As the dreaded treatments draw ever closer I find myself making unexpected progress. I continued to try and find things I could eat, things to practice with. At home alone is a good time to attempt this, I can get into a mess or spit things out without getting any comments from children or generally just grossing people out.
To this end I went to the shops after the morning school run. My original intention was to (apart from getting the kids dinner for today) just stock on up some yoghurts and the ingredients for the smoothie I make at lunchtime. After yesterdays success with mango I decided to try something different. I picked up some nice honey and sunflower seed wholemeal bread and a sweet potato. The potato was for lunch and the bread was for an immediate experiment as soon as I got back.
The bread was reasonably successful, I often found myself having to manoeuvre the piece from, say the roof of my mouth, with my finger (I still cannot move my tongue enough to do it that way) to the left side of my mouth where I could chew it. The other, surprisingly so, hard part was actually biting through the crust. I simply struggled to exert much force AND I found it rather uncomfortable on my bottom front teeth. I succeeded though, even though the crust was hard to chew and the sunflower seeds kept getting lodged in odd corners of my mouth.
Lunch was easier, being softer, I ate most of it but couldn't finish it. I am again surprised at how much my appetite has changed over these last few months, especially since the operation.
I managed a short bike ride between the rain showers again today, I also got some more work done. I am paying for that bike ride now though - I am feeling somewhat tired. I have one more day of relative normality before my next hospital appointment, this time to get the gruesome details on the chemo and to have a small operation to have a PEG tube fitted to allow me to be syringe fed if the radio and chemo makes me really ill.
At least it looks like I won't be having chemo on my actual birthday, so after a short visit to be cooked in the morning I get my birthday back to enjoy now - hopefully I won't actually be feeling unwell or having a reaction to the damned radio at that point, being the first session and all. It seems a shame to lose any progress I have made because of the side effects, I will have to work hard to try and keep going - apparently the fatigue can be really bad, but you are better off keeping going that giving into it - they do recommend gentle exercise if you can manage it to help alleviate it a bit. We'll see, so far I've done better than they have always expected, so I'm gonna try to do it again.
That and the fact that if I can keep up and about and eating normally then I know my family, especially my wonderful missus, won't worry so much about me.
