Tag: Radiation

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April Hike

This month’s hike took us along the banks of the Chattahoochee River. It was a gorgeous morning so everyone and their brother appeared to have had the same idea, which meant that the parking lot was full and there were too many other dogs on the trail for Tosca’s comfort. We managed a meandering loop, anyway. 4/12 down, a third of the year behind us, and 8 more to go. Checking these off of the calendar is certainly a welcome alternative to radiation treatments; I heartily recommend it to anyone in recovery from, perhaps, anything at all.

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Or maybe…

I’ll lean right the fuck into it. The future, that is. I’ve had a profoundly reassuring week, and I figure I should share the good news here, just as I have the bad. On Wednesday, I saw my surgical oncologist for the first time since he removed the stitches from my neck in February (and well before I began radiation). He said I looked great–that everything was healing wonderfully. Personally, I think anyone who’s not barfing all over themselves–which I was the last time we met–would get as favorable a review. But this was a relief to hear, nonetheless. I then asked him if my prognosis was good, and he told me I was in the best possible position I could be in with respect to that: the remaining tumor he’d removed from my tongue was small, my lymph nodes had been clear of cancer, and they staged it at I. “You can relax and enjoy your summer now,” he said. “The hard part is behind you.”

Hearing this was like a benediction. They’ll still continue to monitor me via CT scans of my head and neck for the next five years, of course, but there’s good reason to believe I just might be alright. The doctor then asked if I wanted a referral to a plastic surgeon to see if they might be able to laser off the long scar on the side of my neck. “I know it can make people self-conscious,” he explained. I declined. I’m strangely proud of it. As I read the other night in the knock-your-socks-off memoir, All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf by Katharine Smyth: “We are each of us circumscribed within a body, the shape of which, the scars on which, the holes within which, tell our tale if you care to read it.” I actually now have two scars on my neck, the one from my recent lymph node excision and another, fainter one, across the base of my throat from a partial thyroidectomy I had at age twenty-one. My daughter likes to trace her finger over them when she’s lying in my lap. It looks like I survived the guillotine or something. Twice.

Then today, I saw my speech therapist, who also gave me a good report. She observed me chew and swallow a few sample foods they keep on hand (the graham cracker was a challenge), and said she was impressed with my progress. She encouraged me to continue doing my weird tongue exercises, as latent complications from the radiation can occur as long as five or ten years down the road. So I figure I’ll try to do them when I’m driving and give anyone who happens to pull up next to me a good laugh.

When I got in the car to head home after this appointment, I cried. The weather outside was so fittingly, beautifully bright it seemed staged. I still feel the clench of fear in my gut when I think of everything I’ve been through (and will continue to go through in the coming months and years), but I’d like to give myself permission, as my doctor did, to feel joy a little more fully, too. I’ve always been frugal with this emotion, bearing (stupidly, constantly) in mind a line from Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! claiming that the minute you let down your guard is “the instant which Fate always picks out to blackjack you.” But what else is there to do, really? The house always wins, and yet you have to play. That’s the rub.

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Healing is hard work

Consider the cucumber. We bought one at a plant sale my daughter’s school was having, and watching it grow has been fascinating. The students staffing the sale told us that cucumbers are climbing vines, and would need a trellis or cage to latch onto (if you’re an avid gardener, you already know this, but I’m a novice; I try to grow a few potted vegetables and herbs every summer, with varying degrees of success). We followed their instructions, and I was awed by the first little tendril that unfurled from the stem, delicately coiled as calligraphy. It listed far from the cage and I thought, there’s no way it will latch onto that! It seemed blind, like a worm or some deep sea creature, tonguing its way, vainly, into the air. But then, a day or so later, this tendril had somehow found the thin metal rib of the cage, and curled around it with such grace and precision that I felt oddly moved. That nature is ingenious and resourceful shouldn’t surprise me, but it did. It struck me as miraculous that this seemingly lost and fragile fledgling of a stem found what it needed in the night, even though it’s merely a rote machination of the plant–what it does, what it’s designed to do.

I’ve wondered if my body is functioning in a similar way. I wonder how much invisible work it does every night to heal and repair what has been ravaged. And I’ve wondered how it knows to do this, without any books, instruction, or bidding. I was in so much pain last week, and felt so vulnerable, that I couldn’t believe my doctors had sent me home to deal with it, alone. I don’t see my radiation oncologist again for six weeks. Six weeks! I would think to myself, enraged and incredulous that I’d been left to flounder through the hardest part of all this, unmonitored. But maybe it’s because there’s really nothing she could do for me, aside from prescribing the heavy regimen of pain meds. Maybe she knew that my body would begin to heal itself on its own, and my job now is to simply wait it out. Only it’s not so simple, because the process has been slow and strangely hidden from me. I wake each morning wondering how I will feel–whether the pain will have subsided some, or my energy returned. Whether my body, in its distress, will have found some kind of mooring.

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You can ring my bell

Yesterday, I reached a major–albeit, unsought and unwanted–milestone: my last radiation treatment. It was an emotional afternoon. Unlike Spider-Man, I chose not to take my mask home with me. But, like him and every other cancer patient treated at this center, I did ring the celebratory bell outside the waiting room when I finished. Everyone sitting nearby claps while the radiation techs and administrative staff sound noisemakers. I can’t believe I made it through the past six weeks (much less, the past five months since my diagnosis).

Several friends and family members have asked how I’ll be celebrating, and it’s frustrating to have to tell them that I’m not exactly out of the woods yet. My doctors warned me that I would probably feel the worst during the week following treatment and, so far, that’s been the case. My mouth is a swollen mess, my jaw aches, and painful new scar tissue has formed in my throat as a result of the radiation. I’ve been ordered to stay on the full (which is to say, maximum) dose of my various pain medications for the next ten days before I start to slowly wean off of them, one at a time. So a glass of champagne isn’t exactly in the cards for a while. To celebrate, I cried with my husband, came home, and took a nap.

Today, though, I feel slightly better than I did yesterday. I’m sure a large part of it is the sheer relief of knowing that this leg of the journey (which has been an arduous one) is behind me. I don’t have to go back to the hospital today at 3pm, as I have for so many miserable afternoons. I don’t have to go back tomorrow, either, or the day after that. When I think of this, it’s like taking a deep breath after holding it underwater, or under duress, for(seemingly)ever. But this is not the end. There are still follow-up appointments and scans and the attendant, agonizing period of waiting for their results before I’m officially in the clear. Remission–a word I once gave little thought to that now sounds so wonderful it has the ring of an incantation–is a long ways away. That said, I now also understand that the designation “survivor” is as much about surviving treatment–be it surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy–as it is the cancer, itself. And I survived this.

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I’ll take what I can get

This probably gives you a good sense of where I’m at today. The hours pass at a snail’s pace, but I’m growing accustomed to this. Time is marked mostly by the dosing of different medications, in-between which I sleep or make myself drink something. Monday is a big day, however: my last radiation treatment!

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I take my waking slow

A friend who visited the other day asked me how I’ve been passing the time, and it was difficult to formulate an answer. I’m on a short term medical leave from work, but the past few months have felt nothing like the summers I enjoy off as a teacher. Those days are usually filled with leisurely errands, cooking, reading, small projects around the house, our annual trips to the beach and the lake–in short, stuff I like to do that’s more of a challenge when I’m working. And well. But right now, I’m not. This is a hard thing to accept, both for myself and for others. I want to be able to say that I’m passing the time productively–that I’m keeping apace with the world and its various demands. Or that my role in it remains an active one… But illness is really more of a passive art, as I’m slowly learning.

For example, I’ve had to increase the dosage of my pain medication, which makes me drowsy and means I can no longer drive. The radiation also causes fatigue, so I spend a good part of the day sleeping. I actually love the hours in which I’m not awake because I don’t feel any pain or discomfort. I’ve even fantasized about being put into a medically induced coma for these last few weeks of treatment (which my generally pleasant, positive doctor has said I’ll want to “blot out of my memory”), then magically awakened, like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, when it’s all over.

The remaining portion of each day is now devoted to consuming the requisite amount of fluids, which I hate. I used to look forward to meals, but now I dread them. Swallowing is painful and requires a near herculean effort, so I work my way through a single glass of water or an 8oz. Ensure in, like, an hour. Because I’m losing weight and not getting many calories, I’ve not felt up to my daily walk. I’ll still go outside (as the weather has been beautiful), but mostly to sit on the deck or check the mailbox, savoring the sun on my skin.

In short, I’ve been convalescing. This is a rather foreign concept to our modern minds (not to mention, an outright affront to the busied, breakneck ethos of modern life), but it was once quite common. Pick up almost any 19th century novel and at least one character in it will be at–or headed to–some oceanside villa “to convalesce.” They’ll sit in a wheelchair on the shore, blanketed against the bracing sea winds, the salty air a supposed elixir of sorts. I feel oddly akin to them now, despite our differences in time and place. Just as I’m beginning to feel akin to the folks in the radiation waiting room. I see the same people at the same time every day, seated in mostly the same chairs. We smile wearily at one another, sometimes chatting a bit and sometimes not. It’s a fellowship I never sought, but will be strangely sorry to lose. Perhaps it will be succeeded by another one: survivors.

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Maybe I should just re-name my blog “I miss food”

I’m becoming quite the connoisseur of protein drinks. Apparently, this is the beverage of choice for gamers and coders. I’d say it has less of a metallic finish than Ensure, with hints of isomaltulose and soy lecithtin. The bouquet is barfy. Needless to say, I haven’t taken a solid shit in days (gross, I know. If you’re looking for a non-gross blog on cancer’s ravaging of the body, let me know when you find it). On the upside, I have stopped biting my nails. It’s a nervous habit I developed when I was about 9 or 10, but surgery and radiation have made this nearly impossible. I wish quitting had taken less extreme measures–I remember my dad offering to pay me $1 for each nail I stopped biting when I was a kid ($10 was a lot back then!). Maybe I can collect on that offer now.

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Radiation: Halfway there

After today’s appointment, I will be halfway through my treatment. I should have been halfway through this past Friday, but a week ago, the server to the radiation machines was down, so they sent me home without treatment one afternoon. I remember this being a little alarming. My doctor assured me that it wouldn’t affect the outcome of my treatment in any way. “The server was down once before,” she said, visibly annoyed. “That was about five years ago.”

It’s strange to think that possibly everything we rely on is vulnerable to some kind of breakdown–even the most advanced technology, state of the art machines, our bodies, our minds… Confronting this truth is difficult and, no doubt, leaves us reaching for all manner of props and crutches that seem more secure, or for distractions that evade it altogether. What are these, for me? I don’t ask because I want to condemn them, but because I want to recognize them more clearly for what they are. My thought is that, in doing so, I might also be better able to recognize their converse–the ways in which I am whole and present and functional now, despite the cancer and the treatment and its side effects.

The other day, when the radiation tech (whom I’ve gotten to know and like a little better) asked how I was doing, I confessed that it was getting harder–that I was in more pain than I had been before. She responded that this was a particularly tough treatment because it takes away a crucial function–several crucial functions, actually–that you’re so used to having (namely, speech and swallowing). It was a relief to have someone inside the medical profession acknowledge how hard this is. It freed me up from having to be so hard on myself.