At our church we have a weekly Prayer of Hope, when we as a congregation pray for people at home and around the world. For the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Greg and I put together a video, using movie clips from the last three years (hospitalizations, surgeries, clips of me setting up TPN at home, etc.) and the following narrative. It is a compilation of several previous writings in addition to some new. Perhaps at some point I’ll be able to post the movie file itself, but until then, here’s the narrative behind it:
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I have a love-hate relationship with food.
On the one hand, I love baking. Pies, cakes, breads, cookies—if it’s carbohydrate-loaded and induces an overdrive-shift of the olfactory senses, I’m there. Naturally, then, the holiday season is my ideal season—a welcome excuse to bake myself silly, to bask in the accolades of my co-workers and the yummy noises of my beloved husband. I LOVE to bake.
On the other hand, there’s a problem now, which has complicated not only my beloved holiday season but a large part of my social life as well: the problem being, quite simply, that I cannot eat.
Somewhere between health and now—just over three years in real time—my stomach surrendered its given duties in favor of idleness, and what a healthy stomach does in about ninety minutes, mine takes a little over sixteen hours to do. As a result, I get all of my nutrition through a permanent IV line that delivers concentrated nutrients into my bloodstream at night. I’ve had surgeries and life-threatening infections, and my husband and I have had the end-of-life talk long before most of our peers. The condition is called gastroparesis: break the word down, and you have gastro (stomach) and paresis (paralysis)—literally, “stomach paralysis.” Depending on the severity of the dysfunction and the individual digestive traits of the person afflicted, symptoms can range from mild discomfort and bloating to severe pain, nausea, vomiting, and critical malnutrition, among other complications. There are numerous causes—for me, it’s a nonspecific nervous system failure, which is progressively invading my entire digestive system in addition to other vital functions. Regardless of the cause, mealtimes serve up a hearty portion of tension and apprehension, with a side order of psychological torture.
Not being able to eat is tedious enough—think about the last time you missed a meal, and the headache or crankiness you experienced as a result. Now imagine sitting around that laden Thanksgiving table as a dozen or two friends and family members sate their healthy appetites with the most succulent festal foods known to man—and being fundamentally excluded from participation.
That’s where I live.
You see, until you’re starving (literally), it’s nearly impossible to notice how prominent food is in our lives—nutritionally, socially, emotionally. We meet our friends for lunch, we feast at Christmas and Thanksgiving, we stock candy at Halloween, we invite friends over for dinner, we take our dates to restaurants, we go out to honor birthdays and anniversaries, we have potlucks at church, we provide snacks for social events, we give plates of cookies to welcome new neighbors, we observe the Lord’s Supper. We eat to celebrate, to mourn, to socialize, to distract, to romance, to commemorate, to comfort.
Food is everywhere.
As an ex-anorexic, I knew before gastroparesis how prevalent food is in our society—but the complete elimination of eating from my daily life made this prevalence nearly excruciating. As the impact of the diagnosis set in, I began to deeply resent the central place that food occupies in our lives. I resented how my husband and I had to start putting stipulations on our social engagements to avoid the angst of watching others eat. I resented my coworkers microwaving their diet dinners six feet from my desk. I even began to resent my seven-pound cat (who eats more than I do, God bless her, and is considerably more vocal about it) and various inanimate objects (like peanut butter and salad bars and Mexican restaurants) for the audacity of their very existence.
Now, having worked in hospitals for several years, I know that from the outside of a health crisis, it’s natural to wonder, How do they get through this? How do they keep going? From the inside, it’s pretty clear: you just do. You do what the doctors tell you, you research what you can, you muddle through the emotions and facts and try to keep them relatively separated in your head, and surprise, surprise—minute by minute ticks by and you find that you’re still alive, still living, still surviving.
Not to say that sometimes it isn’t easier than others. Sometimes the minutes dance by amid friends and laughter and brief periods of non-health-related attentions. Other times they slog away on tortuous aromas of freshly-baked cookies, savory gravies, and every other olfactory assault on my pureed palate. I never know how my body will respond to such once-pleasant experiences—whether it will slip into some sense memory of taste and texture and begin the salivation process in spite of the established hopelessness of the response, or if it will remember the last time I fought the nausea—and lost. My body and I frequently travel on different (often opposing) avenues, one refusing to yield right-of-way to the other. The result is usually a T-bone collision, with a steak through my heart.
It’s virtually impossible to describe the chaos of mind–will–body caught in the blender of appetite and desire. After all, isn’t it my God-given right as a human being to enjoy my daily sustenance? It’s right there in the Lord’s Prayer—give us this day the indulgent delight of our fresh-baked, warm-from-the-oven daily bread… Straight from Scripture, I know it.
At the time the Lord’s Prayer was first spoken, sharing a meal served as a covenant-seal between two parties—not an insignificant purpose for a good dinner. And, for two thousand years, participating in the Lord’s Supper has continued to bring believers together in corporal and spiritual community while reminding us of our covenant with Jesus Christ as our Redeemer.
As a result—despite my yearnings for pizza and sushi or even a simple sandwich, and regardless of the resentment that I still tend to feel when inundated by food and eating—through the severity of my condition, God has given me a renewed appreciation for the essential role meals play in community. And while I may still indulge in the occasional pity party (which, by the way, is the only party where food is never served), I will raise my glass in celebration and thanks this holiday season.
So while you’re swimming in the sensory overload of the holidays, step back and savor it all—the sensuous aroma of golden-roasted turkey, the sweet and salty simplicity of butter and mashed potatoes, the luscious crust cradling the perfect pumpkin pie, the champagne slipping sumptuously over your tongue on its way to warming your belly. Focus on the connections around the table—the personalities, the nuances, the topics chosen for conversation. Food is more than physical nourishment—it does, indeed, nourish the soul.
