Cancer Recovery: Week 5

I spend my time eating through my feeding tube and trying to find something interesting on the idiot box.  Neither is much fun, but life took a turn for the worse last Monday.

I'm a lazy person by nature.  I'm suffering from exhaustion which exacerbates this condition, but that's neither here nor there.  A month or so ago I decided to see how much pain was being masked by my morphine, and so I skipped my morning pill.  By noon I had my answer - a lot of pain was being masked - and so took my morning Morphine pill and a shot of my emergency booster morphine liquid.  So far, so good.

Last week I repeated this experiment and discovered I no longer needed the morphine and so stopped taking it.  My logic is that if I'm not in pain, why take the meds - right?  So I stopped.

This was a mistake.  Big time.

The nausea got worse, then it got a lot worse.  I became light headed and my hands and feet felt numb (I'm told this is called neuropathy).  Then the vomiting started.  I called the emergency number I'd been provided with and spent two and a half hours playing telephone tag with non-medical personnel who individually assured me that someone would be calling me back.  I finally got the message and dropped into the ER, there to saddle them with my symptoms.  Thankfully I was able to get Main Lady to drive, as Mom does not do well driving at night and her head is full of dust bunnies.

So we get to the ER and taken to a room where I'm eventually given anti-nausea medications.  In the middle of all this I get asked the standard questions about what I've ingested and when, and I let it slip that it's been two days since I took the morphine.  Main Lady jumps on it, beating the ER doc by a mile.

"Jack, you're suffering opiate withdrawal.  You can't just go cold turkey on an opiate; you'll get sick." 

So that was that.  I saw Dr. Deathray the next day who set up a program to taper off, which is what I'm doing.  For her part, Main Lady is a licensed clinical psychologist who used to work for the State, and so has seen a lot of this type of thing.

There should be a warning about this stuff.




 

Cancer: Recovery Week 3

Monday night was devoted to nausea and vomiting. I flashed until I couldn't stand up, and let me tell you there is nothing worse than vomiting up the artificial food I have to eat via my feeding tube followed by dry heaves.

Tuesday my radiation oncologist (Dr. Rubin) stuck a fiber optic tube up my nose to look at my throat. This procedure is no fun, by the way. He followed this examination by trying to find the tumor in my neck that had started the whole business, and declared the tumor to be gone. 

Result: I am now cancer free.

Dr. Rubin has no idea why I'm still sick and unable to retain food. I explain that I'm depressed and need some sort of anti-depressant, which Dr. Rubin cheerfully prescribes. Everyone in the know says the pills will help, but I'm doubtful.

Wednesday my chemo therapy oncologist (Dr. Muler) ordered hydration and 2 grams of magnesium. Dr. Muler thinks the problem is with the tube feeding and blames the dietician, Marcia, for my problems.
Marcia changed me to a brand new artificial food and slowed the intake rate to practically nil. Marcia wondered if I might have picked up a nasty little bug from the hospital, which is very likely. My immune system is compromised.

Thursday I begin to feel a little better and spend the day eating from my feeding tube and watching The Sopranos on DVD. I'm depressed. I force myself to get cleaned up and think positive thoughts.

Friday, today, I'm fighting off depression with everything I've got.

The bottom line is that both doctors are good at their profession, yet neither one can tell me why I'm so sick.  I'm exhausted all the time, I'm almost always nauseated and I'm depressed.  I don't see that there is much of anything worth living for.

Still and all, I keep marching.  One foot in front of the other, one hour at a time.  I hope the scenery changes.

Cancer: Recovery Weeks 1 and 2

Now that the therapy has concluded with an appropriate fanfare (Puccini's Tosca belting out Saint James Infirmary) I can relax and recover.  Right?  Wrong.  Real wrong.  I've spent most of my days in the hospital hooked up to multiple bags holding various concoctions which are guaranteed to keep my electrolytes in balance.  We hope.

The real blessing is that the constant nausea is gone or is under control.  The stomach being a small part of the digestive system, the intestines are free to give me one form of hell or another, and I now know that my mother's favorite son can have constipation and diarrhea at the same time.

Right now I'm getting nutrition from a bag of slop hooked up to my feeding tube and being fed into me by a pump.  If not for the pump regulating the flow, I would truly be up against it.

I want to thank all of you for your kind words, prayers and patience.  This is a bad road I'm on and every single prayer helps.  Just this afternoon Main Lady stopped over with a small bowl of yellow squash soup, and wonder of wonders I could actually taste the soup.  I am overjoyed, literally.  Everything else tastes like sawdust, and because of my dry mouth condition most foods are off the menu - I need soup or something the consistency of soup, not too spicy because my throat has the same feeling you get right after a tonsillectomy.

The pain medications are making me paranoid and hallucinate.  Not badly, mind you, but hallucinations are what they are.

Well, thanks to all of you. 

Cancer: Last and Final Treatment

I had my final treatment today.  As of today, no more chemo therapy and no more radiation therapy.  I'm officially done.

Now the tough part starts.  All that collateral damage has to be repaired, and the urban renewal process is tough and takes time.  For instance, Monday night I landed in the ER with my electrolytes out of balance to the point of magnesium being critically low.  I was unable to move my arms and legs, I was hallucinating and generally incoherent.

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology and Divine intervention, I'm still alive and with us. 

Cancer: Week 7 Day 4

Today is my birthday and my final chemo therapy treatment.  Of better news is that I was given a pump to use with my feeding tube.

The deal is I have a feeding tube.  In theory I take a can of highly concentrated, high caloric liquid food and poor it down the tube and into my stomach.  The trouble is and likely has been, is that the stomach can't handle it.  Think: you go from a diet (diet?  you call that a diet?) diet of junk food and gin to something that any triathlete would call desirably, disgustingly healthy and you wouldn't know what to do either.  So the stomach threatens an abrupt return to sender until the mystery substance can be identified and dealt with.

Enter the pump.

The pump accepts a huge bag of this health slop on one end and dispenses said slop into the stomach one tiny teaspoon full per minute.  The stomach gets used to getting a nutritious substance in this fashion and doesn't act up.  Much.  So now the nausea is, we all pray and hope, a thing of the past.

Prayers answered, and we may all thank the Lord for this one.

Cancer: Week 7 Day 3

I woke up yesterday afternoon and discovered that I've lost my voice.  I cannot talk at all; only whisper.  I'm told this is an expected side effect of the radiation therapy.

The skin on my neck and throat is burned and the nausea continues.  I can't eat anything without becoming nauseous, and the medication for nausea is not all that helpful.  The only real cure is time. I'm supposed to consume 2000 calories per day; I'm doing good to eat 1100.  Yesterday I managed about 1800 or so, which took a Herculean effort on my part.

Cancer: Week 7, Day 1

Seven weeks of treatment.  My final radiological treatment is one week from Tuesday (tomorrow); my final chemo treatment is this Thursday.  Then I'm done with therapy and things will get worse for three weeks.

Nausea comes in waves.  I've never been so sick in my life. 

Cancer and Rock Bottom

Last night, Wednesday, I hit rock bottom.  My digestive tract was malfunctioning in ways I couldn't believe were possible.  Nausea came in waves, accentuated by a spike in my fever.  I was so miserable I wanted to die.  Why should I live through this?  I couldn't come up with a good reason, but the effort of assembling myself, my pistol and a conveniently private place where my remains would be guaranteed to be discovered by the authorities was just too much effort.  So here I am.

Cancer, Week 6

I'm still alive.  My dietician tells me I'm not eating enough, which is probably true, so this week is going to be food week.  The problem is that my mouth is so dry that anything resembling a bread product is automatically rejected.  My sense of taste is, for all intents and purposes, gone.  Everything tastes like low-grade sawdust.  My energy level is down, which isn't helping.

The team on the radiology side have got their act together and are handling their set of side effects very well, meaning my pain level is easily tolerable.  The chemo side has been a different matter up until I switched oncologists; I picked the one the nurses feared, respected and universally disliked.  I met him and consider him a good, regular type guy who happens to be a whole lot smarter than everyone else.  Question: how would you handle it if the people you were forced to work with were all retards?  Let me amend that question: how do you handle it?  Because we've all been there, right?

This morning things aren't too awful bad.  We'll see how the day shakes out.

One good thing is that I no longer need Lorazepam (Ativan) to get through my radiology treatment.  I'm happy with that.

Status Update

I'm too sick to write.  Most of the medical staff tell me I'm doing real good.  One reminded me they never said this would be easy.

Thank You

My sincere thanks to everyone who has prayed for me or who has left a comment.  You have no idea what a line or two of encouragement means, so I'll tell you: The lift is enormous.

Still Alive

To those who can't tell from the next post, I'm still alive.  I'm sick as a dog, but I'm alive and I am not giving up.  For one thing, there's all those anti-freedom moonbats out there who would celebrate my demise - and I'm not going to give them the satisfaction.

English As Our Official Language

What's the problem with making English the official language of the United States?  This comes up every few years and every time it does, the media is flooded by moonbats who rant, rave and screed about racial prejudice and other bad things.  You know what?  I no longer care.

Keep reading for my own somewhat profane rant.  Warning: politically incorrect.

My Condition

Don't get your hopes up; I'm still alive.  My treatment begins in the next 10 days, and will consist of both radiation therapy and chemo therapy.  The primary treatment is radiation, which will happen five time a week for seven weeks.  The chemo therapy, which uses Cisplatin, is used to kill whatever squamous cells the radiation therapy breaks loose and that try to take up residence in another part of my body.  Think of this as bayoneting the wounded.

At the terminus of my last meeting with my treatment team, my doctor told me in all seriousness that in terms of undesirable side effects, this particular regimen was the toughest they had to offer.  In his entire career he's only seen two men continue working at their regular job all the way through treatment.

I don't intend to set any records, but neither do I intend to wimp out.  I'm going to get through this and come out the other side just as grouchy and ill-tempered as ever.

Still on Hiatus...

Pick one letter out of the alphabet.  Hint: it's the one between B and D.  Okay, you in the back of the class, get your hooter out of that girlie mag and pay attention.

C.

That's the letter, and that's what I've got.

Back to School!

Well, the brilliant minds that comprise the Sylvania Board Bored of Education have just cost the hoi polloi a bundle of money.  Keep reading for my somewhat disjointed rant about our elected officials and our no-fault system of government.

On Hiatus

I'm taking a leave of absence for a few months due to poor health.  I'll resume blogging with a vengeance in a month or two.  Keep reading for the details as it amuses you to do so.

Congratulations!

My sincere congratulations along with a hoist of the morning bourbon glass and a tip of the old fedora to Sollecks, law enforcement officer extraordinaire, and his wife Mrs. Sollecks without whom this event would not be possible.

Sollecks is the brand new father of a baby boy.

For those of you who don't know the players, Sollecks provided me with a police ride along which I wrote about in Cops: My Ride Along. He is an excellent police officer and will be a great father.

Restaurant Review: Hot Pot & Asian Grill

Hot Pot and Asian Grill

4038 Talmadge Rd.; Toledo, OH

Mon - Thu: 11:00 am - 10:00 pm; Fri: 11:00 am - 11:00 pm

Sat: 12:00 pm - 11:00 pm; Sun: 12:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Phone: (419)214-0600

Facebook Page - Hot Pot and Asian Grill

Northeast corner at Talmadge and Sylvania

The Toledo Blade did a review of the Hot Pot Grill, which I will not link to here.  The restaurant reviewer didn't know what she was talking about, mainly because of her worldly experience (none), which was inversely proportional to her attitude - if the food doesn't look like a burger and fries, then what's it doing on my plate?  I couldn't let that one slide, so this afternoon I went over to see for myself.  Keep reading to get the straight money story on the Hot Pot and Asian Grill, and why people would want to eat there.

Sylvania Ohio Busybodies

I am, generally speaking, a live and let live sort of person.  I take pains to avoid irritating my neighbors.  I don't play loud music, I stay off their property and I don't get into loud, extended brannigans with friends and relatives at 3:00 AM (otherwise known as three in the damned morning) that involve the local constabulary.  I don't make comments about the length of my neighbor's lawn and wonder aloud if he's ever going to get off his dead ass and cut it. I don't offer him beer or wine in an effort to be friendly and sell him my current political agenda.  I figure the poor bastard has enough problems of his own.  I know I do.

Likewise, I expect the same from him.  I've found that most people will let me alone, excepting a few minutes of casual conversation now and again.  The only help from my neighbors that I would ever hope for is for them to call the fire department should my house ever catch fire, and if they see some low-life breaking into the house they might call the police and deliver an anonymous tip.  I don't expect them to ding the intruder while he's halfway in through the window.  For one thing, it might be me, as I've been known to lock myself out upon occasion.

This, then, is how good neighbors ought to act, and if we all did this, we'd all get along just fine.  We don't, but that's a topic for another day.  What happens in the middle of this pastoral scene is government.  Federal, State and Local, every single branch is populated with people who are convinced that they can run your life better than you can.  The city of Sylvania, Ohio is no exception.  Keep reading for the latest regulation to float to the surface.