Catering for nausea

One of my best friends is undergoing chemo now as well so I thought it might be useful to put a couple of ideas up.

One of the big problems of chemo is nausea. The doctors will give you various anti nausea tablets, tuned to you and your treatment. Some of these have unpleasant side effects, and so you get other tablets to treat the side effects, and so on. Its all a balance.

I found I could  reduce the effects of nausea a bit by eating little and often, and snacking every few minutes with very small things. Things that worked for me were, salted roasted peanuts, crisps, individually packaged plain biscuits, such as the coffee biscuits shown in the photo. Burnt toast is good too - the carbon seems to absorb uggh in my stomach. The other thing is sipping drinks - whatever type works for you. I found Ribena (black currant drink) was the best, or pasteurised / long life fruit drinks through a straw. (I tend to be very nuetropoenic as well, so with no immune system the indiviudaul packaging and pasteurised stuff is important)

If you get constipation as a side effect, then eating prunes and Scots Porridge Oats helped to reduce the need for tablets to sort that out. Basically lots more fibre than you would normally have
And sitting up is important. If you lie down too much you can get refluxes which is not nice and can cause nasty problems to your throat as acids from your stomach are very strong.