June 14, 2008
Eating fruit
I don’t eat fruit. I have a condition called short bowel (or short gut) syndrome. That means that I don’t have enough intestine to process food normally. My food goes through me very quickly and is not in my system long enough to break down so that I can absorb all of the nutritional goodness (or junk) that goes in my mouth. Rough textured and fibrous things are the worst. They don’t break down at all and cause me a lot of cramping and pain. I can handle vegetables that are cooked until soft (thus robbing them of nutrients,) but no raw fruit or vegetables, seeds, nuts, beans - all of those things cause me serious grief. Oh, I cheat sometimes, but only when I know I have at least a half a day I can lose to non-functionality due to pain and frequent bathroom visits. I susbsist mostly on defatted or low-fat meats, starches, soft vegetables and some dairy. I took nutritional supplements and vitamins for years, but apparently don’t absorb them, either, because they didn’t make a bit of difference. They’re expensive and their benefits were wasted on me, so I gave them up. The good news is that I seem to have lost the lactose intolerance that I had for a while after my gut surgery, so I gradually added more cheese other dairy products back into my diet. The bad news is that this has been going on for almost fourteen years and there’s no cure. I’ve lost a lot of teeth, my hair and skin are dry, my nails split and tear off easily and my bones and joints hurt - a lot. The overall state of my health is … well … crappy. Since the lactose intolerance faded, though, I’ve decided to try fruit again. Maybe I’ll be able to eat it and maybe I’ll absorb some of the good stuff. I started yesterday. I ate a half a banana on toast.
I don’t like foods that have a slimy texture. Cooked or canned fruit - bleh! The texture is so disagreeable it makes me gag. Yeah, like I’ve needed another dietary limitation all these years, hm? Seriously, I think it’s a genetic thing. My son has it worse than me - his avoidance extends to things that are creamy. He quit eating anything slimy, creamy or mushy as soon as he was off of strained baby food and rice cereal. He’s never eaten Jello or pudding. I eat those, and cooked cereals and yogurt and lots of other things that he won’t, but slime - no way! I just can’t do it. Bananas are slimy, but if you mix one with peanut butter it becomes creamy instead, with just a hint of slime. Today’s breakfast was much more agreeable than the half a banana I ate yesterday.
So okay, this wasn’t bad at all. I could see myself eating banana and peanut butter on toast every morning. I like it, but wouldn’t say it’s my favorite food. I don’t “love” the slice of dry whole wheat toast I eat right after I get out of bed every morning, but I “like” it okay and it’s part of my routine. It helps with the extreme nausea I have each day when I get up. It’s kinda like having morning sickness for fourteen years without having a baby to look forward to. Nausea is a background feature in my life all the time, but it’s really bad when I first wake up, thus the toast. (Yeah, those are my flabby thighs in the photos. I meant to edit before uploading, but I’m not gonna go back into my photo editor, crop each shot, delete the originals from Flickr and upload the cropped versions so I can switch them out on my post. I’ll live with the humiliation instead!)
Family tradition: Lance gets the last bite of pretty much everything I eat. This is the first time he’s had banana with his peanut butter. I think he likes it.
When I was in the hospital they made me eat papaya with every meal and they encouraged me to drink a lot of papaya juice. Papaya contains a digestive enzyme that is good for everyone and especially recommended for folks with screwed up guts like mine. The ancient Hawaiians knew that and the Western world discovered it with the invention of Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer. The main ingredient is papaya (or it was - Lawry’s owns it now and papaya is not listed on the label anymore.) I resisted the papaya a little at first, but by the time I’d been eating it several times a day for a week it had become a part of my routine - a part I didn’t like at all. I liked the taste okay, but had had enough to last a lifetime, or so I thought. Tomorrow, or maybe tonight with dinner, I’ll have papaya again for the first time in fourteen years. Wish me luck! I hope I love it because it needs to be a part of my life for a while, at least until I find out if I can eat it without (literal) gut-wrenching pain.
And now for a brief editorial statement: Are you opposed to stem cell research? I hope you will look at the issue from as many sources as you can, instead of just what you hear from the pulpit, which might be based on something other than scientific reality. I’m not asking you to abandon religious convictions, just to take a look and see if there is a valid conflict with your beliefs and what actually goes on in stem cell research. No one is getting pregnant just so they can abort and make some money on stem cells. It’s not happening and is not going to happen. The materials needed for stem cell research are readily available though abortions performed for all of the usual dreary reasons, so there is no market to lure anyone into planning pregnancy and abortion to satisfy supply and demand. The supply is already there, but most of it is being discarded as medical waste instead of being used to help people. Is that what you really want?
Why do I care about stem cell research and want to encourage you to take an educated look at your opposition? Because it will some day make all the difference for people like me. Notice I said will, not may. It is inevitable that scientific discovery will go forward, with or without opposition. Opposition just slows it down and makes already-expensive research cost more. Someday, probabaly not in my lifetime, but maybe while my son’s generation is still kicking, people will grow their own new guts from implanted stem cells engineered to grow guts. There will be new spleens for people like my vet, who lost his when he got kicked by a cow and who lives with his own medical nightmare. People on dialysis will get fresh-grown kidneys and no longer need to be tethered to machines and clinic schedules, greatly improving and extending their lives. Organ rejection will no longer be a problem because the new organ will be grown from the body of the person who needs it. I expect to be dead, probably as a result of something related to nutritional deprivation, long before that happens, so I have no vested interest in the state of research today. My support of stem cell research is based on a wish for future generations, that they might have healthier more funcitonal lives even after their bodies throw them a curve ball.
Technorati Tags: diet, food, food and nutrition, fruit, short bowel syndrome, short gut syndrome, stem cell research
Posted by skeet @ 2:21 pm • Food and beverage, Health & wellbeing
RSS feed for comments on this post.
TrackBack URI
June 15th, 2008 at 8:37 am, Whim Says:
I hope you can go back to eating fruit on a semi-regular basis at least.
I was told to eat papaya and pineapple to help me with my weight gain. I try to eat some dried papaya or drink pineapple juice each day (can’t afford the fresh stuff).
I am all for stem cell research.
June 16th, 2008 at 8:21 am, Angie Says:
Good luck on adding those things back in. I have a friend with the same problem and he takes papaya pills b/c he doesn’t like the taste of it either.
I’m all for stem cell research/use. My father in law had a stem cell transplant and it saved his life at the time. He was a devout Catholic but let me tell you when it comes to seeing your only grandchildren being born, he said thought God would understand.