Has this really only been going on for two months? Time passes so slowly. Every hour is as long as a week. Every aspect of my life has been affected, and in just a couple of months, I'm wondering whether I'll ever see "normal" again. Normal was so long ago.
I always had a difficult relationship with food. There are massive categories of foods that I either can't eat, won't eat, or honestly do not recognize as food. (Seriously, who eats fish voluntarily?) The last 9 weeks have made it even more difficult to eat things I previously had learned to like. I didn't always like cheese, for example. When I was a little kid, I thought it was sour and icky. Maybe I was just a product of the 1970s, but I only liked grilled cheese sandwiches or cheeseburgers made with Kraft singles. And I was brand specific, too. Don't put that store brand junk on my sandwiches, child me insisted. As I grew, my tastes grew as well, and now there are few cheeses I won't try. (And Kraft singles are out.) I'm not crazy about the rind on brie, and truffle cheese has a weird aftertaste to me, but otherwise, I dig it all. Or I did, until the last two months. Now something has happened to the texture of cheese and how my mouth perceives it. It grosses me out again, unless it's totally melted into something, and even then, I have to be careful what kind I choose.
For the first two cycles, as I came out of them, I was very interested in strongly sour flavors. They say try lemon on all your food, and that worked well. I begged for leafy greens, and salads with vinaigrettes and cooked spinach with a splash of vinegar were just about the greatest things I could get. And, much as last week, when I first was able to tolerate having the TV on again, and saw an ad for one pizza retailer after another all day, I was desperate for pizza. But I knew I had to be wary of pepperoni or garlic or anything that would give me heartburn all night, after falling into that trap twice.
This cycle, the object of my desire has been the tomato, in all its glory. I wanted it on pizza (still do, this minute, even though I'm still full from dinner 5 1/2 hours ago). I focused so hard on the spaghetti sauce my older daughter made that I'm surprised I wasn't able to telekinetically lift it from the freezer and fly it down the hallway, like Eleven in Stranger Things. Before I was able to get down solid food, and I was rhapsodizing about tomatoes, my younger daughter reminded me I had a pack of V8 juice, and it was like finding paradise when I stumbled across the house to get it. Tonight, for the first meal I felt like making on my own, I made a crock pot chili, light on heat but heavy on tomatoes and complex seasonings. I wonder what it is about tomatoes that has gripped me this summer. I have a few plants growing them outside, but with the cold spring and early summer, none have ripened yet. I don't think it's just because my old Okie brain is wired to want them in summertime. I know the lycopene in them is supposed to be a superfood to prevent prostate cancer, and since I never owned a prostate, I don't think that is my unconscious reasoning. It may or may not be worth asking the folks at the cancer center if other people are as tomato-mad as I am during chemo. Seems weird, but maybe it's really a thing.
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