My mother has been in the hospital twice in as many weeks, when she went in for the last stay things looked fairly bad.  Her cancer has progressed to the point where a lot of fluid is building up on her abdomen, and ended up causing her to be vomiting pretty continually and unable to eat consistently for more than a month.  They’ve put a shunt in her so she can drain the fluid herself, and she’s gradually improving, but after vomiting for a month it is hard to get back in the swing of eating normally. She’s able to keep some food down now, but she’s still having some trouble, especially at night.

The first thing she was able to keep down was Dean’s Country Fresh Orange Pops:

She’d started eating almost entirely organic and almost entirely abstaining from sugar after her initial surgery, so the fact that that it was an amalgam of discount frozen chemicals that ended up helping her through, and especially the fact that she came to love them, is telling. I’ve tried to track down somewhere to buy them retail, with the help of friends, but have not had any luck so far.

The first surgery had been hard, especially as it had occurred only a few days after she was diagnosed.  (They ended up removing something like 6 lbs. of tissue from her, without anesthetic as she ‘didn’t want to feel weird’). But after she had ended up making what seemed to be an almost complete recovery and a complete relapse, it became kind of normal, and easier.