Food

As in previous posts, I must ask your indulgence while, yet again, talking about the weather before TKR topics, but golly--who would have thought we'd have an earthquake and a hurricane all in the same week? It's really just a little too much, don't you think? In an effort to correlate the weather with knee topics, I'll mention that several of my friends on Facebook today have claimed that their arthritis seems much worse today as the low pressure center of the hurricane approaches. Is that really true? Does low pressure affect arthritis pain? I guess that's as good an explanation as any for the fact that both my knees are strangely achy today.

Stan and I have had a fairly quiet day, going out only once for a brief event at our granddaughter's Tae Kwon Do class, but other than that, we've puttered around the house, waiting and watching for the hurricane. So, since there's not a lot to say about the current state of my knee, and since I'll be winding up regular posting in the coming week, I thought I'd start my final set of articles. Let's talk tonight about a subject near and dear to my heart--food.

More for myself than for the edification of my small (very small) audience, I'll talk about food in terms of time. So, let's talk about food at these time periods:
(1) Hospital: It was my experience that with the morphine drip and the other pain killers that I was getting in the hospital, I felt pretty perky and had a moderately good appetite, so, in the hospital, order what you want and eat as much as you feel like eating because believe me, you won't be eating much after that for quite a while.
(2) The 1st week: Don't bother to have anyone cook for you or do much at all in the way of food preparation because it will be wasted effort. For the first 2 or 3 days at home I could eat only a few things: crackers and ginger ale in the morning, maybe some yogurt and a cookie for lunch, a little clear, plain soup for dinner. I think I ate a couple of individual cups of applesauce, and I forced myself to eat Raisin Bran cereal in the morning, but I wasn't interested in food and only ate to keep myself going.
(3)The 2nd week: My bouts of nausea continued and my lack of appetite abated only slightly during the second week. At the beginning of the second week, I still had trouble eating, but by the end of that week, I was eating real food, such as Stan's quesadillas. I couldn't eat much, but I could eat. For this time period, keep the crackers and ginger ale available, but add in some plain soups, a grilled cheese, and a bit of peanut butter on bread or crackers.
(4) The 3rd and 4th week: These were transitional weeks when I would alternately eat fairly normally (although never in great quantity) and then I'd be repelled by food to the extent that I could eat only a couple of bites at dinnertime. Stan tried so hard to cook good little meals, and they were good, but often I just couldn't stand the thought of food. My preference seemed to be for bland food such as the chicken and rice soup I made for myself. I began to enjoy ice cream and fruit (especially the cherries that were in season), but heavy foods such as big pieces of meat and spicy foods were impossible to eat. Several times during this period we had cold Subway sandwiches on flatbread and, while I couldn't always eat quite all of my 6-inch sandwich, I could eat most of it and I enjoyed what I did eat.
(5) The 5th and 6th week: The easiest ways to characterize these weeks was that I ate regular food, just in smaller quantities. Because I started back to work during this time period, I ate out several times. My meals included everything from a spicy Indian buffet (only one plate--couldn't force any more food down than that) to a Vietnamese-Chinese fusion restaurant to a New York deli style place to McDonald's to Ruby Tuesday's salad bar to Panera Bread (a bowl of chicken soup for my dinner, please). I continued to favor ginger ale but drank plenty of Diet Coke, coffee, and other assorted beverages. I abandoned cereal for breakfast and went back to my former habit of scrounging around in the refrigerator for leftovers for breakfast. By this time in my recovery, no special accommodations were necessary however, and the only difference was that I continued to eat much smaller portions than I previously would have eaten.

Perhaps I should have kept better records of what I ate and when I ate it, but for now, this seems to be a fairly good overview of what to expect in terms of food. My last thought on this subject is that nobody should be offended if they fix something tasty and appealing, presents it to the TKR patient, and is met with a look of horror and the comment that "I just can't eat anything." It's no reflection on the food, just an honest assessment of a particular moment and a particular state of being.