The Fat Diaries: Surviving the Hospital Food Diet
This week I’m sick, so I’m writing about that. I’ve managed to get both bronchitis and a sinus infection simultaneously. I try to stave off these yearly attacks. I drink a ton of orange juice, use those fizzy powders and tablets, and chicken dishes with a lot of chilies. If I feel I need to indulge in the evenings, I’ve actually gone out of my way to invent a somewhat beneficent cocktail. It’s two-parts tonic, one part orange juice, a dash of lime, a grapefruit-flavored “Airborne” and a tablespoon of gin. I call it an “Emer-Gin-C.” The gin probably nullifies the benefits of the Vitamin C, but I figure, what the hell?
Well it didn’t work, so I’m currently on the couch, watching George Cukor’s The Women, while drinking nauseating herbal tea and sucking on cough drops. In fact this, is one of the few times in my life where eating becomes a chore rather than a pleasure. On sick days I tend to live on cold cereal (or oatmeal, if I feel like making it), and tea. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a stomach ailment or not, I just don’t care about food. I generally only eat enough to line my stomach for the antibiotics. I might drink one cup of coffee, just to keep the caffeine headaches away and if I have to feed the kids, I order pizza. It’s one of the few times I do go to the Domino’s website, and I feel absolutely no guilt in doing so.
This wasn’t always the case. Back in my teens, I’d curl up on the sofa while I ate cookies and chips and be perfectly content. Of course, my mom waited on me back then. In college, when I was sick, it was like that scene from Little House on the Prairie where everyone had malaria. I’d flop out of bed, crawl across the floor and microwave some soup in a Tupperware bowl. I remember distinctly knocking on the door of the party boys next door, wrapped in my patchwork quilt, shivering and covered in stale sweat, and begging them for some Ramen noodles. They were actually very kind and gave me five or six packets.
Now with a house to run, I can’t crawl across the floor – my knees won’t allow it, and it leaves me exposed to unwanted children jumping on my back and demanding rides. As a grown woman, I wrap a shawl around my shoulders and “shuffle” through the day. If I make food, it’s for other people.
I think my aversion to food while being ill stems from my experiences with hospital food. I had complications with my second pregnancy and was confined to bed-rest in a hospital for seven weeks. During those weeks I ate the same meals every week. I’d get a menu showing me my options for three meals I’d get the next day. It all sounded great, like “roast beef with potatoes and green beans” and “breaded chicken cutlet with salad,” but it was terrible. Everything tasted the same, bland grey meat in a pool of water, limp soggy vegetables, dry choking potatoes or rice. Even the desert was foul, chocolate cakes that tasted of plastic, cold hard cookies and angel food cake that was probably made of foam rubber. To this day, I can’t stand angel food cake, and I recall the last four weeks of hospitalization, that instead of eating it, I’d make shapes with it like it was play-dough.
The only real food on the menu was Friday, where each of the women in the pre-natal ICU could get a personalized one-person pan pizza from Pizza Hut. I remember those horribly lonely days in the unit, where I had 2 things to look forward to. The Thursday meet-and-greet, where women with wheelchair privileges could sit and talk together for an hour, and Friday, which was pizza day. ‘Only three more days until Thursday and then it’s pizza day! Only two more days until Thursday, and then it’s pizza day!” I’d count off to myself.
After two weeks of nauseating cuisine, and when pizza day was too far away to wait, I complained about the food to the head nurse. She gave me a furtive side glance, and then bustled off to her desk. She came back holding a sheet of Xeroxed paper and said that this was the “special menu” where people who’d been in hospital for a while could order special meals. They weren’t supposed to tell people about it, unless they asked for it, which immediately made me suspicious until I looked at the contents: pizza, corndogs, hamburgers, onion rings, potato chips. It looked like the menu for a seven-year-old’s birthday party! No wonder they didn’t let out that you could get this food, it was unhealthy, greasy junk. Still, it was different, and that’s all I wanted. It was no surprise that following two days of hamburgers and french fries, I was violently ill. After weeks of bland low cholesterol, low sodium, low sugar banality, the fried meals hit my stomach like a left tackle.
By the third week, I’d given up on liking the food and only ate enough to sustain myself and keep the nurses happy. A few months after my daughter was born, and my hormones went back to normal, I gradually shed about forty-some pounds. I’m sure some of that was due to the hospital food “diet”, but I’m not exactly grateful for it. I would just as soon have kept a few extra pounds on, and not had my legs atrophy while eating rubbery meat and fighting crippling loneliness.
Ah well. I’m content at home, and I’ll be back on my feet soon. It’s nice to know that no matter how much of a hassle cold cereal is, it’s far superior to the hospital’s trout almandine. I miss the nurses though. My pillows need switching out.
