Feeding the Body, Nourishing the Soul

At 17, Megan Blunt has already successfully battled bone cancer. Now she’s started an ambitious project to help other young patients eat well and feel in control.

Called A Meal When You Crave It (or AMY, after a friend of hers who died of leukemia), Blunt's project stocks hospital cupboards with microwave meals in flavors that, from personal experience, she knows cancer patients crave. (Because chemotherapy changes the palate, kids fighting cancer often want strong savory flavors, like pasta with tomato sauce.) So AMY allows kids to eat what they want, when they want, as opposed to when the hospital chooses to serve food.

Blunt began her project three months ago at London’s University College Hospital, thanks to donations from British grocery store Tesco. According to the UK's The Times, before the AMY project 72 percent of the meals young cancer patients ate were brought in from outside — an expensive proposition for parents, many of whom already have given up income to spend every day in the hospital with their kids. Now the numbers of patients eating outside food has dropped to 23 percent, and staff say the mood in the ward is brighter.

"When you’re having oncology treatment, it's important to eat whenever you can," Blunt says. "It helps to keep your weight up and may help to delay a gastric tube being fitted. But for a child in oncology treatment, the food window — the time you can eat — is about 20 minutes, and it's easy to miss that."

For Andy Kuhnel, a 19-year-old battling cancer, the 24-hour availability of Megan's meals has helped him regain more than five pounds of the nearly 30 he lost during his treatment.

"The first week I was here I didn’t eat because I was sick," Kuhnel told the Times. "I lost quite a lot of weight. You've got to be hungry when the hospital food comes round. If you're not and you miss lunch, you want to eat mid-afternoon, then you're not hungry when dinner arrives."

Or as one mother puts it: "It's a godsend."

Blunt hopes to bring her project to hospitals across England, bureaucracy be damned.

She told the Times: "When you have cancer you are suddenly thrown into this grown-up world where adult terms are used a lot and adult things happen. Cancer doesn’t have to be this Voldemort word in the 21st century. Positive things can come from it." Indeed, like Blunt’s project.