I don’t mind making a meal of it when I eat with Nick

In Sickness and in Health: Sharing a meal with Nick has always been one of my favourite things to do

Pizza (Getty Images)

Last year, Rebecca’s husband, Nick, was hit by a car and seriously injured. Here, in one of a series of columns, she writes about the aftermath of his accident

As well as being possibly the most middle-class ready meal ever, Marks and Spencer’s chicken, quinoa and noodle salad is also the snack most likely to end up all over Nick when he tries to eat it. It’s too tricky for him to tackle on his own, so I stick in a fork, twirl it round and hand it to him. Sometimes I bite off a few noodly strands to try and make it easier (that, right there, is true romance), but on the journey from fork to mouth, quinoa rains down his front, noodles nestle in the hollows of his throat and slivers of spinach often end up in his armpits. Quinoa is the sand of the grain world – it gets everywhere – and since Nick eats many of his meals in bed, that means flecks of the stuff between his sheets.

Pizza is easier. If I fold each piece in half lengthways and hand them to Nick, he can eat them himself. But even though he can only use the thumb and two fingers on his left hand (he’s right-handed, but that is currently scrunched up into a useless claw), his grip is so strong that sometimes he’ll hand me a mangled clump of dough that has come adrift from the crust. “This piece isn’t working,” he’ll tell me, and I’ll reach in and feed it to him myself.

Prawn toasts are a piece of cake; duck pancakes tend to be squeezed so hard that they burst their banks. Rice is OK if I hand him a spoonful – forks tend to be so slim that everything falls off. Nachos, which we eat at the pub, are good (pulling a cheese-swathed tortilla chip skywards counts as a form of physio, surely) although I tend to find the odd kidney bean in the recesses of his wheelchair after he’s made a meal of them.

Steak is too chewy, even if I cut it into bite-size pieces; chilli is too hot; toast is always a winner, although if it’s a bit cold, it needs to be folded in half to stop it from collapsing. Weetabix are a post-accident discovery, but they don’t always come how Nick likes them (with cold milk and a sliced banana), sometimes turning up hot with a whole banana laid on top like an anaemic sea creature. Ice cream is fine to begin with, but as it melts I find myself willing Nick to get the spoon to his mouth as quickly as possible to avoid it dripping all the way down his front.

I’m not complaining. Sharing a meal with Nick has always been one of my favourite things to do, and I haven’t forgotten the dark months when his diet consisted of beige protein juice piped directly into his stomach. Recently we ate out in the evening – date night! – and Nick mainly fed himself his chicken pie, once I’d tackled the pastry for him. To be concentrating on talking, rather than feeding, was a meal milestone, even if one of the things we discussed was what the most difficult things for him to eat on his own would be. Anything with chopsticks. Or soup in a bowl rather than a mug. Spaghetti. But I wouldn’t really care if the food were to go everywhere; what matters is that one of the places it ends up is inside Nick.