Day 25: Spoons

By now you all have an idea how I am struggling with food and feeding myself.  Monday will make 4 weeks of a liquid diet and I have so far manged to keep my weight loss to 14 lbs.  I have started to use a calorie counter to count up my calories and make sure I am eating enough....a complete reversal of what I was doing 3 years ago! With working this week I have only managed to eat about 800 calories a day. This is not a healthy a number for any adult, never mind one who is trying to heal nice strong bones!  I know this, but it is a struggle to eat when I can only consume thinner liquids through a cup or straw and moderately thick liquids with the use of a syringe. (Not to mention how nothing liquified looks appetizing!)

But today I received an order from amazon.com that marks a win in my eating column!  I have tried to find spoons that would enable me to fit something between the small opening I can make in my mouth  without much success (see previous entry on Eggs).  A normal teaspoon is too wide and too deep to fit into my mouth.  The first baby spoons I bought were coated in rubber making them too deep to fit into the opening.  The toddler spoons I bought were shallow, but too wide to fit between the bands on my teeth.  So I spent some time scouring amazon.com for something that might work.  I couldn't find any simplified baby spoons (crazy!), so I thought of gellato spoons (these you can order in packs of 500 and will ship in 4-5 weeks...too late for me, but might work for someone who thought ahead!) and from there I found Espresso Paddles! The product reviewers actually commented that they were even smaller in person...perfect!  You can see in the picture below that they really are small and shallow, not much too them at all.  BUT with those "paddles" I just ate some hummus and then a little mashed avocado! Both hummus and avocado were sticky enough that I could turn the paddle upside-down in my mouth so that I could drop the food into/use my tongue to eat (remember I have a splint covering the roof of my mouth immediately behind my teeth).  Its still slow going, but oh to eat something semi-solid!

Paddle, Baby Spoon, Toddler Spoon, & Normal Teaspoon

Monday is my 4-week follow-up with Dr. M. and I have a couple of hopes:
#1 Is that I am healing up appropriately (obviously)
#2  I am really hoping he lets me take these bands off for at least a few hours per day to eat (I'm really all about the food)

Day 25

#3 I'm also curious to hear what he says about the swelling around the middle of my face and when it typically resolves.  I no longer see a complete stranger when I look in the mirror, but I still look funny to myself and I feel just a bit surprised when I catch my own reflection and it's not quite right to me.