18th-21st July - Rest Days

The Friday and Saturday (the two days immediately after my treatment) were tough.  I felt ill, didn’t want to eat, didn’t want to speak to anyone, in fact I had no energy to do anything really – not even enough to focus on resting the iPad in bed in order to watch some TV!  Still, I was expecting this but I think it was more the way it crept up on me that caught me out.  I thought it would be a big bang type hit, whereas this blighter had snuck up on me and caught me unawares just as I thought I was doing ok.

Bizarrely, on the Sunday evening I felt an ever so slight upturn in energy and managed to eat a plain jacket potato with some grated cheese.  Whilst it felt like I was trying to battle through the equivalent of eating ten potatoes, it did feel good to get some food down which in turn helped with my energy levels.

By this time I’d also really started to notice that my usual tastes and smells were all out of sync.  Certain smells which used to be quite appealing suddenly really seemed to make me feel sick – mint or citrus type smells were an example of this and I found that it wasn’t nice trying to brush my teeth with mint toothpaste.  Similarly, certain foods which I’d been loving only two days before all of a sudden even the thought of them made me feel nauseous.  Ready made microwave pasta dishes (and nice ones at that) were now consigned to the rubbish.  Instead I found myself craving only a few very limited food types, specifically bread, cheese and hard boiled eggs.  I’m sure there’s some logical biological explanation for these cravings (probably that my body was simply craving carbs, fat and protein) but I’ll just keep it simple by saying that I decided that whilst I felt ill, I was going to eat whatever I wanted to, regardless of how unhealthy it may otherwise be considered.

By the end of the Tuesday I was feeling quite a lot better, still weak and lethargic, but by comparison a lot better than I’d been a couple of days before.