My boyfriend, age 63, had his Whipple surgery on 7 Sept at M D
Anderson Cancer Center in Houston TX, part of the Univ. of Texas group
of hospitals. They are the top rated cancer hospital in the U S from
U S News and World Reports Cancer treatment study. Everything there is
state of the art,from the radiation equipment, right through having
Cyberknife capability if it's needed. They do lots and lots of
Whipples there, a reassuring fact with an operation this complicated.
He
saw Dr. Gauri Varadachary initially and his surgeon was Dr. Jeffrey E.
Lee. We couldn't have wanted better doctors, staff, or hospital for
this. Everyone we dealt with had a marvelous can-do attitude that never
sounded like giving up.
He was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma on
the head of the pancreas in May 2007. He had 5 weeks of chemo and
radiation, then a little over a month to recover, then the Whipple.
The recovery was difficult, almost 2 weeks in the hospital and 2 months
of packing an open incision with retention sutures. He was a difficult
and often uncooperative patient. Had been incredibly healthy and
running 5 miles a day, taking no meds at all , when diagnosed. I had
some advice early on from a friend's wife who is helping her husband
deal with multiple cancers thought to be from Agent Orange exposure
during the Vietnam War. His wife told me to that my boyfriend would
feel lousy and wouldn't want to eat and that my "job" was to nag, push,
pull, coerce, and do anything I had to do to get him to eat. I took her
at her word. Along the way, I yelled, cried, begged, threatened,
walked out, came back and started again, but we got through it. I can
tell you it was hard on both of us, but he is doing well now, eats
normally ...with digestive enzymes...and has minimal problems. Enjoys
his beer again and has started to enjoy salads and tomatoes again.
I made heavy use of unflavored high protein whey powder. I used it in
scrambled eggs, made french toast, pancakes, and waffles with it added
to the batter, and protein shakes and smoothies, etc. He refused to
drink Ensure or Instant Breakfast (as I said, a difficult patient). It
was necessary to use the protein poweder because the things that were
high protein were not things that he felt like eating, so I made them
high in protein with the powder when I could. You can buy this at most
health food stores. There are flavored varieties also, but I found
the unflavored most useful. I found the following site very helpful in
finding out how much nutrition/protein, fat, etc was in foods:
http://www.calorieking.com. You don't have to join to look up foods
and I used it all the time. They even have the food content for
restaurants and fast food places, like Subway and McDonalds. The
Whipple is a big incision and the body needs lots of protein to build
the tissue to fill in that missing tissue and heal the incision. The
nutritionist told us that our body prioritizes where it uses the
protein first and the first thing it uses it for is to keep your organs
and brain and heart operating. If it has protein left over it uses it
to build the tissue to fill in the incision...so you need lots of
protein to give it the extra it needs. They wanted him to try for at
least 80 protein grams a day and I aimed for 100-120. Some days I made
it, some days I didn't. I also recommend a food scale to weigh the
portions...makes it much easier to assess how much protein you are
getting into them.
Good luck to you. My thoughts are with you in this difficult time.
Donna in FL