In With the New!

While most of us have New Year's goals about eating less or losing weight, Brendan's goals (or our goals for Brendan) are to gain weight and eat more.  Today Brendan began eating three times a day.  Chewing AND swallowing.  He resisted, he complained, he tried to sneak off, but in the end he ate.  Only a few bites each time, but it was a start.

(Brendan's neck and shoulders after radiation.  He has quite a tan on his neck and shoulders with skin peeling.  I was glad he didn't end up with blisters and "sunburn."  I talked with others who really had skin problems during radiation.)

 Knowing just what to feed Brendan has been real challenge.  When he was only able to tolerate a small amount in his stomach, we had to think carefully about what to pump into him.  Now that he can tolerate more, and keep most of it down, we can pump more nutrients into him.  And we see a big difference in his strength and energy levels.

Brendan with his pole (which he named "A Pain")

 At first, we just fed him the small containers of Nutren Jr. "formula" and dripped it into him slowly.  Now, we can pump a lot more into him -- and do it faster.  We've added more bottles of Ensure during the day (and sometimes night) and usually add probiotics into the mix.  Green drink adds a few extra vitamins too.

This past week my brother-in-law, Rob, (a nutritional biochemist who teaches Masters level nutrition  classes at Logan College in St. Louis), crunched Brendan's weight numbers and nutrition needs and came up with an additional amount of protein we needed to feed Brendan to optimize weight gain.  Within the week, Brendan had gained two pounds.  He also informed us we needed to be giving him electrolytes (Pedialyte, not Gatorade) to optimize hydration.  Since then, I've actually seen Brendan's eyes glisten with moisture again.

We still feed him about 10 hours each night, and have upped his amounts from 900 ml to about 1400 ml.   Every once in a while we get too ambitious and feed him too much too fast, then up it all comes.

All of this reminds me each day how little we know.  It's so hard to want to help Brendan perfectly, but we just don't know enough to do it.  Each day we learn a little more.  We've been blessed by good people put in our path that help us learn new things and how to do them better.  (By the time Brendan is done with treatment, we just might be getting this down!)  But for now, we just keep learning and doing our best.