Laurie White’s Blog

Okay, I was warned that food would taste different.

And oh, it does!

Actually, this is a good thing. I don’t taste salty much any more, so am using a lot less salt on my food. But it’s also making drinking enough at home rough. I usually drink diet soda and the sweetener just gets awful tasting right after chemo. Okay, so fewer diet sodas is also a good thing, but that means I drink less than I should. (A reasonable person would drink water instead, but I think it’s long been established I’m not a reasonable person.) Fountain drinks use a different sweetener, so I try to eat out soon after treatment, if just to get enough to drink. (I actually had no trouble with a baked potato and cup of gumbo 2 days after treatment…I’m thrilled!)

I’ve also been warned not to eat favorite foods, because if I got sick, well, they stop being favorite foods.

But I was not warned about Madras Curry.

Now, despite its geographical anomalies, Madras Curry is the Thai-3 entry at my local Chinese restaurant. Yeah, you can think about that for a few minutes, but it’s not going to make sense. Apparently the Chinese running the restaurant are as bad at geography as Americans, or maybe they’re just giving in to American’s thinking all curry comes from Thailand, but last time I checked, Madras was not in Thailand (but then again, it’s now known as Chennai in India, so maybe the Thais took the name?).

Anyway, I do long for Madras Curry, but usually much later in the chemo cycle. It was a favorite before I started treatment. It’s a spicy food I can eat (the Pad Thai at the same Chinese restaurant, surprisingly appropriately named the Thai-1 dish, is way too spicy now). Madras Curry is full of big vegetables. I’d be an absolute fool to pick up an order on the way home (especially since Charlie’s home and he’d stop me from eating it). But I want it.

But the strangest thing about Madras Curry is that I’m sure I stink of it. I just know the odor is oozing out of my pores. When the smell first started, I decided the odor was one of the chemo drugs, Adriamycin. But I have no real reason for thinking it’s Adria, and I think I’d prefer smell of Chinese/Thai/Indian food than of chemotherapy drugs, so I’m sure I am a walking advertisement for Madras Curry.

Of course, no one else can smell it, so maybe I’m just a crazy woman who thinks she smells like a delicious curry.

But the good news in all this is that less than 3 days after treatment, things are going well enough for me to hallucinate smells. I made it through classes the day after treatment, and more importantly, today (a day I usually sleep in). I still can’t concentrate on much (except Asian geography?), but I’m doing remarkably well physically. Charlie and I did 20 laps (almost 2 miles) at Wellfit last night and I snuck out to attend the Laughter Yoga class today. It was amazing, almost 30 people, most of them cancer patients, walking around for 45 minutes laughing.

Laughter may not be as good as Adriamycin and Neulasta, but it was pretty good medicine!