Healing

Well, we had our last chemo session today -- and followed it up with our next-to-last radiation session. (See "Double Whammy" in previous blog postings.) Monday is the finale for the radiation sessions. I like using the first-person-plural "we" for this description, because Deb has been so intimately caught up in every phase of this -- from driving me to and from sessions, to retrieving medications, to acting as secretary for upcoming visits and procedures, to feeding me via the food tube and on and on. So we're coming to the end of... something.

Clearly, the overall quest to confirm that my body has totally rid itself of cancer (with the help of these wonderful technologies) is still ongoing and will be for years. But it is time now to celebrate this penultimate treatment -- about which I will blog a bit more, I hope, tomorrow. It was a rather special day at the radiation therapy facility.

As posted earlier, we will start scheduling one or more scans sometime soon for a month or so from Monday -- and MRI and/or PET and/or CT scans, all have been mentioned and I will be asking for clarity when the subject comes up with a doc. At this point, I'm not even sure which doc...

Anyway, there are signposts -- or checkpoints, or something -- between "here" and "healthy." I e-mailed my classmates about this yesterday in a context that only affected my work with them, but thought I would share these with you. The steps, in order, look like this:

1. My tongue needs to heal. It got a bit better, then a bit worse over the last week or so. Yesterday, I carried on several extended conversations with folks that taxed the damaged tissue excessively. So a minor setback...
2. Once my tongue repairs itself, I will work to move to solid food taken orally and run the daily Jevity liquid nourishment count from six cans a day to zero. (My fantasies about eating pizza or moo shu pork still haunt me, but they have been joined by more prosaic desires. Like toast. Rye toast with butter and jam. And raisin bran. With almonds sprinkled on top. And coffee! Or even herbal tea! Oh, the ecstasy of it all!) Over the last couple of days, I've managed to ingest half of a root beer float one evening and a half can of chicken-and-wild-rice soup yesterday. So swallowing is not a problem, it's just the pain from the ulcer that eventually tells me, "Okay Randy, that's all we can handle just now..." So this is all quite promising, but whether this will take two days or two weeks has yet to be determined.
3. Once I don't need the PEG food tube anymore, I can schedule a date to have the surgeon remove it. I recall he outlined briefly how this extraction will take place, but I don't recall the details. (Do I need stitches in my stomach wall? How to you put them in, and do you need to go back in and take them out?) But it sounds like there will be some serious "lay down and take it easy" time after this procedure. Once again, two days? Two weeks?
4. Hey! But after that is done and the recovery from the tube extraction surgery is in the rear-view mirror, I can start working out at the gym again -- trying to regain some of the 15 or so pounds of muscle that I've lost during these procedures. And lose some of the fat that's been kind enough to hang around with me (quite literally "hang around") for the last several months. But when I get to that stage, darn it, I'm healed. And then, chapters in my life that have been placed on hold for a couple of months open up again.

And it's delightful to think about how many of you will be important parts of those chapters. Just as you have been such important parts of these chapters that should be closing soon...