They call it metal-mouth, what happens to your sense of taste, when you’re going through chemo. I was prepared for it, technically, but obviously not enough. In the weeks between surgery and chemo, someone who had been through chemotherapy had offered to speak to me, and that was one of his pieces of knowledge - that everything I ate would have this metallic quality. He offered no silver linings, which I appreciated. With my appetite being as low as it was, he told me, it wouldn’t make a huge difference that everything tasted awful.
I wasn’t ready for how much surgery would mess with my eating, let alone chemo. “The bowels are so interesting,” I was told, by a friend who is an anesthesiologist. “During surgery, at the beginning, they’re all frantically moving, and then only after sometime do they settle, and relax.” After surgery, it takes a while for the bowels to get working again.
The recovery period, soon after my first surgery, was the first time I actually had a sense of all the digestive issues I’d heard the names of, like indigestion, and gas, and constipation. It took ages for me to be able to eat normally again. Everything tasted awful, and I kept throwing up bowl after bowl of bile in multiple shades of green. Even after I got my appetite back, I had to be sure to eat “easy foods” - another concept that had never been relevant to me personally before. The medical report said I’d had a normal, uneventful recovery.
With chemo, I was told I could eat anything I wanted, as long as it was cooked, and cooked at home. Chemotherapy medically compromises your immunity to a degree that uncooked food is too much of a health risk. I could eat uncooked fruit, as long as it was thick skinned. Restaurant food was out of the question. I could also drink anything I wanted, as long as it was homemade- the only exception was brandy, which went into eggnog, which was medically encouraged because at least the milk and eggs would give me some nutrition. “Anything you feel motivated to eat, please eat.” they told me, as though it was going to be some great treat.
My father bought a juicer - for the first time in my memory, he chose the more expensive option simply because. My mother woke me up each morning with a glass of freshly made juice. And then every two hours, she’d bring me something else to drink, that wasn’t water.
Every meal was freshly made and it was invariably food I loved, or used to love. But all eating had become a chore. There were some foods I could appreciate more than others, like sautéed mushrooms, but considering how much I love food, it was barely a blip. I spent hours watching food vloggers and documentaries, feeling sorry for myself about all the flavours my taste buds and immunity couldn’t handle.
Today I’m grateful for citrus fruits. Limes or lemons didn’t taste distinct enough for me to see them as separate flavours. There was a lime tree in the garden. Whenever there was a ripe fruit, someone brought it in for me. Whenever someone went grocery shopping, they were asked to bring limes, lemons, or whatever citrus fruit they could find. They weren’t exactly readily available, but as ever, I was surrounded by undue love and care, and there was always at least one lime at the table when I wanted it.
It was the only taste I could properly handle, and relied on it to eat. The metallic taste that never left my mouth was somehow neutralized, and the tang wasn’t overwhelming. At nearly every meal, I’d cut open one lime to drink with my water, either with salt or sugar, and another lime was squeezed onto my food and salted. I’ve always enjoyed citrus flavours, but during chemo, it was a necessity.
I could only manage small portions of food at a time, so I got hungry often. For a midnight snack, my mother gave me boiled baby potatoes dressed in olive oil, salt, and lime juice. Enjoyment is a generous term, but it was often the meal I most appreciated during the day. When family friends were visiting from the US and asked what I wanted, I asked for lemon powder. A year later, over the spot on my belly, more or less, where my ovary would have been, I got a tattoo of a lemon.
In Chennai now, I could have lemons delivered to my doorstep by the kilo, if I wanted, within 30 minutes, if that. I tend to overestimate how many I’ll need, and they frequently brown. I’ve even had limes grow mouldy, and needed to throw them away. It’s obvious in retrospect, but I didn’t realize limes could grow mold. I thought the citric acid meant that they could only shrivel up and dry.
