Real Food, part II

Now, it all seemed fine and dandy: I was able to eat again so life is good, right? Well, not quite. I still had the feeding tube in because they were concerned that I wouldn’t get enough calories. But I can’t eat a full meal because the formula from the feeding tube is filling my stomach. So we got to go one way or the other right?

Now I’m not sure how this worked. I think they left the feeding tube in, but shut it off so that if I wasn’t eating enough, they could turn it back on easily and quickly.

Wouldn’t you guess it? I wasn’t eating enough. It isn’t that I wasn’t trying. It’s just that hospital food is disgusting! Truly, ask my family. To boost the calorie intake, they brought me a protein shake between meals, three times a day. Protein shakes are good the first few times and then…

So I have this problem with bad food, I just can’t eat it. I’ve been like that all my life. I like my homecooked food. The hospital food was so far from anything good it wasn’t funny. Now several times a day I’m being threatened with the feeding tube if I don’t up my calorie intake.

Prior to surgery Dan would always finish my meals for me because they gave way too much food and that way Dan didn’t have to leave to buy food. Now the nurses are food Nazis. We have to show or list how much of each meal I ate, and how much Dan ate.

I’ve never counted calories in my life, but at every meal, I’d have my mom or Dan estimate how much of the food I needed to eat to fulfill my requirement. It was so hard. I never would have thought that being required to eat more could ever be a bad thing.