Wandering Around with a Hole in the Middle of My Face | Part Three
Coffee, Wine, Ice Cream and Other Nutritious Tidbits
We know the importance of a good diet to our overall health. It’s especially vital to eat well during cancer treatments to ensure your body gets all the nutrients it needs and for the practical purpose of helping you retain your weight. Like many people who receive a cancer diagnosis, I researched the potential repercussions of my cancer, even though my doctors warned me against looking it up on Google. Of course I did not follow this advice. I discovered the overall median survival rate for my high-grade Mucoepidermoid Carcinoma at the time was 49 months—even lower for a tumor where mine was growing. MEC is cancer of the salivary glands and typically presents in the parotid glands on either side of your mouth in front of your ears, not between your eyes in your nasal cavity. My doctors didn’t discuss mortality rates with me though, even when I asked. They focused instead on what I needed to do to get well. One thing that both my surgeon and oncologist stressed was that I needed to try to GAIN weight before I started radiation. Well, okay, if you insist! But it was this statistic that led me to buy a juicer and add protein shakes to my daily calorie intake:
The National Cancer Institute reports that malnutrition affects 80% of all cancer patients and is responsible for one in five cancer-related deaths.
So eat I did! And my doctors were quite proud of me because I managed to not only gain weight before my radiation therapy started, but continued to put on pounds during the first few weeks of treatments before my sense of taste declined, I acquired a perpetual sore throat, and just plain lost my energy for eating. Smoothies to the rescue. The juicer turned out to be a godsend.
Losing My Senses — Gaining Perspective
Lucky for me, these symptoms were temporary. However at different times throughout my first year post-surgery, I lost my ability to taste, hear, and smell. My eyesight was also impacted, although I have never been blind. Add to these the fact that I lost my sense of touch for a few years after contracting spinal meningitis when I was in college, at one time or another during my life I’ve experienced loss or radical depletion of each of my senses.
Hence it didn’t seem like a coincidence when I attended my fifth Sundance Film Festival in January 2011 — my first one sans nose — that there was a film in competition called Perfect Sense.
The film is a haunting love story between a chef and a scientist who happens to be tracking a worldwide pandemic causing people to lose their sensory perceptions one-by-one. It did strike me as bizarre, though, that people lost their senses in the movie in the same order as I had lost mine during my treatments. Whoa! After the screening I went for a long, meandering walk in the snow back to my hotel. I was just a few days away from my one year anniversary of losing my nose and being cancer free. A lot to think about. I’m not sure any film has ever made me feel such intense gratitude to be alive.
By then my taste had returned so I was able to enjoy picking up coffee for my morning Sundance screenings and having a glass of wine in the evening. But it hadn’t always been that way. A year earlier things were different.
Counteracting Symptoms
Losing the sense of taste during radiation treatments is a common symptom, so I prepared by doing research on how to mitigate the effects. I found some cancer cookbooks, two that I still have today because the recipes in them are excellent and the information they provide, invaluable. I recommend these books for anyone going through cancer treatments.
- What to Eat During Cancer Treatments: 100 Great Tasting, Family-Friendly Recipes to Help You Cope
This cookbook, put out by the American Cancer Society, organizes recipes by symptoms. My go to chapter was the one on Taste Alteration. A few of my favorite recipes from this section include carrot ginger soup, honey teriyaki salmon, and pimento cheese. Soon I began not only making the recipes in the book, but using the concepts of how particular foods helped lessen taste alteration to make up my own dishes. That is, until the last couple of weeks of radiation and the month that followed — my most difficult recovery time. The book also has a chapter called The Survival Kit that lists kitchen staples to have on hand and one on Tips for Dining Out.
- The Cancer-Fighting Kitchen: Nourishing, Big-Flavor Recipes for Cancer Treatment and Recovery
This cookbook states that its recipes are science-based, nutrient-rich, and easy to prepare (I can vouch for that one). In addition to recipes it includes a Cancer-Fighting Tool Kit and has a chapter on Strategies for Thriving During Treatment. Organized like a more traditional cook book, there are chapters covering soups, vegetables, proteins, drinks and desserts.
If you know of other good cookbooks for cancer patients or resources for maintaining nutrients during treatment, please leave a response below.
How did I fare? I was fooled for a bit because I felt fine, great really, through the first few weeks of treatments. Then, all of a sudden, food started tasting like bitter pesticide. By the last week of radiation treatment, even the bitterness was gone and everything was tasteless, like tissue paper, but by sticking to the theories in the two cookbooks above, I was able to keep my weight up. The first soured taste I experienced was with all things dairy. Milk tasted like mold. One of my cookbooks recommended Almond Milk. I was euphoric! It was delicious, so I started drinking Almond Milk and using it in my smoothies.
My distaste for dairy meant no ice cream, one of my three favorite food groups, the others being coffee and wine. (Yes, I know, these aren’t exactly nutrient-rich dietary stables!). All of them left a rancid aftertaste. I use half & half in my coffee so I tried drinking my coffee black but it tasted like dirt. With half & half it tasted like bitter dirt. By June my altered taste issues were pretty much gone so I only had to live without coffee for two months.
While I was going through cancer surgery and treatments I was living in Capitola, in Santa Cruz County California. Santa Cruz County is as full of great wineries as its more famous cousin, Napa. One of my favorite weekend pastimes was attending wine tastings at the wineries in the mountains and along the coast but for a couple of months in 2010 wine tasted like vomit. Bummer! Not that I had the energy to go wine tasting then, anyway.
The good news is the loss of taste was not permanent, however I have become a bit lactose intolerant so I made a permanent switch to almond and other nut milks (though I do still drink half & half in my coffee) and eat just small portions of ice cream or buy gelato instead. Wine — all good!
There have been longer term changes, as well. Hot, spicy foods are even hotter and spicier now — some intolerable. I still eat wasabi because I love it but it makes me shudder with tears streaming down my face. And cutting onions? Forget about it.
So yes, losing your taste during cancer treatments is a drag, but it comes back, even stronger for certain tastes if you’re like me. If you embrace the experience you’ll gain a greater appreciation for the flavor of food.
Next: “Wandering Around with a Hole in the Middle of My Face”
- Part Four | My Ironic Facedown Tuesday Summer
Prior: “Wandering Around with a Hole in the Middle of My Face”
- Part One | A Sudden Unobstructed View
- Part Two | Radiation and the Importance of Physics
