Todd's first blog post-treatment!

I'M BACK. I finally have recovered enough to help Bonnie out with the blog updates. Man, the last few weeks were indeed a journey through hell. Bonnie tells me some detail from the last week of treatment or the first 2 weeks after treatment and I can’t recall any of it. There are massive chunks of those 3 weeks that are just holes in my life. The recovery so far has been pretty much as advertised in that I can’t look for day-to-day improvements. The recovery process is too slow for that. We look at things now week to week.

We did get some good news today at my 1st post-treatment appointment with Dr. Fong at Kaiser. We set up my monitoring schedule for the next few months. He finished with a detailed exam: my neck from the outside, inside of my mouth & throat, and inside again with the camera down the nose. He said he saw and felt no evidence of cancer. He also said that my quick early response to radiation was a very good sign. The next milestones are an MRI to be done at the end of May and a PET scan at 12 weeks.

Although I’m still living on Ensure shakes, my weight seems to have stabilized. I have lost 24 lbs that includes a fair amount of muscle. I have almost no endurance and I get cold very easily. Now my focus is eating enough Ensures a day (6 is the target), staying hydrated (drinking 1-2 liters), getting an appropriate amount of exercise and keeping a positive outlook. Bonnie has been the key to everything. I couldn’t have survived this without her. Yesterday she mounted all of the cards from you folks on the fireplace mantel and told me that I have all these folks and more out there rooting for my recovery. I have to admit it did feel good. So thanks to all of you who have sent cards or flowers or responded to the blog. I’ve managed to read them all and they do help.

This week is better than last week but life is still far from normal. Last night we got distracted and forgot that my opiate patches needed to be replaced. At about 8pm my throat started hurting much more than normal. It hurt so much that continuing to drink was out of the question. I just curled up in a ball and waited for the new patches to take effect.

Dr. Fong suggested that I try eating some soft foods to keep all my swallowing mechanisms working, so I just had my first non-liquid food in weeks, some cherry jello. Progress is so slow that it’s tough to keep a positive outlook consistently. Patience has never been my strong suit.