Surgery #3 Cancelled

I am so glad I checked on the meaning of "fistula".

I thought that meant they were going to close an opening in my incision. Yeah, let's do that. I'm ready for that. If I hadn't checked out what they were going to do, I would have signed the consent form.

If I signed the consent form, they were going to open up my neck and look for the hole in my throat. When they couldn't find it, I don't know what they would have done.

I told them there wasn't a hole in my throat any more and I wouldn't sign the consent form until I talked to the doctor. I told the doctor that if he had any reason to think I still had a hole in my throat that we should do the surgery.

The doc gave me a dye test and waited close to an hour to see if any dye from inside my throat got into the area of my incision. The test came out clean. The fistula is healed. No surgery today.

The incision is getting better. Part of what appeared to be healing was "something" that isn't healing, impedes healing, and isn't viable. That "stuff" died. That's normal, but it went from looking like healed tissue to being dead stuff. The doc scraped all the dead stuff out, which created an opening to an infected area that is now slowly draining. The infection seems to be under control, but the dead stuff and the infection created a rather disturbing visual on my neck.

Now it's time to start with the radiation treatments. I've been told to call my Radiation Oncologist and get the treatments started as soon as possible.

The variation of the type of cancer I have doesn't fit into medical knowledge and practice very well. The good news is that survivability is about 100% if what they've found so far holds up to be true. The bad news is that they really don't know how to combat it, so they hit it with everything they know of.

In my situation, they're hitting it with some stuff that's supposed to take care of the "about" part of "survivability is about 100%". The medical effort is totally geared toward survival and doesn't really consider quality of life issues of the survivor.

In my situation, I consider the ability to speak to be a major quality of life issue and a major career issue. I have to sign a "permanent damage to vocal cords" waiver for anasthetic, so if I have permanent loss of vocal ability, I've agreed to it.

I'd like to know what the chances of permanent loss of vocal ability are compared to the increased chances of survival (or something) from the surgery or treatments. I'm not getting that information.