How should you treat a pureed meal. Is it a soup? Is it a drink? Is it a smoothie? The simple answer is yes. It really depends on where you are in your treatment process.
When I was going through treatment and my mouth was full of sores. I couldn't eat a thing without my magic mouthwash. Numb the whole mouth and then eat. I generally had about fifteen minutes to eat. Most of the time I was the zombie eating very slowly. Caregivers know that you try so hard to get the patient to eat, and watching them take 15 minute it eat just a little amount of food is frustrating.
Just today, I was online when a daughter/caregiver was at her wits end begging for a better way to get food into her father.
Spoons are for people you want to eat and feed themselves. When you are not at that point, it is clear that using the spoon was an effort in futility. To much work and pain for the amount of food I was getting into the belly. Each small amount of food, required a huge effort on swallowing too.
The other day, I went out to lunch with my sister-in-law at Panera Bread, it was the first time I used a spoon in months. Mostly, because I cannot open my mouth wide enough to get the spoon in. I recommend giving up the spoon and treat the meal more like a drink.
Remember, for the survivor, food is no longer fun. It hurts to eat. Many have lost the sense of taste. The food choices suck (but I'm working on that). And worst of all, the people you love the most are berating you to eat. After a while, I stopped listening to my wife, because I didn't want to hear it from her. Luckily, my son stepped up and said "Dad, you have to eat."
Now my son wrote an essay about DON'T POKE THE BEAR. At our lowest point during treatment all we want to do is sleep and growl. We get pretty good at both. When my son woke me up from napping he never knew what he would find - happy dad or grumpy bear. Which to be depended mostly on whether I slept through taking my next dose of pain-killer. . .
So, I'm a big fan of chugging food. Chugging allows a mouthwash pain killer to work, and then just pass the food down the gullet as quickly as possible. The major factor in deciding whether you should sip or chug is how hot the food is. Cold food gives a throat freeze which can be very painful. Hot food can easily burn the lining of the mouth. So what is the right temperature? Think a baby bottle.
Use the same techniques that you use to test if a baby bottle is too hot. I always did the put a little on my forearm. A baby will chug down the bottle if they are hungry. Unlike a baby, the cancer survivor eat their food very slowly.
However, this all sounds good, but you have to be able to have the throat control to be able to swallow, and not choke on it. So if they cannot chug without aspirating, don't even attempt it.
My family would make me lukewarm cups of soup, after about 1/2 hour, they would swap out the cup for a different lukewarm cup of soup. They would never make a comment about how much I ate, they just kept a fresh cup near me.. They realized that eating, for me, was an hour long process.
Unless there are other people sitting at the dining-room table, I never ate there. Nothing more lonely than sitting alone at the dinner table.
I often would sit in front of the TV and watch AMERICAN CHOPPER (mostly because I didn't have to worry about keeping track of the plot) and they would place the food next to me. Every once in a while, I would be inspired to take a gulp. Sure the magic mouth wash had worn off, but I wouldn't realize that until after I swallowed.
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Chemo treatment at Dana Farber
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