"Are you hungry?" "No"

In December I had an encounter with the rarely found, but very effective zinc deficiency. This caused me to have a raccoon like rash around my eyes, nausea, altered taste perception, and above all else, reduced appetite. Because of this I was brought in and hospitalized, due to my nutrition markers being so low. In the hospital, alongside nocturnal tube feeding, I was encouraged to eat, well, as much as I could. Awesome right? Nah. I was disgusted by food. I’m not saying I wasn’t hungry, I’m saying I was REPULSED by food. The thought of it made me queasy, the sight made me gag and I just couldn’t eat. The hospital food, did NOT make it any easier. Here is the menu that I would typically follow in the hospital, and let me make it clear, that in terms of choice and selection, I had one of the best available.

Breakfast: Breakfast would consist of a mini container of cheerios (exactly 80 calories worth) a half a cup of soymilk, half a cup of diced, canned peaches in water (not syrup) and one sugar packet on my cereal.

Lunch: I somehow managed to get myself assigned the same diet as the patients that were in the rehab hospital, so my lunch options were usually pretty good. I guess if you’re in rehab, you’re in for a while, so you get better lunches. Go figure. My lunch usually consisted of a fruit plate, which I got solely for the grapes, French fries (Mmm! They were a lot like the fries from KFC), a cup of soup that was usually vegetable or chicken noodle and a sort of vegetable that varied from carrot sticks to coleslaw. Lunch overall was pretty decent and I can’t complain about it.

Dinner: Dinner. Oh dinner, how is possible for a meal to go so wrong? The meat options were always terrible, beyond terrible, so I usually opted for the sandwich provided it wasn’t a salmon sandwich. I made that mistake once, it was nasty. Alongside my sandwich I would get about a half a cup of plain, white rice. It was the cheap stuff with no flavor. I would also get about a half a cup of boiled to death wax beans….tasty. I’d also get some sort of dessert, either jello, banana

Other: I’m sure this category is the main reason I didn’t starve in the hospital. I would eat soda crackers and Cracker barrel individual cheese. I would eat small individual ice creams at really weird times, like before breakfast or right before I went to sleep. I ate a LOT of baked chips. Nurses would share food with me at night so I ate a lot of fruit from fruit trays (melon <3), I also drank a lot of hot chocolate. I loved hot chocolate in there.

Thank you all for returning to my blog despite my disgustingly long hiatus. I promise there will be more posts very soon! Muah!