrooms do is make you sick on cancer treatment!
I also had a similar, nasty, sickness reaction to hummus & I don’t mind admitting that this made me cry. There was nothing that I liked better than hummus spread on a slice of sourdough but no, I had to stop having that!
During my last bout of COVID-19, I lost my sense of smell & taste. My taste came back a month later & my smell came back 5 months later – it was such a strange sensation. I feel that COVID-19 didn’t help my taste situation in the long term & when combined with the cancer, no wonder I’m having such a nightmare with food.
Sometimes potatoes taste sickly sweet. Croissants give me very bad nausea, so I’ve stopped having them. Lemon in water helps with digestion & improves the taste. I try not to eat my main meal (or anything) after 7pm. Both decaf & caffeinated tea taste bitter & in the mornings, I can’t drink tea on an empty stomach. I eat fruit with lunch or at my early evening meal, otherwise this makes me sick. I can’t have oranges or associated juices as they burn my stomach. I have to be mindful of cucumbers, but I can’t give them up entirely as they’re my favourite sandwiches! I don’t often drink fizzy drinks.
You see, all of this is so random, but some of it might not last forever as my sister can eat mushrooms & a few other things now that she has stopped her treatment.
I’ve taken quite a lot of advice over the years on my diet & this is what works for me:
- Eat what you can manage
- Think healthy foods first
- Juice if you can’t eat
- Batch cook to combat fatigue
- Buy ‘pre-cut’ veg & fruit to save your energy
- Have your main meal before 7pm in the evening
- Eat 4 smaller meals instead of 3 large meals
- Search for healthier food swaps on the NHS website
- Make your own takeaways (‘fakeaways’!)
I realise that I’ve used a lot of medical terms in the blog, so here’s some links to give you more explanation:
- Spina Bifida – Spina bifida – NHS
- GORD – Heartburn and acid reflux – NHS
- Sleep Apnoea – Sleep apnoea – NHS
- CPAP machine – Sleep apnoea – NHS (scroll down this section to find the explanation about CPAP machines).
For now, I’m just going to plough on with eating what I can manage & getting back to exercise!
The Musings of Spu 