A lot of you read my blog to know what’s happening with my cancer and my recovery. I have been posting more eclectic posts as I recover and I find my life isn’t 100% focused on my cancer. Still, I have a lot going on.
- I’m still not eating with my mouth. I need to use my feeding tube. I have a feeding pump that injects 8oz of my “formula” into my belly in about an hour. Any faster than that and I get very, very nauseous.
- I am starting to get a bare minimum of taste back, but I am still not making saliva. Last week I got a nasty case of oral thrush as a result. See, I was kind of tasting the Fuze Black & Green tea, so I stocked up on it and was drinking it orally as much as possible. The sugars in the tea were the feeding frenzy the fungi needed to thrive. Because I don’t have saliva, I don’t naturally wash the fungi away the way you do.
- My strength is increasing, but I am still very weak. I took it upon myself yesterday afternoon to go to the grocery store and do the week’s shopping. I almost couldn’t finish. I seriously considered leaving my cart in the aisle and driving home; I was that tired. Only pride kept me going and, when I got home, I crashed for 3 hours on the couch.
- My hair continues to thin. My chemotherapy was kind to me in that I didn’t lose clumps of hair, but every day in the shower I stop the drain with hair that falls out. I don’t know when the thinning will stop – but I hope it does soon.
- My blood counts should be returning to normal about now, although it will be a couple of weeks before I am out of the woods. That’s why I was so paranoid this week and last as every child in my house got the flu.
- The thick mucus in my mouth is getting significantly better – I barely use my “spit cup” anymore at all. Mostly it’s in the morning and after I try to eat something with my mouth.
- Items I have eaten orally in the past week: 2 bites mashed potatoes, two bites chicken nugget, small handful of Apple Jacks, one goldfish cracker, one bite of pizza. The problem is, the initial bite tastes almost normal, but subsequent ones taste like ash or cardboard. They say it could be months before I recover my taste, but the fact that I have some taste already is a heartening sign.
- I still only weigh 159lbs. Check me out:
- I am up to 5-6 cans of my formula a day, but I really need to be having 7 if I want to put back on a little weight.
- Because I have lost so much weight, my diabetes is virtually non-existent. Also, my blood-pressure, which has been borderline high for years, is completely normal.
- I have been getting (no pun intended) pains in my neck where my surgery was. My surgeon told me to expect this as my nerve endings started to recover. Still, it’s no fun to have those sharp, biting, pains in the neck.
So the big thing for me now is to recover my strength and a little weight. I can’t walk across the yard without getting tired. Every day I try to take a little walk now. There is a gorgeous lake right by my house, Lake Davis. To walk around it is about 3/4 of a mile. There are benches every few hundred yards – so I walk the lake and sit as I get tired. I need to get this strength back – because I am going stir crazy here at the house.
Yesterday was the worst – I am so bored that I want to scream. So – my mission is to recover my strength and get back to work. I am a little nervous about going back to work with my feeding tube – it’s not something I want a lot of people to see – but I suppose I don’t really have a choice.
So there’s my status, in a nutshell, people.
