Sunchips

The next day I woke up hungry but optimistic—little did I know the day wouldn’t go as I’d thought it would. My nurse for the day came in, and while I thought she was going to tell me what time I was to have my assessment, she had much different news for me. She told me that a bed was available for me at a rehab hospital, and I was to be transferred there in a few hours.

In a way, this was a good thing because it felt like I was actually working toward something—discharge and getting back to my regular life—but in a way, it was bad because it meant I’d be in the hospital for a lot longer than I’d thought. Up till this point, all my attacks that led to hospital stays were short, and I usually bounced back fairly quickly, but this one would be my longest—measured in weeks.

When I got to the new hospital, my new roommate was already there, a woman with very short brown hair and dark brown eyes that had the unnerving quality of looking in different directions. Her name was Vivienne, and she had already been at the rehab hospital for a few weeks before I arrived. Vivienne had a degenerative disease that would land her in the hospital for a few weeks every few years, and each time would mean learning how to adapt to a new level of degeneration.

Alison came up to Edmonton for a few days to visit with me while my mom went home to take care of things going on in her own life. Alison stayed at my house and looked after Shamus in between coming to hang out with me at the rehab hospital. I had classes (such as exercise rehabilitation workshops) to go to, but afterward there was a large recreation room that had many tables and chairs, games and puzzles, a shuffleboard, books, and even a small cantina where visitors could buy snacks and drinks. Alison and I spent a lot of time in this room.

It had been almost two whole days since I’d had anything to eat; this was an unusual situation where basically I had just slipped through the cracks. The rehab hospital hadn’t set up a swallow assessment for me before I arrived as they hadn’t been told that I needed one, and as I was no longer a patient at the university hospital, my care and treatment wasn’t their responsibility. The rehab hospital made an urgent appointment for me and I finally ended up having my swallow assessment later that day; I was cleared to have a pureed diet.

After not having anything semi-solid for almost two weeks, pureed mac and cheese tasted like heaven. You might think that there was a special menu for patients on a pureed diet, but no. We had the exact same meals as our solid food–eating neighbours, but our meal was dumped into a blender and ground up. The slip of paper that accompanied the meal was useful because otherwise you’d be left guessing what the mangled goo was supposed to be.

One dinnertime, that slip of paper told me that under the cloche covering my food, I would find chicken à la king. That sounded fancy, and I wondered what the hospitals’ interpretation of this would be. I lifted the cloche and almost laughed. There was an ice cream scoop of mashed potatoes, a fluorescent green blob, and a hideous splotch of something that reminded me of a dead mollusc. The kitchen staff had covered the mashed potatoes in watery gravy that spread over the whole plate, and the already unappetizing chow was swimming in a murky brown puddle.

As the days passed, I ate less and less of the meals provided. I always ate my scoop of mashed potatoes because they tasted like mashed potatoes were supposed to taste and not like something that had been dumped in a blender. I didn’t mind breakfast so much because it usually tasted almost normal, and I didn’t feel the revulsion for it that I did over the pureed meatloaf or salmon at lunch and dinnertime.

I was eating so little that the kitchen staff noticed my meals were mostly coming back untouched, so my food trays were now accompanied with a bottle of Ensure and a juice box of Boost, two kinds of meal replacement drinks. Despite my food intake reducing, I was getting physically stronger each day. I was pretty sure my next swallow assessment would show that I was at least ready to advance to the next level of food intake, maybe strictly soft food.

My nutrition intake was still up in the air, and nothing had really been resolved when one day Alison and I were in the rec room just sitting at a table and talking. Alison, being hungry, had gone to the cantina to get herself a snack and came back to the table with a a bag of Sunchips. I don’t think she was insensitive to my plight of having an empty stomach, but in her mind, she was hungry and had the means and ability to remedy that, whereas my diet was out of her control; it was the hospitals’ responsibility to feed me.

As we were sitting there, she reached into the bag to pull out a Sunchip and a small sliver of one came out and fell onto the table. I reached out and snatched it up, like a snake darting out to attack its prey, and greedily popped it into my mouth. Alison stared at me in astonishment. I think she thought I would rationally dismiss the thought of eating a Sunchip because it was probably not safe to do so, but any rationalization I normally had had dissipated with my last meal. Luckily, the little piece of Sunchip didn’t make me choke, and her astonishment slowly turned from disbelief to hilarity and we laughed and laughed.

I would end up losing over thirty pounds during that stint in the hospital. It’s not a diet I would recommend, and I put it all back on once I could eat regular food again. It’s not pleasant to look back and remember what it felt like to get an NG tube and not smell my food or to remember what pureed chicken à la king smells like; but I enjoy remembering puzzles, puppies, and Al’s look of astonishment-turned-to-laughter as I snatched up that little piece of chip.