Coping with Cancer - Food

Hello from Chemo Ward B! Its Friday, I’m in a room with twelve other cancer patients and there’s a nurse in front of me with a box of syringes. We’re all set for a chemo party.

Except they aren’t chemo syringes. Due to an excessively low white blood cell count I’ve been prescribed a new set of drugs to boost my immune system. I’ll need to inject myself every day for the next six months, and take an extra week off to allow my body to fully recover. Chemo is strong stuff folks.

Alongside the drugs, the nurses also advise me of a list of foods that will help to improve my white blood cell count. And that’s the subject of this week’s blog. Food that’s good for the immune system and food that’s good for people on chemotherapy. One in two of us will experience cancer in our lifetime, so you don’t want to make any faux pas when it comes to serving up dinner.

Good foods

Chips and Gravy

Pop quiz class. How does Chemotherapy work? Its…kind of like radiation right? It fills you with poison, makes you sick a lot and then all your hair falls out.

Well… sort of. Here’s a quick science lesson.

Cancer drugs work by damaging the DNA that tells the cell how to copy itself in division. If cancer cells are unable to divide, they die. The faster that cancer cells divide, the more likely it is that chemotherapy will kill the cells, causing a tumour to shrink. Got it so far?

Obviously they removed my tumour the old fashioned way – scalpel and a palette knife. However, I still need chemo to kill those last cancer cells in my body.

The problem is that chemotherapy doesn’t just damage cancer cells. It also affects healthy body tissues where the cells are quickly growing and dividing. Examples of this are:

-the hair, which is always growing

-the bone marrow, which is constantly producing blood cells

-the skin and the stomach lining, which are constantly renewing themselves,

- the salivary glands, which can quickly produce, err – saliva.

The damage to the saliva cells is the one I hate most. It clams up the mouth and makes eating some foods, such as chicken, bread, chips or scotch eggs (no!!!) - very difficult. Luckily this can be solved by the addition of one delicious substance. Gravy. Its warm, its tasty and it makes dry foods much more digestible for a chemotherapy patient.

We all know that gravy’s good, but for cancer patients it is a nutritional must.

Carrots

Don’t worry folks, chemotherapy doesn’t make you blind – but it does make you stupid. After two sessions my mind has dulled to that of a marijuana addict with concussion. ‘What day is it again? Where are my socks? My God, Neighbours is intense.’

Luckily there is a solution to this. Carrots. According to science, eating carrots can stop cognitive decline by as much as sixty percent. Although they may not make us as sharp as we were at say… twenty-one, a daily dose of carrots will improve recollection, and make us stay at least as smart as we are now. For chemo patients, it stops our brains melting into mush.

Neighbours is still pretty intense though.

Bland Food

Chicken Jalfrezi, Coq au Vin, Lobster Bisque - you can have them – all I want as a cancer patient is some plain rice, some plain chicken and some baked beans. None of them are particularly exciting, but when chemo kills your stomach lining (which it does), they are as good as it gets.

Turmeric

Turmeric dramatically increases the anti-oxidant capacity of the body. This is good for us in many ways, but most importantly because it protects from something called ‘free radicals.’ Now I know what you’re thinking. Didn’t they release that You Only Get What You Give song back in the late nineties? Well, they are also unstable molecules which can do major damage to the components of cells - DNA, proteins, and cell membranes – and can then potentially cause cancer. And if there’s one thing a cancer patient really doesn’t want, its more cancer.

I’m adding turmeric to my cornflakes right now.

Ginger

Chemotherapy patients don’t spend all their time lying on a bed being sick into a bucket - but they do spend most of their time feeling like we want to. In order to stop this happening, I have to take three different types of anti-sickness drugs, and even then I spend a good amount of each day sweating and watching Location, Location, Location.

Fortunately, mother nature has provided a natural solution. Ginger.

In a study of chemotherapy patients, as little as one-quarter of a teaspoon of ginger cut symptoms of nausea by 40%. Ginger also contain loads of anti-oxidants (remember them?) and gingerol that ‘may also help prevent cancer.’ I have ginger tea for daily use and take ginger sweets for emergency cases, and it relieves pretty much all sickness. While there no hard science behind this, it works, so I don’t care.

Mulled Wine

Chemotherapy makes you incredibly sensitive to the cold. The chemo drug that I have to take - Oxaliplatin - is the worst for this. It makes touching cold objects very painful, cold food difficult to swallow and, tragically, a cold beer about the worst drink in the whole world. Yep, it really sucks.

To try and find a solution to this, I consulted a few websites. Here’s a few of their recommendations:

‘Don’t go out in the cold.’

‘Don’t put ice cubes in your drink’

‘If you must go out, wear a ski-mask.’

‘Don’t breathe deeply when exposed to cold air.’

Sadly, I lent my ski-mask to the local serial killer, so have had to take some more practical options - a scarf to help my breathing, gloves to protect the hands and, if I MUST go out the pub, a large glass of mulled wine.

For the chemo patient, alcohol is one of the last simple pleasures available, so a cup of mulled wine is pretty much as good as it gets. It’s warm, its tasty and it gets you nicely drunk. What can be better?

Bad Foods

Ice Cream

Its delicious, but its cold – so for the cancer patient, eating it feels like swallowing arsenic.

Steak

A nice medium-rare steak sounds great, but when chemo has killed your digestive enzymes, it sits in the stomach for weeks. Not fun.

Pavlova

Tumours love sugar. And no-one loves tumours. So, if you don’t want a tumour, don’t eat desserts with loads of sugar. Simple.

Thai Vegetable Curry

There aren’t many times when eating a meal sends you into accident and emergency, but in my case, this is what happened when I last tucked into a Thai Vegetable Curry. Chemo loves sugar, but OMG does it not like spicy green vegetables.

Cake

The good people in my office held a MacMillan coffee morning the other day. People bought in delicious cakes and donated money to cancer research. Sounds great, right?

Well, not according my oncologist:

‘They hold these coffee mornings and ask everyone to bring in cakes. I don’t get it. Cake is just about the worst food you can eat. It’d be like holding a charity fundraiser for lung cancer and asking everyone to bring in twenty Marlboro Lights.’

Maybe carrot cake is a happy medium.

The truth is, cancer is a complicated disease and there is no one food that makes it better or worse. The treatment affects people in different ways, so while for some cakes and chocolate make chemo feel ten times worse, for others they are the only way to get through it.

For me, I want to try and consume as many nutrients that will help me as possible. I know that the body can deal with an amazing amount of stress and damage, but sometimes we need to give something back to help it recover. It will thank us for it in the long run.

Treat yourself well, be mindful and, as a wise nineties band once said:

Don't give up

You've got a reason to live

Can't forget

We only get what we give

I’m off to put some Turmeric in my Bisto.

Until next time

Ben