Lung cancer has become the number one killer of tumors in China. Many families are concerned and anxious about how patients should eat well after surgery?
Usually, lung cancer surgery does not go through the digestive tract, so it does not damage the digestive tract, so theoretically, you can eat normally on the first day after surgery. The first day after surgery, theoretically, you can eat normally, but there are some rules about how and what to eat.
One week after surgery: Avoid greasy food and chicken soup and fatty meat!
After a week of surgery, it’s important to avoid the fatty chicken soup.
One week after surgery, the most important thing is to avoid grease! The most important thing is to avoid grease! The most important thing is to avoid grease! (The important thing to say three times.)
The “no greasy” part is mainly related to the surgery. This starts with the surgical procedure.
During surgery, the surgeon performs a mediastinal and hilar lymph node dissection, which simply means clearing all the lymph node areas in the metastatic pathway of the tumor, with the goal of removing all the possible metastatic lesions. The company’s main goal is to provide the best possible service to its customers, and to provide them with the best possible service.
Lymph node dissection, although the standard procedure for lung cancer surgery, has some complicating side effects. The lymph node wound can leak lymphatic fluid outward because the tiny lymphatic vessels cannot be clamped shut and have to close on their own after surgery. During this period, if you eat a lot of fatty foods, such as thick soups and fatty meats, the oil will flush out the newly closed lymphatic vessels, and the lymphatic fluid will leak out into the chest cavity, resulting in a large amount of milky white pleural fluid, which doctors call “celiac disease,” requiring drainage and increasing discomfort.
So, in order to reduce postoperative drainage and remove the drainage tube as early as possible, surgeons usually advise against eating greasy foods. After 3 or 5 days, when the lymphatic vessels are completely closed, you can eat chicken soup, rib soup, etc., as appropriate, and if there is still no problem, then the “alarm” is lifted and you don’t need to avoid eating.
Some of you may ask, “My old man had lung cancer surgery, too, so how come we didn’t hear about this?
Two reasons. One is that the healing of the lymphatic vessels varies greatly from person to person, and if the section of the lymphatic vessel is cauterized more thoroughly during surgery, even if you eat greasy food, you won’t have any problems;
Second, the degree of lymph node dissection may vary from patient to patient, and many patients in the early stages do not need extensive dissection, so even with a greasy diet, there will not be much exudation.
After 1 week post-op: you can basically eat normally, and after January you can eat normally!
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At this time of the week after surgery, patients are usually discharged home. Many patients and families start to worry: without the doctor’s guidance, what exactly can we eat and what can we not eat?
So when you open a search engine, there are many different opinions on the internet, and the more you look, the more scary and interesting it becomes.
In fact, lung cancer surgery does not damage the digestive tract, so you eat normally right after surgery. The first thing you can do is to eat something that is easy to digest, such as porridge, noodles, etc. After you can move around on the floor and breathe normally, you can gradually increase the type and total amount of food you eat, instead of eating porridge every day.
This means that during this time, you can eat normally, except for a little less greasy food.
When we wait until 1 month after the surgery, we will advise the patient to live as if he or she were a normal person, rather than making a special food for the patient alone.
On the one hand, there are no more contraindications to eating at this time, and on the other hand, allowing patients to think of themselves as a normal person from the point of view of eating is more helpful for patients to psychologically overcome their fear of tumors and return to a normal life as soon as possible.
How can I adjust my diet when I have to undergo chemotherapy after surgery?
The mechanism of chemotherapy is actually very simple, it is to feed the body a cytotoxic type of drug, referred to as a poison, to make those most active tumor cells apoptotic.
But at the same time, what kind of normal tissues and organs are most vulnerable to damage? The most important thing is that it is the “front-line workers” who work the hardest every day, such as the epithelial cells of the gastrointestinal mucosa (vomiting), the scalp cells (hair loss), and the bone marrow cells (lowered white blood cells, anemia, etc.), so chemotherapy is a way to hurt the enemy 10,000 and hurt yourself 8,000.
Then we understand that only if our own reserve army is very adequate, we won’t
Fear that chemotherapy will be fatal to the body. We can replenish the body with a constant reserve army through nutritional supplements, and as long as the cancer cells die faster than normal cells, the battle is won.
But some patients are too weak precisely because they don’t care about nutrition and they eat too much, and we are supposed to follow a cycle of chemotherapy every 21 days, but because the patient’s body can’t take it anymore, it makes the cycle fall off helplessly, which greatly affects the effectiveness of chemotherapy.
Many patients are aware of this and their families are also taking sea cucumber and abalone supplements, but many times the more they “supplement” the thinner they get, so what is going on?
In fact, the body absorbs the three major nutrients in order to absorb energy and protein, which can then be used as raw material and energy as fuel to synthesize the nutrients it needs. So we want to minimize the amount of protein that is broken down for energy consumption.
Let’s say we want to cook a dish, roast pancetta, and suddenly we find that we don’t have enough gas, so we have to take out half of the pancetta to make oil for the fire and the other half to make a dish to eat. This is an invisible loss of half of the protein for nothing.
So, if patients just eat a lot of protein, it will affect the absorption effect and also increase the metabolic burden on the liver and kidneys.
The correct approach is to ensure adequate intake of energy provided by staple foods, followed by a reasonable amount of high-quality protein, such as fish, shrimp, chicken, and beans.
In addition, if a patient vomits during chemotherapy and has trouble eating, you can change the frequency of eating, try to eat fewer meals, and prepare more fresh-smelling and easily digestible foods to facilitate eating. Many patients’ families may prepare a thermos cup with the right temperature of porridge, etc., to facilitate the necessary additions between meals.
If the patient continues to lose weight, he or she may also be prescribed the appropriate protein-based supplement in the nutrition department as a supplement.
What are some of the things to keep in mind for patients undergoing radiation therapy for lung cancer?
Patients with lung cancer who are undergoing radiation therapy should be aware of the following
The most common adverse effects of radiation therapy for patients with lung cancer are radiation esophagitis and radiation pneumonia because the radiation field often passes through the patient’s chest cavity.
Radiation pneumonia, a common complication that can occur during or after radiation therapy, is progressive dyspnea with fever.
In Chinese medicine, the lung is a delicate organ, which is true from a Western perspective. The lungs are not only afraid of dryness, but also of moisture, and are very sensitive to radiation. Radiation can cause sterile inflammation, and although there is no invasion of bacteria or viruses, there is a reaction of damage and repair inside the cells, causing a large number of inflammatory cells to accumulate in the lungs, resulting in increased exudation and decreased gas exchange capacity. Therefore, if radioactive pneumonia develops, it needs to receive standardized and aggressive treatment, otherwise it can be life-threatening.
In terms of diet, we must be careful to thicken the patient appropriately at this time to reduce the risk of accidental inhalation of food into the airways caused by choking and coughing, which turns what was originally sterile pneumonia into bacterial infectious pneumonia, which would be a botch.
In addition, we can eat foods that promote coughing and phlegm, or even use some phlegm-suppressing medications, such as tranylcypromine, to allow the lungs to exude phlegm as soon as possible and promote the repair of inflammation.
Also, when the cold air invades in winter, you need to wear a wind mask to avoid severe coughing caused by the “eaten” air.
In the case of radiation esophagitis, if burning pain in the retrosternal esophagus occurs, the main thing to do is to reduce the intake of irritating foods, such as hot foods, hard foods, spicy foods, etc., to avoid aggravating the damage and pain.
On the whole, there are no special dietary strategies for lung cancer patients, whether they have surgery or radiotherapy, and there are no obvious taboos, such as “no hairy food” or “no chicken”, and there is no need to take any unscientific supplements. There is no need to take any unscientific supplements. The standard treatment, combined with a balanced diet and appropriate exercise, is sufficient for lung cancer patients, and most importantly, we should no longer treat them as patients, but should help them return to a normal life as soon as possible.