Time to transition to a nasal feeding tube yet?

This morning I had my weekly review with my oncologist, June, to see how everything is going. Traffic was shocking for some reason this morning; today took an hour to get in, yesterday took 30 minutes. No obvious accidents but obviously a lot of people who had forgotten how to drive over their summer break.

After a quick tanning session (#27) it was time to catchup with June. We discussed what was going on with my weight, eating habits, an inspection of my throat both internally and externally, and a discussion about pain management.

In her opinion, I'm doing very well, better than she expected, and now need to really change my diet to allow me to keep swallowing, and keep nutrition levels up. My morphine dosage has now doubled so hopefully that will know a bit more of the pain off.

The most important thing here is keeping my nutrition levels up to fuel my body. If I don't do that, my muscle mass (hence weight) will drop, and a requirement to transition to a feeding tube. This comes into play if I lose 10% of my weight. So far, I've lost 5% and it's dropping still, but slowly. I'm not worried about a feeding tube, and they would prefer me to not use one. If I can keep my swallowing muscles going, I will have less problems on the other side getting all my muscles working again to eat.

I need to get approximately 10,000kJ into me daily. When you can't taste or smell, and you can hardly swallow, this is a big challenge. So my diet is now 4 x Endure TwoCal HN protein drinks (200ml each) which will give me roughly 8,000kJ per day, then supplement with custard, ice cream, yoghurt or anything I can manage to give an extra 2,000kJ.

A Big Mac medium-size meal with fries and coke is about 4,000kJ as a reference point!

So all this food is just a means to an end. The Endure protein drink is vanilla-flavoured, or so they say. I can't taste it anyway!

Here's my new, daily buffet!



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