Re: Happy early birthday!!!!!

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Randy Happy early birthday my thoughts are with you during this difficult time for you. I'm sure with your great spirit and enthusiam (sp) you will do great. Keep up your positive attitude. Again HAPPY EARLY BIRTHDAY!!!!!! Rosejackpoint_94401 wrote: 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

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