Maintaining a Nutritional Diet During and After Active Treatment

Abstract

As a nurse who cares for mesothelioma patients, diet and nutrition have been an important part of my daily care and assessment of my patient. Over the 12 years that I have worked as a nurse, I have watched and learned the types of nutrition that best facilitate healing in patients recovering from surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. As a healthcare professional, I quickly learned that an individual’s diet and nutrition was not only the key to one’s overall health and well-being but how they would respond to their disease process. This chapter addresses the nutritional challenges mesothelioma patients are faced with while offering practical solutions based on my personal experience as a bedside nurse caring for surgical patients and as a nurse coordinator to mesothelioma patients going through all aspects of treatment.

This chapter will include why weight loss is so prevalent with this diagnosis as well as how to help your patients maintain their diet and nutrition throughout each specific treatment and recovery and ultimately after they have moved to the monitoring phase of the disease. Most often patients will question which diet is the best to follow. There are an infinite amount of diets out there that all have different restrictions and information about what foods should or should not be included in a daily diet. Most diets do not have scientific evidence proving its effectiveness or even benefit and usually have an individual restricting specific foods from their daily diet. Each food group has a purpose and brings nutritional value to the table, but that does not mean they can go crazy eating fried or sugar-laden foods all day. It only suggests that they should not have to restrict foods from their daily diet. You want your patient to enjoy the foods they are eating, and if that means enjoying a bowl of ice cream every now and then, then go ahead and indulge. What I hope you take away from this chapter is that the general goal through each phase of treatment and recovery is to limit the amount of weight lost and to help your patient maximize their diet and nutrition.