update

[Guest guest]

Just to let you know - my chemo starts tomorrow. Because my cancer

is growing so fast, the doctors decided to use different

chemotherapy agents, and as a result I will not have to have a port

surgically installed to drip in what they had been planning to use.

However, the agents they will use are toxic enough and have enough

nasty side effects that I will be sedated, and I will also be

getting some IV benadryl to combat expected side effects, so I'll be

pretty loopy. Same treatment next Tuesday, and then, if all the

appointments and timing work out, I will begin the five-days-a-week

radiation treatments the following Monday or Tuesday, with chemo on

the first day, three weeks later, and on the last day.

While I continue to feel pretty good (well, up to maybe 9:30

tomorrow morning, anyway), and still able to eat without too much

difficulty, there is no doubt that I can feel that the tumor has

grown. It becomes increasingly difficult to swallow solid foods, and

my voice has become incresingly distorted and weaker. It's getting

higher, which suggests to me that the air is vibrating in a much

narrower passage (which I am calling the piccolo-versus-tuba

theory). I hope I don't lose speech altogether, although it would

surely only be temporary - there's nothing near my vocal cords or

larynx.

I have been doing all I can to keep the weight up, and I am now down

to 243, but I have stayed between there and 249 for almost two weeks

now, so I am fighting the good fight there. No matter how the

radiation affects my ability to eat, though, I expect that I will be

down a hundred more pounds over the next three to four months. That

would be a loss of 50% of my body mass in just over five months - a

good bit faster and farther, I daresay, than most WLS patients. When

I look at weight loss that rapid while under the strain of the

cancer and the therapies, I count every second I spent exercising as

having built a wall between life and death from cardiac exhaustion.

My 49th birthday is coming up on March 31, but since I may have

started radiation by then, we decided to celebrate a few days early,

this coming Sunday. Here's hoping it won't be my last!

Randy