Hi Galley: Once again, welcome to the family. You have lots of friends here who will help both you and your husband get through this battle. It won't be easy, but it is entirely doable.

Several time now proper nutrition has been mentioned to you. It may be very well the most important factor in getting you through this. Cancer is hyper-metabolic, that means it eats a LOT of calories (after all it's generally trying to grow rapidly). Sadly, the treatment is also hyper-metabolic; what the disease isn't eating the treatment is. So, what does that mean for poor Larry who is 3rd in line to get some calories, it means Larry has to eat a LOT of calories. We've all heard the pregnant woman is eating for two, well Larry is eating for three.

Now, let's factor in loss of taste, or even worse everything tastes BAD like it did for me. When things taste bad we spit them out, but what if everything tastes bad. Go down that road just a little and you will see how patients can decide not to eat anything as nothing tastes good. Do that for a couple of days and you can start losing 1 or 2 pounds of weight every day. keep that up for awhile and you end up in the hospital due to mal-nourishment, on IV feeding, but worst of all is your treatment stops while you are in the hospital. Stopping treatment is a bad thing; once we get the cancer to start dying we need to keep it dying and not give it a chance to recover.

My doc told me 7 bottles of Ensure every day. I generally got 6 of them down and surprisingly they didn't taste bad, one of the few things that didn't taste bad. But I still lost 32 pounds in 6 weeks. One more pound of weight loss and the nurses were recommending I go on a PEG tube. Fortunately for me I was a plump little dumpling before treatment, so I had extra weight to lose. If Larry is slim and trim already he really needs to eat, he doesn't have the extra to lose.

Lots of people tell you to eat during treatment, but they always give you the short version. My crusade is telling people why they need to eat (a lot) and what happens if you don't. And as Paul Harvey always said; "now you know the rest of the story."

Welcome to our family, we will help you get through this.

Tony



Tony, 69, non-smoker, aerobatics pilot, bridge player/teacher, avid dancer (ballroom, latin, swing, country)

09/13 SCC, HPV 16, tonsillectomy, T2N0.
11/13 start rads, no chemo
12/13 taste gone, dry mouth,
02/14 hair slowly returning
05/14 taste the same, dry sinuses, irrigation helps.
01/15 food taste about 60% returned, dry sinuses are worse in winter.
12/20 no more sinus problems, taste pretty good