Thursday was a hard day. I had no energy and a foggy head. Our website wouldn’t allow me to upload anything, hence the late blog post.
My alarm goes off at 6.45am every day without a weekend respite. Normally I wake around 8am. Some days I’m grateful for the early start. Other days, like Thursday, it felt like the middle of the night. If it was just a case of taking the pills I’d have them by my bed and I’d go back to sleep. There are a lot of them though and you have to eat them with some fat. Normally I’d make a point of avoiding fat.
At weekends, I have a mouthful of Greek yoghurt and go back to sleep. Otherwise I put cream in my porridge. There’s a blog in today’s Guardian called Healthy food: can you train yourself to like it? Well, I believe I have. I was diagnosed 11 years ago and I understood early on that one of the ways I could control symptoms was with food.
I must have been a 1st class bore for the first few years.
I read the ingredients on everything, I asked hosts what they’d used in their cooking and I gave my mum a new list of things I could and couldn’t eat each time I visited. I even made my son anaemic for a bit when I banned dairy products from the house.
After I did my 1st round of treatment I settled down from a practically fascist healthy eating regime to a more of a well-balanced diet. I even smoked again for a while. Thankfully I’ve managed to kick the fags but I enjoyed them for a bit. Throughout this time despite relaxing my strict self- imposed diet I have developed a healthy palate. I don’t like crisps, biscuits, fizzy drinks, processed food or even chips. I do like puddings (see day 13 Banoffee Pie), chocolate and coffee but all in moderation.
The extreme health kick I was on didn’t do me any good. It made me uptight and anxious. Looking back, it was reaction to my diagnosis. What I couldn’t express in words or process emotionally I acted out in all sorts of controlling behaviour.
The person who has suffered most from my eating fads is my son who now has an aversion to brown rice. He also doesn’t have a single filling and is a handsome lean, clear skinned young man. The pic is of my 2 empty blisters and my (just started) new one. 10 more to go...
This entry was originally published February 28, 2013 on The Hepatitis C Trust. Reprinted with permission.
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