When you feel sick you want familiar things, comforting things, to eat and drink. If it’s a sore throat then it can be uncomfortable to eat. I had such a sore throat recently that I ate only smooth food like mashed potato and soup as well as lots of warm drinks.
Feeding my son when he is sick can be super stressful if I don’t relax and focus on just feeding whatever he will tolerate (and not taking it personally!). My son is over-sensitive to touch and feels a sore throat more intensely than most. But really it can be any kind of illness that puts him off kilter. That means eating food he is totally comfortable with in the moment.
So, there’s this ongoing sore throat and we don’t know why. But my son reckons a possible cause is an injury inflicted by a rogue fish finger (he has short periods where he will eat these). A naturally cautious person, he had concerns about hurting his throat by eating rough food. The unpleasant sensations were signs of further injury. By eating smooth food, he felt he was allowing it to heal. My son is very rational; this all makes sense. And anyway, even if it didn’t - it is important to listen to his concerns because they are real to him and I can address them if I know about them.
And then there is the medication. Medication often has a strong taste, can be sticky and thick, or the inside of capsules are gritty - in this case they were tiny hard spheres. Swallowing a whole pill seems impossible so we’re left with the spheres. I don’t hide stuff in food. The trust thing is too important. However, medication like this makes me desperate and I figure it is too important. So it goes into butter. Or yoghurt. Turns out - despite their size - white, hard balls are not easy to hide, visually or texturally. I had to give up. But luckily (or rather unluckily) that medicine wasn’t working anyway. Then there was the antibiotic. Too sweet, a bit chalky. I had to dilute it. I always ask the doctor if liquid medication can be diluted, and what I can dilute it in e.g. water, juice, milk. Tolerance goes down as the 10-day course of medicine progresses. This is hard work.
Oh for the sickness to end. And the eating to return to our-kind-of-normal.