The up side of nausea

If you’re sick enough, doctors advise you to eat anything you can – literally anything. Sadly, at that point there’s generally very little you can even look at without feeling ill.

But then you improve a bit. And a bit more. And then comes the shining day when chocolate goes back on the list of things you can eat.

From that point on, you’re in a grey area. At some point, you need to focus on health rather than just “Whatever doesn’t make me nauseous today”.

So yesterday, having dreamt (literally and metaphorically) about junk food bingeing for three months, I celebrated the impending end of the grey area by eating about 70 grams of chocolate*.

As you may have gathered, I am improving – so there’s still hope I’ll be well before January. But if that does happen, then I’ll be eating healthily (oh, the horror). To be fair, I am actually eating pretty well at the moment (excluding green vegetables, which are still pretty much impossible to eat without a lengthy recovery time) – and this week I gained 0.8 of a kilo, which is about what I was hoping for (it means I’m gaining roughly what I should, thus proving that I’m not over-eating).

In spectacularly exciting news, I AM reducing my medicine (very very carefully), I’m able to drive to work and home again (with careful planning), and – wonder of wonders – I managed to grocery shop a little yesterday (very impressive because it means being around food AND standing up for more than three seconds at a time), and I’m now doing two minutes of extremely slow riding on my exercise bike most days.

Nausea still runs my life, but I usually have two or three hours to myself each day. And I find out in eight days whether I’m having a boy or a girl!

*And yes, it made me nauseous. But not as nauseous as what I would consider a “true” binge – which could be as much as half a kilo of chocolate and lollies in a day. Hopefully I won’t do that again for a good long while. Or, possibly, never.