I’m still marinating in my feelings about food. I just ordered a burger meal with a friend, and it’s a bit on the spicier side, so I need water to wash it down, but I can still handle it. My whole life, people have accommodated, and laughed at, my intolerance for spice. I’ve always been the odd cousin who finds everything karam. It was a joke in the family that the only spice I could handle was with Naga pork. I was the Indian girl who couldn’t do spice.
Two years after the cancer surgery, and chemo, I needed another surgery to repair a hernia. And then because of chemo-related complications, I didn’t recover properly. All the veins in my arm were thrombosed, which I guess means that they were blackened and couldn’t be used for IV lines, or even to draw blood, but somehow I was still alive. My bowels were scarred and damaged, and I needed another surgery. Before that, I had to have a central line put in, and then another one.
A central line is a pipeline that goes directly from a major vein to your heart, so that they don’t have to keep putting in IV lines. The central line stays usable for eight days, unlike regular IV lines, which can’t be used for much more than a day or two. Central lines also have three inlets, instead of just one. If my arms had had viable veins, they’d have been in my arm. Instead, I had three tubes sticking out of my jugular vein, as well as the nasal tube drain, and another tube out the side of my stomach.
I hadn’t been able to eat for a few days before the surgery, and couldn’t eat for three weeks after. I was throwing up every 24 hours, almost to the hour. I should have got better sooner, but I wasn’t, so they had me on TPN - Total Parenteral Nutrition. My mother and I heard it as parental, but one of the junior doctors explained “Enteral is through the mouth, so this is para-enteral”.
It was a giant bag of this white solution, which had the total i.e. the T in TPN, nutritional value I needed. The bag was attached to one of the tubes in the central line, and I swear it tasted like artificial milk. I know it doesn’t make sense that I could taste it. Maybe it’s that I hadn’t eaten for so long, or that the giant white bag was giving my brain some much-needed flavour cues.
After you stop eating for as long as I had, your tastebuds reset, in a manner of speaking. You can do this voluntarily, by depriving yourself of flavour for a while, including salt. Your sensitivity to different flavours shoots up, and your likes and dislikes shift, sometimes rather significantly. Apparently, a lot of your sense of taste, and your preferences, are learned through habit. It turns out, a lot of what I thought I enjoyed, I’d mostly just talked myself into enjoying, like sugar.
Today I’m grateful for spices. After the three week resetting period, when I could finally eat again, I became appreciative of foods and textures I’d barely tolerated. After spending so much time thinking I wouldn’t be able to eat again, even the dry hospital cafeteria vadai felt remarkable. I lost my tolerance for sweet things. I still love dessert, but I can’t imagine consuming the amount of sugar I used to. I began enjoying spice. The first time I tried to eat real food after they took me off TPN, I tried clear chicken soup, and all I could taste was the salt. My taste buds were still especially sensitive, so I couldn’t handle a whole lot of it, but I found myself seeking it out. I’ve begun to appreciate the flavours of spices rather than just tasting general heat, and needing to drown it out with water.
