Been awhile, eh? Thought maybe I’d kicked off this old world and headed off to the beach somewhere?

No way.

Last week was fairly hellish, from a health point of view. Not eating enough (too much nausea), too much puking (ditto), and just not feeling it. Dropped the pain patch, though, and that seems to have made a tremendous difference in the nausea factor – meaning I only need to take three different things to keep the rolling under control.

Still not eating – or, rather, feeding through the tube – enough. We’re guessing that I’m getting about 1000 calories a day on a good day, and maybe 500 on a bad. Not enough, but I swear once I get finished with treatment and get this damn tube out, I’ll be much happier about eating that I am right now.

Still, the other numbers are making me feel better.

1 – the number of chemo sessions left
7 – the number of radiation treatments left
14 – the number of amifostene shots left

There will bemonthly visits to the various doctors over the next year, then every two months the following, then every three the third, and so on, until we reach the magical five year point, when we’ll just visit once a year.

The medical bill numbers keep going up, too, but that’s to be expected and I figure we’re nearing 100K now with everything, but not including the facilities charges for the radiation treatments themselves. We’ll see what they come to at some point.

They’ve changed my radiation treatments this week as well. Instead of treating three locations (right, left, top), they are now treating five – two more lateral (left/right), except with electrons. This is to the spinal area, and the reason they do this, so they tell me, is so they can treat the posterior spinal area without hitting the spinal cord, since electrons do not travel so deeply as the general wide field radiation does. A long as they don’t turn me into Quasimodo, I’m agreeable.

Tomorrow will be a long day on the table as they continue to shrink the treatment areas, which means more x-ray films while I am in lockdown. This is also apparently a normal course of action as you move to the end of treatment. It simply makes for a long, tiring day with all the machinations and the Xanax it takes to stay calm while the techs do their awesome job.