When you’ve lived inside serious illness, your relationship to medicine changes.
You quickly learn what is essential. What is protocol. What is non-negotiable. And then, somewhere along the way, you more slowly start to notice everything else. The possibilities not handed to you within a protocol, but found in late-night searches like: nutrition during childhood leukemia treatment.
This series is about those things: small, supportive tools that are easy to integrate into cancer care and may help support the body’s healing processes.
This series is about those things: small, supportive tools that are easy to integrate into cancer care and may help support the body’s healing processes.
These topics are not a replacement for medical care. They merely support the body in what it’s already doing. As always, bring things to your care team when you need to.
Why Nutrition During Cancer Treatment Matters
There are a million and one different ways to support your child’s body through leukemia treatment. When it comes to childhood leukemia nutrition, the choices range from fleeing to Mexico and finding a holistic cancer clinic to indulging in hospital cafeteria milkshakes at every appointment.
Trust me, I have considered it all.
The overthinking…in some ways I do think it helps square the freight train of childhood cancer with the paralysis that is being the parent of a cancer kid. When you spend three hours searching the web for hats that your soon-to-be-bald child won’t end up wearing, it is easy to think all that research was a waste.
It wasn’t. In the sacred space of adjusting to your child’s cancer diagnosis, nothing is wasted.
But with hopes of keeping you from spinning your wheels on every topic, here are the decisions we made for our family regarding nutrition during childhood leukemia treatment.
You can see all recommendations here.
What We Focused on During Steroids
We focused on raw fruits and vegetables, especially during the first month of steroids.
Our guideline was that he could have as many helpings of chips, bread, crackers, etc. as he wanted, but each serving had to be coupled with a plate of raw produce. This worked pretty well for us to curb his insatiable appetite and keep his gut motility up.
We would provide a plate loaded with:
- bell peppers
- carrots
- celery
- snap peas
- cucumbers (English, only!)
- Fresh herbs
- (ranch, duh!)
…and then happily give him endless carbs after he made a dent in it.
Beau also craved salty things, so we kept options like Bubbies and Ozuké sauerkraut and pickles on hand. We made homemade popcorn cooked in coconut oil, drizzled with olive oil, and sprinkled with Redmond popcorn salt.
So delicious.
We also focused on potassium-rich foods because of the muscle weakness and cramping he experienced from steroids.
Do what you can, offer it all, hold the line when possible, and then grace, grace, grace.
Probiotics During Leukemia Treatment
We chose not to supplement with probiotics any time Beau was neutropenic, but allowed the probiotic-rich foods his care team permitted and that he craved: kefir, sauerkraut, pickles, yogurt, etc.
When he was not neutropenic, we used Flourish probiotics. Post-treatment, we alternated probiotics to get a variety of strains. Other brands we have used include Klaire Labs, Ther-Biotic Complete, Pure Encapsulations, and Ortho Molecular Products. Probiotics can be a complete waste of money if they are not legit, so don’t buy unless you know the source is reputable!
Supporting Bowel Motility During Leukemia Treatment
Steroids and Vincristine are both known for the havoc it can wreak on the gut. During phases that included vincristine, we paid close attention to how often Beau was having bowel movements.
Ensuring a fiber-rich diet was key for us because regular bowel movements helped Beau’s overall comfort. We sometimes used Smooth Move tea or similar to support this.
Hydration was another key to bowel motility. We used Ultima Electrolytes to keep Beau drinking and replace some of the electrolytes he was losing.
Variety, Balance, and the Occasional Frozen Pizza
Days after diagnosis, we attended the New Cancer Family Orientation at the hospital. The nurse explained that it didn’t matter what Beaudin ate as long as he got calories. Even if he ate mac and cheese for six months straight, that was fine.
I knew then that we would have to agree to disagree.
But her approach, that nothing mattered, did help release me from the panic that everything did.
I mean, Betsy, six months of mac and cheese straight is permissible by these people. Enjoy the luxury of a damn frozen pizza after a long clinic day!
We tried to offer a variety of fruits and vegetables. You could almost always find berries, bananas, pears, oranges, apples, carrots, bell peppers, celery, English cucumbers, and snap peas in our fridge.
You could also find us in the Chick-fil-A drive-through.
Balance.
Sugar, Caffeine, and Chemo-Day Treats
The naturopathic oncologist we consulted in Arizona believed that consuming sugar and caffeine shortly before chemotherapy could make fast-growing cells more active and therefore more vulnerable to chemotherapy.
For us, it meant that we ate wicked healthy 75% of the time and enjoyed mocha milkshakes before and ice cream after many chemotherapy appointments.
After being so strict with diet before cancer, during treatment we also indulged in the simplest of all pleasures: Cheez-Its.
Knowing that even a flawless diet couldn’t keep cancer away allowed us to move into a more balanced space where we focused on nutrition and deeply enjoyed treats.
Nutrition and the Medication Load
Everyone’s body is different, and everyone’s beliefs about the toxic load of pharmaceuticals are different but there is a wild rabbit trail you can fall down about the side effects of chemotherapy and how badly it can hurt your body in the long run.
How I operated was that if we had to do chemotherapy- I could support his body with fresh produce, limited processed carbs, and lots of clean, filtered water.
Was it harder to prep fresh produce than hand him a bag of chips? Yes.
Was it harder to explain, on repeat, that we were choosing differently because we believed differently? Yes.
But it was hard and worthy, as are all of the best things.
What difference did it make?
Who knows what actual difference nutrition made! What I do know is that throughout treatment, Beaudin maintained a healthy weight and did not struggle with the low blood sugar levels that can be a side effect of 6MP during Maintenance Therapy. He had one chemo hold, the week following Delayed Intensification, and visited the ER once for a fever that resolved within four hours and left me wondering why I took him in the first place.
Teaching your kid to choose healthy, nutritious food is a beautiful thing. Allow them to indulge in creature comforts like chocolate milkshakes and then tell them the plate of veggies has to be finished before the next bag of chips.
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