I just had far too much for my breakfast, I fell for an offer on hot cross buns and landed up buying two packs rather than one, nothing unusual there for any shopper, but I never throw food out until there is no other choice. There were six buns that had to be eaten today, I know that Adam will without a fight happily eat three for his breakfast, so I ate the other three, one bun to many. Now I feel as though I have just eaten a huge overly rich three-course meal and my insides are telling me so, why is it I can one day eat two, but try three and I want to throw-up? There is such a fine line between comfort and wanting to explode and not just when I try to eat hot cross buns. When you do nothing, well you don’t need that much to eat and if you eat too much, well the weight piles on as I already know, slowly I have been eating less and less, my appetite has diminished along with my mobility, but the scales still tell me I am eating too much. I try to not eat too much at any one time, I have become more of a grazer than a feaster, so I am not surprised that now feel over full.

Food to me isn’t something I am over bothered by, I know that sounds an odd thing for anyone to say, but I have been the same right through my adult life, unless I am really tempted by what is on offer, I just don’t want to eat. I will and always have been happy to live on the exact same diet day in day out for months without even thinking about it. Adam doesn’t like it one bit and has always done his best to try and get me to eat the foods he likes, but there appears to be a golden rule, if he likes it, I wouldn’t touch it. Food has to be either lushes or decadent for my interest to be sparked, I am not the type of person who is tempted by normal everyday foods, my idea of a nightmare meal would be something like steak or beef burger and chips, or even a curry, in fact, anything else that I would call average British fare. Add on all the issues that food causes me, the choking and then the digestive problems, well, food is just easier to be kept simple and little. For me to be tempted to eat every meal on every day, I would have to be moved into a five-star hotel with a Michelin chef cooking every meal for me, but even then I would be asking for small portions. The odd thing is that I know without even trying it that I would very quickly get fed up of even the best foods and would start requesting my mono meals of choice. It appears that like everything else that lives alongside chronic illness, appetite becomes something that is under a microscope and our likes and dislikes are all amplified. For some reason when your entire body is working against you, it can also feel as though the outside world is doing exactly the same thing, what is meant by Adam as a caring gesture, like the bars of chocolate he kept buying me, somehow turn into some kind of challenge, I feel as though I am being forced into eating them to keep him happy. I eventually had to ask him to buy no more of it as I didn’t like it that much or want it, I thought the fact it took me weeks to eat one bar might be enough for him to get the message, but the truth never reached him and had to be spelled out.

When I found that porridge was suddenly making me feel sick when I ate it, I had to find something else, so I tried to eat yoghurt every morning, a month and a half on and it too is making me feel sick. It has become something I was having to force myself into eating, hence the not so hot idea of the hot cross buns. When breakfast started to be a meal with too many problems, I thought that maybe it might be better to have something around 4pm instead. I started having soup, which apart from one particular type, has been fine so far, but I don’t hold out much hope in continuing it as I am now starting to feel sick in the early evening, so badly the other night that I had to ask Adam to fetch me an anti-nausea tablet as I didn’t dare move just in case. Other than lunch, everything that I eat these days seems to land up making me feel sick, I can only guess that it has something to do with what is going on in my guts, but it does also make me just a bit angry. This is now the third time that directly or indirectly, my PRMS has turned food into an issue, I have either through luck, changes in my PRMS or changes in my lifestyle, managed the other two and been able to return to not a normal pattern of eating, but at least one that has allowed me to be able to eat enough to live. Three times I have found myself in the position where I can’t eat and every single one of them has one thing in common, food makes me feel sick. To date, the doctors have been of absolutely no use other than to put a gastric nasal tube down my throat for three years. I eventually got rid of it once I was housebound, not having the stress of getting ready to go out, leaving the house and being in the office, meant that I started to find food that bit easier, but I have never since then been able to eat normally, it has had to remain small amounts when my body can take it. Now I once again find myself facing an appetite that just doesn’t want food and stomach that makes me feel nauseous when I do force it to take something.

In all it has to be about 10 years since I was actually able to eat a normal diet, 10 years of picking at this or that, trying to find some way through the mess that is my body. I know it has to be fed but what no one has been able to tell me is how to do so without it either wanting to come back up or getting stuck inside me. After 10 years you would think that I am used to it, well in many ways I am, but I am also incredibly fed up with it all as well. From the outside, it might appear that it is phasic, it’s not, it’s just it has been going on so long that I don’t really talk about it, but I do admit that like everything else from body pain to diaphragm spasms, the mess with my guts seems to be making it worse and I am spending more and more time feeling sick, regardless of portion control. I know that nausea is part of MS, but the link to the amount eaten isn’t something that I can find anywhere.

Read my blog from 2 years ago today – 28/03/13 – Navigating help > http://bit.ly/10U1ZXp

Today is the big day, Teressa will be married this afternoon! Despite all the changes in date and the whole trauma of actually getting John here, we have made it to the long awaited wedding. There are still several hours to get through before I log on to the live stream so it is a case of keeping busy….