In Between Meals

I am a person who loves to eat. I am sure many people will be able to relate to me and my love for food. By love I don’t mean eating endlessly anything and everything. In that aspect I am a restricted eater, but I really look forward to my meals in the day; from breakfast to lunch and from lunch to dinner. And what upsets me many times is when I have to stay hungry (past my usual meal time) due to meeting, phone calls, travel, etc. I try and completely avoid such a thing from happening.

Lately my love for food had to go through real hard and testing times. I used to get strange kind of mouth ulcers that replicate and cover the whole mouth including the palates, gums, cheeks every possible inch inside the mouth. Then they would itch and pain all through the day. First I could not eat anything hard, and then as they grew I could not eat anything at all. The pain and itch was immense. I felt as if I had mouth cancer. I started getting these ulcers every month for 5-6 days, and then twice a month. I visited many doctors from ENT, to dentist, to gastrology department head, to respiratory department head, but all in vain. Every doctoer gave medicines – mainly vitamins, but no one knew why it was happening. These medicines had absolutely no effect. The horrifying part was when even after a week, they did not reduce, and I lost the sense of taste completely! Not even salt. And drinking water was so painful that I preferred staying thirsty. After a few days of starving, one night I applied local anesthesia (used by dentists) all around in my mouth, and once everything went numb, I swallowed lots and lots of food. Tears rolled down my cheeks and my husband was crying even more than me. Eventually it got over on its own, but re-occurred again in a few days. I was helpless, and taking off from work did not sound like an idea, so days passed by from home to work to home, and I stopped looking forward to meal times. I survived on curd rice, and sometimes idli. I have gone through this for almost one year now. And though it hasn’t come up since almost a month now, I cross my fingers, and eat my meals. Now food is tastier and more precious than ever before. I like to enter kitchen just to smell masalas. I eat each meal, thinking I should enjoy it for as long as I can taste…….