On Grilled Cheese

or cheese on toast depending where you're calling in from 😉

Hi friends,

Yesterday I ate a tuna melt, which I don’t often do, and I was reminded of the many days I spent on a steady diet of grilled cheese and saltine crackers — because nothing else worked. I struggled to eat for at least the first year and a half post liver transplant, so much so that my friends dubbed me ‘baby bird’. I’d eat tiny amounts and then push my food around the plate. The first days back at home after being discharged from hospital were marked with many tears, unwinding and some whiplash from what we had just been through as a family. 

There were many, many silver linings to being back at home. The comfort of my own bed, the possibility of a shower in a bathroom with home comforts and not the cold, cell-like quality of those in the hospital. Access to real soap and shampoo, not the hospital-issue stuff and the tiny travel bottles my friends had smuggled for me from Soho House — to make me feel cute and posh and less crusty dressed in a backless hospital gown with my ass hanging out. The feeling of being able to exhale without someone coming in to take your blood or check your vitals or take you for a surprise chest X-Ray was priceless.

Part of home comforts, of course, was home-cooked food. The main obstacle to the prospect of consistent home-cooked food is that my parents hate cooking. From the age of 16, I was the resident home cook simply because I was the only family member who enjoyed it.

I hear my mother’s words as I write this: “Why cook? You have to think of something to make, and then you have to eat it and then you have to do it all over again? Seems like a scam.” If it were up to her, she would exist on a steady diet of ice cream, bread and cereal. And that’s actually what she does when left to her own devices. When I return to the family home, I’m the one who cooks most meals. However, I have recently been informed that they’ve discovered Daily Harvest, so things are looking up.

On top of that, my parent’s building had no gas for nearly a year. This made the monumental task of cooking every meal at home even more complicated (the doctors initially advised me not to eat in restaurants initially due to potential germs). We were provided a camping-grade electric stove by building management to cook everything on, and we got a slow cooker to make things slightly easier. But there was no oven. I may as well have stored my shoes in there. I don’t know what it’s like to recover from a transplant anywhere else but in New York City. We had every restaurant available to deliver to us at the drop of a hat. Still, even once I was cleared to eat out, my fear of eating from restaurants that could be contaminated meant that we ordered takeout sporadically, if at all.

The origin of the fears came from my medical team, who gave me very specific instructions. The advice was clear: proceed with caution. No eating at salad bars. Be careful in restaurants. You must wash all your vegetables. No sushi, grapefruit, star fruit or pomegranate. No juices or smoothies. I have since found loopholes around the rules (within reason), though I’ve never had a grapefruit again. But my need to people please and be the perfect patient as if there was some sort of grade coming at the end of my tenure (as if the tenure was somehow ending, which it wasn’t) meant that I took everything very seriously. 

My trauma manifested in many ways: one of them was an attempt to gain control of what it was I ate. We implemented elaborate systems to make sure I had the food I needed, and I exercised control over it. It was something within which I could build safety for myself when everything else felt so entirely out of control. Unfortunately, that need for control meant a lot of food went to waste. I still do this to a certain extent: I still build those safety mechanisms around what I eat and when. I work in a mental health facility three days a week. I pack my bag each morning with four bottles I’ve filled with different liquids to drink throughout the day because I need a steady stream of chai, tea, more tea, herbal tea, and warm mushroom juice, aka coffee alternative. That’s just going to be my life for the foreseeable. Some might call that excessive. I call it resourceful.

In the beginning, though, I oscillated between feeling nauseous and feeling like I had a hunger hole in my stomach for so long that my brain and my body sometimes didn’t match up. If I didn’t have snacks at the ready, I have been known to have a full-on meltdown. But the truth is, back then, I felt so consistently nauseous that I found any food very uninteresting. 

So rather than eat the food people sent as gifts or the gorgeous bolognese my friend delivered to my doorstep from Brooklyn, I began a torrid love affair with grilled cheese. It was the one thing that my mother would be able and willing to make me, and since it was just the two of us knocking around the house most days, she ended up making endless grilled cheeses. I ate grilled cheese nearly every day for months on end. I couldn’t stomach anything else. 

Initially, the nutritionist charged me with eating 90 grams of protein daily to build strength and help me heal. I would attempt to swallow the beautiful slow-cooked stews my parents made for me with organic meat I insisted my dad pick up on his way home from seeing friends downtown. Honest Chops on 9th Street. Brodo for bone broth. He would trek home with the goods, I would guide him through making the stew, and then I would eat 2 or 3 bites, and I would either vomit or give up. It was not ideal, nor pretty.

Something about two bits of bread with cheddar smashed between them and then fried in butter went down a treat. Maybe it was the comfort of it. Grilled cheese does not have a reputation for being easy to digest, but it was the thing that I kept going back to again and again. I don’t know what it is about the comfort food that made me feel like I could eat it, and it can’t have been good for my non-existent gall bladder to have to process that much cheese and gluten on a near-daily basis. But when I think of the tortuous relationship I had with food during that time, the only thing I remember enjoying were grilled cheese and saltines. And thank god, because I ate it by the fucking bucketful. 

All the podcast episodes I did in collaboration with Soho House, So, Life Wants You Dead are out! The latest episode is with my good friend, Ronaé Fagon (who also happened to do the above illustration — and all our illustrations!). In this episode, we talk about Ronaé’s experience living with a mystery chronic illness for which she’s yet to receive a diagnosis, how grinding at a demanding job contributed to burning out in 2018 and what it’s like to navigate the medical system when you don’t have a diagnosis. Have a listen to it here.

With love,

Nora x