Dealing With Side Effects from Chemo

Side Effect -- Metallic taste in mouth

You know when you eat ice cream with a metal spoon?  After a while the metal spoon gets really cold.  You know how that spoon tastes when it's really cold?  That's what everything tastes like when you're going through chemo.  Here are a few ideas to help with that:

• Use plastic utensils -- Everything already tastes like metal.  Metal utensils just make it worse.  Use plastic utensils, even when eating out.  I've found that the Berkley and Jensen brand at BJ's are pretty sturdy.  If you must use metal utensils, try to be very careful about taking the food off of the fork or spoon without the fork or spoon touching your tongue. 
• Use Biotene mouth rinse -- This is okay for when you're at home, but when you're out, it's not really a viable option. What works best for me are:
• Chick-fil-A mints -- I happened upon this quite by accident.  I work at a high school, and our local Chick-fil-A sometimes provides breakfast or lunch for the staff once or twice per year.  One of these times was not long after I had began chemo treatments.  There is always one of their signatures mints in the box breakfasts/lunches.  It came as quite a pleasant surprise when I found out that these mints not only curb the metallic taste, but actually takes it away for awhile.  Heaven.  The wonderful coworkers sitting at my table gave me theirs when I told them.  So nice ... and the niceness snowballed from there.  Here's the story:
• My dear husband stopped at our local Chick-fil-A on his way home from work one night, hoping to be able to buy some for me.  Here's the original post on my personal facebook page (it's set to public so you can see it even if we're not facebook friends), with what happened.  I was amazed at that kindness.  Fast forward to one year later, and that original post shows up on my facebook memories.  Of course I re-shared.  Today, the owner of our local Chick-fil-A stopped by my house.  Yes, I said he came to my house, bearing gifts.  He brought to me a box of 1,000 mints.  Is that not amazing?!  He said that it's a small thing that he can do, but to me, it's huge.  Click here to see the post on my blog's facebook page.  I will be sharing these with other cancer patients at the infusion center when I go next week.  I'm sure they'll help them as much as they've helped me.  Huge shout out to Chick-fil-A Waldorf, and Ken Weikel.

I hope that these tips help you through your chemo treatments.  More to come....