Whatever He Wants, He Gets - November 11, 2009

Pete lost his appetite around the start of the second round of chemo. He says nothing tastes good anymore. There are some days when all he'll eat are a few pretzels; there have been days when he's eaten nothing. So when he does feel like having something, I'm ecstatic.

He had a craving for pork roll and cheese on a potato roll a few weeks back, so I make sure I have those in the house. He's eaten that a few times. Another day he felt like having meat lasagna, so I called the Italian restaurant down the road and got a take-out order. Of course, even when he does feel like eating that doesn't mean he's going to eat very much. He ate about 1/3 of the lasagna, so I split the remaining piece in 2, and froze them in case he might feel like having that again. The days when he actually eats some kind of food have become few and far between.

He's lost quite a bit of weight. I suppose it was fortunate that he had some to lose at the start of all this. He wasn't terribly overweight, but at 6'4" he was maybe 40#s or so over where he should be. Right now I'd say he's somewhere between "normal" and "thin", but he's got more chemo, then surgery followed by more chemo down the road.

At least he's still maintaining a pretty positive outlook and that's a really good thing. As for eating, whatever he mentions he feels like having, I'll make sure he gets it.

Oh, for those of you who are not familiar with "pork roll", aka "Taylor ham", it's this greasy pork, chopped and mixed with spices and shaped like a roll of bologna stuffed into a cotton casing (think spam, but not in a can). It has a very distinct flavor. It's a NJ original and has been around since the mid 1800's.