GAG.| eating life

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GAG.| eating life
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Between a walnut, lime & hard place - is eating therapy a monolithic culture?

Between a walnut, lime & hard place - is eating therapy a monolithic culture?

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Yvonne McClaren's avatar
Yvonne McClaren
Jul 09, 2023
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Between a walnut, lime & hard place - is eating therapy a monolithic culture?
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A tumour the size of a cumquat

The adage is spot on, yet the irony doesn’t escape me, the use of food images to depict the size of a tumour in head & neck cancer, yet I find evidence that this imagery is used to discuss tumour size in prostate cancer only. I am happy to be proved wrong, let me know if this is a widely spread practice to help patients understand their own particular tumour journey.

It may have just been my experience, as I have heard stories from others that wax lyrical about the treatment they received during and post treatment from their speech language pathologist. Their experience in swallow therapy was much improved to what I received, I refer to support, motivation, ideas, food advice, technique to help people get back to their version of their best food life following any number of treatments for head and neck cancer. Whether it alters depending on the type of cancer (mine was oropharyngeal) I don’t know, but it still irritates me and I have to raise the question - is the help provided in learning to swallow again in a monolithic bubble?

I had my treatment through a public system where time is money, still, it’s peoples lives we are talking about here and I suspect that due to the rarity of the cancer that the area of speech language pathology (eating therapy in my mind) is not heavily funded.

When I explain my tumours to people (selective dinner party conversation) I found myself pinning my forefinger and thumb together to depict my tumour size, followed with “about the size of a walnut”. A walnut is about 4cm and a lime 5cm (or 2 inches)
You can see what I am referring to here which is used for describing size tumour size in prostate cancer.

It’s a thing.

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