My by-line photograph now tells a big fat lie.
Today, I'm a stone lighter and as bald as an egg, after spending the past month in the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre at Gartnavel. Being a patient at the Beatson brings to mind travelling in a Rolls-Royce but one with an irritatingly malfunctioning major component. It purrs along (on the back of a lot of unpaid overtime) and we're all truly grateful to have such a wonderful facility in our hour of need.
But the catering is the weakest link, which just doesn't make sense in a place serving people who struggle to maintain their weight and rely on good fresh food to aid recovery.
We're told Gartnavel used to have 15 cooks and a full-time baker, turning out fragrant fresh rolls, bread and cakes. Today plastic food arrives in chiller lorries from factories in Paisley and Greenock and the Gartnavel kitchens re-heat and serve it up. Nothing seems fresh, beyond salads and apples.
The rest is predominantly reconstituted stodge, reminiscent of school dinners in the 1950s. Desserts come in the same plastic bowls as soup. We know because of the whiff. Jelly and lentil soup, anyone? No thanks. It's a shock to come from a home where healthy meals are prepared from scratch, using fresh ingredients, with an emphasis on plenty of green veg, to a place where overcooked pallid green beans and soggy sprouts are a welcome change from turnip and carrot.
I never eat ready meals. Yet when I had a sore mouth (a side-effect of chemotherapy) and was struggling to maintain my weight, as a result of fighting leukaemia, I rarely got anything else. It's futile turning out nutritionally balanced food, if patients find it inedible.
My personal nadir was ordering a cheese omelette and getting a cheeseless lump I could have bounced off the floor. Yes, even omelettes are pre-made, chilled and reheated. Cancer patients need to be tempted to eat with small delicious meals made from the best ingredients, not food I last saw at primary school 50 years ago. How would Jamie Oliver rate Beatson food?
You hear less about hospital food these days because most people are in hospital for such a short time. By contrast, many of us are stuck "inside" for a month or more. Without decent meals, we have less energy and surely recovery is inhibited. The irony is that modern anti-nausea drugs mean that a majority of patients do not feel sick after even intensive chemotherapy. These patients need to be nurtured nutritionally.
The food is not only poor but often is not what was ordered. On one occasion, my mince materialised as a rock-hard sausage roll that was the last straw for my throbbing gums.
I dreamed of a chef in whites appearing, brandishing cheese scones straight from the oven or some couscous with roasted vegetables. Hardly extravagant. Instead, the management's response was to cater for my request for some hummus with raw vegetable batons but, initially at least, refuse such audacious orders from fellow patients.
That changed after I went around collecting signed statements, including one from a patient in the last days of life. Others started getting hummus and, on my final day, I even achieved some couscous.
But how long will this last when the spotlight moves on? Some patients from outwith Glasgow - Dumfries and Fort William, for instance - spoke of the quality of the food experienced where they came from, so there should be nothing inevitable about the beastliness of the Beatson food.
As cost is presumably the driver, it's hard to think of NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde making a more false economy than hospital food for a particularly vulnerable group of patients but which they cannot bring themselves to eat. The waste must be monumental.
Do doctors, catering staff and bean counters ever eat this stuff? Our family grocery bill rose during my stay at the Beatson because each day my husband had to bring in cold food for me. (We were forbidden from reheating anything.) In this respect the Beatson is not catering well for cancer patients.
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