Treatments Are Over!

I had my last radiation treatment today. Let the healing begin.

It's kind of strange to go 5 months with a series of doctors and you know that every one of them is going to cause pain. Sometimes more of an old pain. Sometimes a new pain. When that was finally over, it took a couple of hours to realize they're going to stop testing my pain threshold limits.

My experience is that discomfort from a radiation treatment increases for about 2 days after the treatment, so I've still got 2 days of things getting worse.

The predictions are either 3 to 4 weeks or 4 to 6 weeks until I'm interested in eating by swallowing food. That's an important step. I'm struggling to put on any weight on the all-liquid diet and I need 6 or 8 pounds. I can't have the stomach tube taken out until I'm eating 100% by mouth.

I probably shouldn't have the porta-cath (under the skin device that attaches to my aorta for IV treatments) out until I know there will be no complications from anything else. The tracheotomy tube will stay in until all the swelling is gone from my throat, which should be about the same time as when I start eating by mouth.

There are still 3 minor surgeries I need. I'm not forgetting that it was a very minor and routine surgery that flat-lined me. I've got a lot of healing to do.

There is good news. I do not have a trace of cancer, neither pre-existing, regrown, nor started in another location, not any kind or type. I'm currently in 100% remission. All cancers can recur, but the type I had (or have) isn't as aggressive as some at recurring.

My radiation oncologist was Dr. Cross at Wesley. He's the guy who decides how much treatment my body can tolerate and then seems to turn the treatments up a notch or two just to be on the safe side for a good kill of the cancer cells. I enjoyed being his patient even though he gave me the guided tour of what Hell can do to a mouth and throat. I better straighten this out again. I did not have cancer of the throat or the mouth, Mine was a neck cancer. Unfortunately, my throat and mouth seem to be in the exact places where the neck gets its treatments.

But I digress. Dr. Cross had another of his observational comments that say things better than any other way of saying it. This time it was, "In a year or two, you're not going to look back at this and laugh, but in a year or two, you are going to look back at this. That's really what we were trying to get out of all of this."