Antibiotic Appetite

My “Antibiotic Appetite”

I’m not sure if other cysters and fibros go through this, but I rarely want to eat whenever I’m on antibiotics.

Over the past week or two, I have been craving Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings.  So, when I saw turkey on sale last week I decided to pick it up.  Yesterday, I proceeded to make roast turkey with stuffing, creamed corn casserole, green bean casserole, and gravy to go over everything.  I was so proud of myself, because this meal is such a high-fat, high-calorie meal that can now be eaten as leftovers for days!! 

It had been two years since I last made turkey with sides – I’ve been relying on my parents and mother-in-law for Thanksgiving dinner for the last few years.  Two years is a long amount of time, and I definitely forgot how to prepare a turkey.  I immediately became best friends with Youtube, and the smiling turkey woman in the video walked me through the prep work pretty well.  Sadly, this turned into one of those meals where you end up at the store a dozen times before it’s done.  I was a bit scatterbrained yesterday and kept forgetting items for the sides.  I also had my meat thermometer break when the turkey needed to be taken out of the oven. Needless to say, my local grocery store loved me and my wallet yesterday!

After all this hard work and numerous trips to the store, it was quite disappointing to finally get the food on the plates and not want a single bite of it.  I call this problem, my “antibiotic appetite,” and I did not expect it to hit this early into my course of Levaquin.  To be fair, it doesn’t matter what antibiotic I’m on, as long as it’s strong enough to kill the bugs in my body, it leaves me with no appetite.  So I stared at the food, pushed it around with my fork a bit, considered giving it to the dog, and ultimately forced myself to eat it.

When I woke up this morning, the smell of roast turkey still lingered in the air and made me queasy.  I ate a single waffle for breakfast and forced it down with a glass of milk.  I know I will have no desire to eat lunch or dinner, but I’ll get to make myself do it anyway.  It’s one of the things I hate about CF.  It doesn’t matter if I don’t want to eat, I have to in order to keep my weight up (lack of desire to eat happens even without antibiotics, but the antibiotics make it worse).  There are also times when I would much rather have a nice lean salad and a piece of fruit, but instead I wind up choking down high-fat, high-calorie, and high-protein foods.  I sometimes find myself feeling like a human waste receptacle who wears a sign stating, "I’ll take all the fatty stuff no one else dares to eat."

So for the next 12 days, I will find myself forcing food into my stomach with no desire to eat.  I’m probably going to lose the weight gain I have managed over the past few months, and I’m going to have to work extra hard to put it back on two weeks from now.  Oh, antibiotic appetite, how I loathe you.