10:07pm April 28, 2013

I’m starting to understand why I do and don’t crave food at different times.

I craved nothing, food or drink, until I became really dehydrated after a day in the emergency room a week and a half ago. Then I started craving ginger ale, to settle my stomach and because I badly needed the fluids.

And I’ve craved nothing ever since, except today, when I’ve been craving any and all kinds of food for the first time ever. And it’s because I went twenty four hours without food yesterday in order to go to the emergency room to get my feeding tube replaced.

I’m starting to think I only have cravings when there’s something my body needs. Aside from having diarrhea, the food they have given me is utterly perfect: Low fat, no fiber, high protein. It fits exactly what my body needs. So as long as I’m actually eating this stuff through the tube, I’m getting what my body wants and my body is happy.

But if I go for awhile without eating when I should be eating, then suddenly I start craving all kinds of food. Today it was pizza. But I don’t have pizza. So I took an Ensure, which is the only readily edible food I have in the house, and I swished it all around in my mouth and spat it out in the sink. I didn’t swallow any, because if there’s one thing my stomach won’t tolerate, it’s Ensure. That’s why I got on the feeding tube in the first place. Small amounts of ginger ale are my limit. Maybe tiny amounts of soup, too, but I haven’t felt the need to try soup yet. I’ve been too contented to really want anything beyond ginger ale, and even that I’ve been drinking less and less of as long as I get the right amount of water in my tube every day, and my stomach is more or less settled.

This isn’t at all how I thought it would work. I thought I would miss food terribly, and constantly, and that trying to find ways to put food in my mouth without eating it would consume a large portion of my time. But it doesn’t. Such cravings for food by mouth seem very sporadic. And the idea of putting anything in my stomach seems awful for the most part.

Take yesterday. I kept getting horribly nauseated in the emergency room, because I wasn’t able to take my Marinol, which can only go in by tube or by mouth. It’s an oil or a resin or something like that, so there’s no IV form. I think they’re working on a sublingual spray, which would be great, but it’s not out of testing yet. And along with Phenergan and Reglan, Marinol is one of the only three nausea meds I take regularly anymore. Everything else (zofran, Benadryl, Ativan) is PRN now. Which is great. Except when I can’t take my Marinol, in which case I get really nauseated.

But the other reason I was nauseated is because I normally take acid reducers, and I didn’t think to ask for an IV one while I was at the ER. And I got to learn that even the normal amount of acid and bile in my stomach fills me up enough to make me extremely nauseated. Acid and bile belong in the stomach, but if your gastroparesis is severe enough, even normal stomach contents make you feel overly full and nauseated. I couldn’t believe how much bile I was draining out through the g tube. It was ridiculous. I’m just glad my hospital room had a huge stack of those barf buckets so I could keep pouring stuff out of my g tube. There was more coming out of it than I have ever seen, and pouring is no exaggeration of what was happening.

So if even that makes me feel full and nauseated, there’s no way I want actual food in my stomach. The very idea is nauseating. And that’s another reason I don’t normally crave food, unless I for some reason don’t have my tube feeding with me and can’t do it, in which case the “OMG I haven’t eaten in a day” thing kicks in and overrides the “don’t you dare put anything in your stomach” thing. So right now I’m wishing I could eat a big slice of pizza with tomatoes, artichoke hearts, and mushrooms. Even though I know even one bite would make me throw up. Fortunately there’s no actual pizza around, so I don’t get the chance to see if I could manage to spit it out before swallowing any.

Hopefully this will go away once my body realizes its getting fed again, because I don’t really have the ability to create pizzas out of nowhere and then chew them up and spit them out again. But I think it will go away, given the patterns I’ve seen so far: I only crave things when my food goes away for awhile. It doesn’t seem to matter how the food gets into me, as long as it does get into me. I can almost smell that pizza though. Still. I think I’ll stick to Osmolite.

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