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2:00pm August 30, 2014

Yogurt! Finally found a food I can sort of tolerate, as far as my body will tolerate any food.

I’d been binge-eating candy as a result of the steroids I’m on, and then having to drain it all out of my stomach through my g-tube to avoid getting really sick because my stomach is paralyzed and it’s not safe for me to leave food in it.  (I either get really sick, or it refluxes up into my lungs and causes pneumonia, or both.  This is partially what was responsible for my recent lung infection.)

Anyway, once I was on antibiotics, I started thinking… yogurt.  And now I’m eating small amounts of yogurt instead of candy.  And it’s working.  I still have to drain it out of my stomach, even if it’s as little as four bites.  (I actually aspirated from reflux from four bites of yogurt at one point.)  But I think some of the probiotics manage to stay in my system anyway despite most of the yogurt being drained out the g-tube, because I feel better after I eat yogurt, unlike after I eat candy.

So I really shouldn’t be eating anything at all.  But if I’m going to eat anything, yogurt seems like the safest option.  It’s also more liquid and therefore more easily tolerated by my stomach.  (By the time I needed a feeding tube, I was on a liquid diet and could tolerate maybe one can of Ensure per day.  Which means I can tolerate small amounts of food, just not enough to live on.)

So until I can conquer this steroid-induced desire to eat eat eat eat eat and eat, I am going to try really hard to stick to yogurt or similar foods.  (Also, even though I am referring to this as binge eating because of the uncontrollable nature of it, I’m not even eating enough to constitute a meal for most people.  Like, if I ate enough to constitute a meal, I’d vomit right away, my stomach doesn’t tolerate that much food, period.)