Hello all, I have seen that there has been a lot of discussion regarding feeding and nutrition on these boards, but I just wanted to ask a few more questions.
We are really lost over here. My father was diagnosed with Stage III hypopharyngeal cancer in June. He underwent 10 weeks of chemo(once a week) and radiation (once a day) treatment. His last treatment was 5 weeks ago. In the past 5 weeks, he has lost about 20lb (a LOT for my father, he is about 125lbs now) and has a tremendous amount of nausea. He has a PEG tube since the beginning of treatment. However, we dont have a nutritionist (insurance wont cover), so we are really on our own in trying to figure out what to do for him. For the last 3 weeks, he has only been able to get, at the most, 3 cans of ensure in him a day. Mostly, he can only keep down 1/2 to 1 can a day. He violently vomits once a day, and it has been really painful for him. We have tried anti-nausea meds Compazine and Phenergan and they dont seem to help. He is developing a huge adversion to Ensure, so now we are trying to give him different foods, like soup and other protein drinks, but he still gets sick. Plus, they do not have the calorie punch that Ensure and the others have. Any suggestions on how to help him would be wonderful. He is so down and depressed, it is taking everything we have to convince him to even try to eat, I think he is so sick of being nauseated. He is just like a walking skeleton now and we are just so worried. Plus, he has to undergo his biopsy in four days and he is so depressed and sick right now that he is saying that if they tell him that he still needs to undergo more treatment, he wont do it b/c he cant go through this again. I need help to try and make him start to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
Thanks so much for listening.

Cherie