Food is fuel so don't eat in the hospital

The title pretty much sum's it up.  Food is fuel and although you never feel like eating you have to so that you don't wilt and fall my the waste side, and there is nothing worse than trying to have a serious conversation with a medical professional and your stomach makes a loud grunt because it hasn't been fed.

So my first comment was when we had our first mealtime experience, because lets face it when you have to guess what meat is in a pie it becomes an experience, was I would like to shoot the person who agrees to put this crap out every day.

Breakfast the most important meal of the day the one that will start you off on your way with what ever you have to face that day.  Not so much the case if you eat in the canteen.  The cooked part of it sits under hot lamps for a good hour so if your not there first thing when those doors open you go from already slightly firm and bouncy food, to it being like a cutting into a concrete slap and eggs that rubbery the only use for them is to bounce them on the floor.  The scrambled egg, an easy pretty low cost food and certainly extra easy to make.  So why when I am stood staring at the egg's under the hot lamp and wondering if they are in fact real eggs, never before have I seen scrabbled egg be cut like a cake and it in fact stay in that shape until it reaches the plate, where it then takes to just wobbling. So it is easy to see why I vowed to stay away from the eggs.  There was one occasion when I went for breakfast and I saw a veggie sausage, great I thought that's for me I know what I'm getting with that.  i was feeling pretty pleased with myself that I was able to enjoy a roll at breakfast time that wasn't going to weigh me down and sit in my stomach like a led balloon for the rest of the day, or bung me up for a week.  It was not to last, I went in on a Saturday morning looking forward to my veggie delight only to be told that they don't do them at weekends.  What am I hearing this right, so my natural reply was, so do all the vegetarians only come to the hospital Monday to Friday or do they just starve at weekends, the blank expression that was staring back answered my question.
Stick to cereal it's easy and you know what you are getting.

Lunch is always a good time to have a light snack just to top you up for an afternoon of sitting in a roasting hot ward or side room, Wrong what you do in fact get offered is more cooked delights from the cooks that bought you the breakfast that should come with a warning not to go swimming after eating.  If you stick to the bread items your pretty safe although after a few weeks of eating bread for lunch you think I know I will try the baked spud.  Surely they can get that right.  Wrong again, never before have I cut open a baked potato to find nothing but skin.  Yes that's right it's been cooked that long that the potato has in fact pissed off and left, I wanted to ask how they have managed that. In my eyes that has to be a pretty skilled cook to be able to do that.  So what you are in fact left with is a filling that you have chosen from the fridge(tuna, cheese or coleslaw) and a hard over cooked jacket skin, thank frankly looks like an 90 year old skin that has spent all its life in the sun baking.  If that doesn't scream delicious then i don't know what does.

Dinner the meal to end the day with, the one that says right its the last meal of the day lets enjoy and fill your tummy up so your left feeling content and ready for an easy evening.  Yes you guessed it Wrong again.  Now this is where the problems really start because all the sandwiches and bread products have usually gone so you are left with cakes or yip more cooked delights.  Ok so I am pinning my hopes on that either the staff have had a change over or I am just that hungry i would eat anything even my own arm right now.  So it's a gamble do we go for the fish, the curry or the pies.  Tough choices and I know that you are sitting there now picking one that you would eat.  Ok so the curry looks pretty good but the rice not so much, ok not a problem we could have them with chips that look like that they have been sitting there since lunch time. It's still an option not to be ruled out.  Pie ok we could have that with beans.  The beans would soften the pastry that looks like you could probably cut steel with, but the next question is, what is in the pie, if anything at all because lets face it if a jacket can be empty whats to say the pie filling has gone the same way.  The fish has already been ruled out just by the sheer fact that it looks that stiff I could in fact (and actually did one day) pick in up by one end and hold it out straight.  Ok so curry for me and pie and beans for Lee.  As we sat down to the tasty delights Lee is looking forward to having a scotch pie.  But wait what is the meat inside its not beef mince, its not even steak mince like you make think. Nope we are told that it is in fact turkey.  Sadly the gamble of having pie didn't pay off but at least the beans looked and tasted like beans.  The curry in fact wasn't as bad as first thought but did leave a long and very lasting after taste, in that every time i burped it was like eating all over again, which in Lee's eyes was getting your moneys worth.

What we did find was that over the course of all our hospital visits and stays that there was no hope of the food becoming any better or any less lighter to eat.  So we had to find a way to help our digestive system out. So we had to stay away from anything that looked like it was going to bung you up for a week, not to have too much of the coffee as you could not only stand a spoon up in it, it would keep you awake for days if you have too much and drink plenty water, and should your stomach need a helping hand in trying to rid itself of all the led that you have eaten, eat a whole bag of cheap mint imperials as that will sort you out.

What I did find really shocking is that the stuff served in the canteen was also served in the wards. No wonder the kids that were on the wards weren't putting on any weight, it was because they didn't eat.  How are children that need to get better and heal do that on the stuff served to them, most of the kids we met on the first stay would live off of yogurts, that's not great.  I would love to get the people who agree to put the food out and make them eat the three meals a day for a month and see how they feel after it.  Bet they wouldn't be so happy to put it out then.  Lets go one better lets get the government to eat the food for three months three times a day and see how smug they would be then.  The food is only good to serve in prison and I would bet any money that the food in a prison is better than that of a sick kids hospital.

Other than a source of entertainment to de-stress i can say that I found no nutritional, value in anything I ate there other than the fruit, and to be honest even that looked a bit sad.
I do think that the staff that work on the till there should be paid slightly more money as they have to stand there day to day a bite their tongue surely.  I could never work there I would be forever telling people not to put that shit any where near their mouth.

There was a plus side to the canteen we did get to meet and talk to some really lovely people and some amazing kids, and hear some incredible story's that would give you some hope and always a sense that maybe our journey wasn't as bad as we thought it was.