The Incredible Eating Machine

It just devoured six hardboiled eggs (whites only) while I watched in astonishment this morning. Between dinner Saturday and lunch Sunday it consumed seven bowls of penne pasta (plain, with butter) and an entire head of cauliflower (roasted with salt and olive oil). Over the past five days it has demolished two loaves of sourdough bread (with butter) and an entire family-size box of Special K cereal (with milk and sugar). We've lost count of how many gallons of milk we're purchased to satiate it. And yet it just keeps on eating.

At first we thought it was the appetite stimulant that Millie takes along with anti-nausea medicine to get her eating again after chemo. But we took her off that five days ago. And like the Very Hungry Caterpillar, she has eaten her way through her days of convalescence, with the constant cacophony of Looney Tunes and Sesame Street in the background. Maybe her body is instinctively fattening itself up before the next famine, the onslaught of chemo to come which allows her to keep nothing in her stomach for days on end, and has turned her off many of her favorite foods (notice the preponderance of white/beige bland foods listed above). All we know is she's eating, really eating, and to THIS dad, with his food-centric viewpoint, this is the surest indicator of health imaginable. Insert huge sigh of relief... of genuine coping... here. Round Three starts tomorrow.

UPDATE: It has now eaten its way through half of last year's Iowan corn crop (in the form of popcorn, with butter and salt) - is there any white/beige foods we've missed?!?!? It's voracious!!!