Hospital Meals - Part 2 - After Surgery

Lunch (May 12th) This was the first food I ate after the surgery. It was served as lunch about 10 hours after I got out of the operation room. I was almost starving to death then, so I gobbled everything up right away. What's in the big white bowl was thin rice gruel, but I had no idea what that yellow pudding-like thing in the red bowl was. (It was a little sweet, but not as smooth as pudding...) The drink in the white mug was probably some kind of probiotic drink. Since I had a great appetite then, I thought I would enjoy all the meals for the rest of my stay there. Buy I was wrong -- definitely wrong. They gave me rice porridge with grilled fish, nikujaga (simmered meat and potatoes) and some vegetable for dinner on the 12th (no photo). Because I was afraid of starving in the middle of the night, I ate them all. My colleague was there then, and I had to make a great effort to force myself to eat and carry on conversation at the same time. But still, the meal didn’t taste too terrible. Later that night, I thought about having some of my oatmeal raisin cookies, but as soon as I opened the can, the smell of spices knocked me down! After that, I never opened the can until I came back to my apartment. Breakfast and lunch (May 13th) Now, these two photos still give me cold sweat when I see them. For the first time in my life, eating meals was a hardship for me. No, it's not that the quality of the meals got worse all the sudden. I guess it was that my sense of taste was a little messed up after the surgery. It was the 13th when I had a real hard time. I knew their miso soup was thick, but that morning it tasted unbelievably salty. And I felt that the bamboo shoots were challengingly stringy and the simmered short-necked clams tasted weird with an unpleasant (to me) smell of ginger. I felt cold sweat on my back during my breakfast. But the lunch was even more challenging. The smell of chicken and burdock – the combination I usually love – almost made me nauseate. And the vinegared dish tasted so super-sour that I thought it might make a hole in my stomach. It was strange… I was undoubtedly hungry. I had a very good appetite, because my intestines already started functioning normally early in the morning on the day after the surgery. But eating was such a hard work and again I was soaked in a cold sweat while eating. Stringy burdock, stringy bamboo shoots (again) and stringy asparagus with dressing which tasted unbelievably sour to me…! Seriously, I got traumatized. It’ll take some time for me to be able to enjoy this simmered dish (chikuzen-ni?) again. But you know what? I ate them all -- just to convince myself that I had a lot of guts. ;) Oh, BTW, you may not know this because my posts on this hospital experience haven't gotten to that part yet, but I already went back to work on the 21st (last Monday.) And I'm still alive (though a couple of problems were waiting for me with their arms wide open). :) Categories: Miscellaneous