As many of you probably know, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer for women in the United States, aside from skin cancer, and according to the American Cancer Society, an estimated 192,370 new cases of invasive breast cancer are expected to be diagnosed among women in the United States this year.
In addition to Crohn’s, this is also a disease that has changed my life. On February 14, 2008, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. Fortunately for my family and me, my mom can now say she’s a one-year survivor. It was a long and difficult year, but we made it through. I could probably devote an entire week to talking about my mom and the fact that she “kicked cancer’s ass,” as we liked to say in our house, but that’s not the point of my blog. I would, however, like to take a brief vacation from all the SCD and Crohn’s discussion and talk about the cancer patient nutrition.
Earlier this week, I found this CNN article about a new cookbook from the American Cancer Society called What to Eat During Cancer Treatment. When I first read the headline I thought, “huh, well, that’s pretty cool of them.” I remember when my mom was diagnosed, she completely changed her diet, but not because of her treatments. We got a wake up call that we needed to eat better. We also didn’t have a handy cookbook of recipes to help with treatment side effects. ACS’s new cookbook features 100 recipes to help with treatment side effects such as metallic taste, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, and mouth sores.
I hope this cookbook really is as useful as ACS portraying it to be. I hope that cancer patients and their families can find some comfort food in this new cookbook. I am thankful every day that my mom is still with us and pray that every family battling with cancer can find hope, comfort, and good health.
Alyse K
