Throughout it all, Brad’s diet changed several times depending on his blood work results and how he felt. After the eight days of cannabis oil and Brad was swallowing chicken again, the first thing I did was figure out how best to get nutrition into Brad with the least amount of carbs and with the least amount of stress (Some foods stuck in his esophagus and it always effected him mentally.) When food stuck, I could see the worried look on his face that it was coming back. I kept re-assuring him it was just a shriveled up tumor, kinda looks like a piece of cauliflower. We made sure celery was chopped finely. Anything stringy would cause an issue. After many months, I figured out a trick that worked brilliantly to get food to go down smoothly. I realized the cause of Brad’s “back ups”. Because his saliva glands  kicked into gear and having the obstruction, the food and saliva would back up his esophagus. What we did to avoid this was have Brad eat a strawberry or blueberry before dinner. This way, his saliva glands went nuts. He would wait about 5 minutes before eating. At this stage, his saliva glands had settled down and he had much less back up’s. If he did have any  food catch to the mass, I’d pat his back and rub his front by the mass, then rub his back and pat his front until it loosened up and went down. 

 

With valuable information coming from our Oncology Nurse friend, we set out to make a morning shake, packed with protein, low in carbs. By the time Brad walked out the door to work, he already had around 50g of protein in his system. We used raw eggs as an added booster, although I cannot recommend this for anyone else. The worry is Salmonella food poisoning  because chemo kills the immune system, in many cases. We learned to only use Pasteurized eggs and kept a close eye on Brad’s blood work to make sure his immune system was in good order. The baby blood cells are what we concentrated on. As long as those baby cells were being produced in an acceptable manner, Brad felt comfortable to use raw eggs. We started him with 2 eggs. The chemo kept his protein low so we bumped up and then up again, to 4 raw eggs in the shake. This was when Brad began to say he felt the best he had, since he was 15 years old.