An 11-year-old boy in the UK hasn’t eaten anything but garlic bread in eight years after developing a phobia to other foods while going through chemotherapy as a toddler.
Billy Turner was just 3-years-old when he finally beat his battle with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, thanks to life-saving chemotherapy.
“When Billy was having his chemo, he said eating felt very strange, as the feeling of food moving down his throat felt very pronounced,” Billy’s mom, Louise Blackshaw, said, The Daily Mail reported. “The only thing that he said didn’t make him feel funny was garlic bread - so that’s what he ate. I was just happy he could eat something.”
While cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy often have troubles swallowing, Billy’s aversion to anything but garlic bread has been going on for eight years now.
Billy loves garlic bread, but he wishes he could eat other foods like everybody else.
“I want to be able to go to a restaurant now and actually order food like everyone else,” Billy said. “I could always feel the food moving down my throat when I tried to eat and that was really off-putting - but I could always eat the likes of garlic bread.”
“Only being able to eat certain food makes me feel really self-conscious and I always try to make sure that my friends don’t find out,” he added.
According to John Newlands, Macmillan’s senior cancer nurse specialist, chemotherapy can alter a person’s taste buds to make all food taste like the medicine in their body, but it often subsides within a month after stopping treatment.
In Billy’s case, Newlands believes the young boy might actually have anticipatory nausea and vomiting, a psychological condition in which a person associates a certain food with chemotherapy before eating it.
“It can be the same with food; during chemotherapy people eat food and it makes them feel sick and the brain remembers that association,” Newlands said. “So when they eat it again after treatment that feeling of nausea is stimulated.”
Blackshaw has now enlisted the help of a hypnotherapist in hopes of rewiring Billy’s brain to stop it from associating food with chemotherapy once and for all.
