Following my last blog post I received a comment from Indigo Jo containing some interesting questions that I'd not previously answered in my blog. So rather than just leaving a comment with my responses I thought I'd post them up here so everyone can read them.
The comment I will be responding to was:
I've looked through your blog and I had one question that doesn't seem to have been answered, which is what it was like not eating for so long? Did you never eat, or even have water (e.g. when it was a hot day) - you couldn't have waited until the night if you were dehydrated, surely? Did you ever see others eating and want some for yourself, and how did you and your parents deal with that?
When I was little my parents used to try to tempt to me to eat but I could never tolerate anything more than a teaspoon of food. If I had any more I'd be sick. There were also numerous attempts to feed me enterally (into my digestive system), rather than intravenously (into my bloodstream) but these all failed.
I could drink a small amount of water pre-transplant - I'd have sips of it with my tablets but I could never drink anywhere near normal volumes of it, I wouldn't have been able to keep it down. I never had problems with dehydration though. Thinking back on it I'm not really sure how that worked though as now it seems odd to me, but somehow dehydration was never a problem for me.
I never missed eating because it was something I'd never known. I'm sure it'd be very different if someone was suddenly unable to eat after being able to eat normally for many years though. Most of the time it didn't bother me at all and I never had any interest in food. I'd sit at the dining room table with a book and read my the rest of my family ate meals. I found a lot of celebrations were very centred around food though, especially in my extended family where every Christmas or other gathering would revolve around a big meal. So I sometimes found it difficult on those occasions, but it would be more that I'd get bored with all the fuss about the food, rather than wanting to join in.
I hope this answers the questions and if anyone has any more then please leave a comment and I'll try to respond to them. I also hope to get back to blogging properly soon. Thanks for reading.
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Thanks for replying so quickly, that was quite interesting. It's difficult to imagine that a child would have no interest in food, for someone who has always taken pleasure in eating.
ReplyDeleteI remember when reading the reports about Lynn Gilderdale early last year, that one of the aspects of her condition that were mentioned most frequently (in one case, before anything else) was that she could not swallow and had to be fed by a nasogastric tube, and for most people that would be thought of as a terrible loss. I remember sitting over a coffee after reading those reports and pausing before swallowing any of it. But having read some of what Lynn herself wrote, it appears that this was actually one of the less distressing aspects of her condition, compared with the terrible pain, nausea and the trauma of ill-treatment and repeated medical disasters.