There Are No Words — September 1st

Parallels

There are pictures of my stoma later in this post. I haven’t posted a lot of these, as some people find it scary to look at.

Some of these are scary to look at. They’re after the “Meeting Doctors” section, so feel free to read that without having to worry about what treatment looks like.

2015.09.01 — Meeting Doctors

Estimated Energy Budget – 2015: 50¢

When You Go Out To The SunnyBrook

When you go out to the SunnyBrook
you don't want a big surprise

When you go out to the SunnyBrook
to look surgeons in their eyes

All you want to hear is good news
You're healing well and and feeling no blues

Today's the day the doctors all have their picnic.

I'm not sure just how much of the team we'll be seeing today. I have some questions about outcomes and risks with and without radiation (informed decisions means understanding the options) and about neck mobility / tightness (hooboy are my neck muscles and tendons under a lot of strain or what!).

Mostly I'm looking forward to getting the staples out so I can drain my no-more-lymphs better, and finding out when the stitches come out of my stoma.

...I'd post some of my stoma pictures here, but they're likely not for everyone, and I can't figure out how to hide them. Under bright light the stitches are blue, though. Who knew?

Be well.

Michael Halas pointed out an important distinction for these discussions:

There's one thing I want to warn you about, because I know you and I think I know what will bother you. There is probably a great deal of uncertainty in the answers (or information) you seek. While I think the choice to receive the treatment required is the right one in many, many cases , the outcomes and side effects are largely unpredictable. I do believe that the medical staff will provide the very best advice they can, and I have faith in your decision making on what to do, I also know that you are someone that thrives on accuracy and fullness of information. And, in my experience at least, I doubt you will get either - at least in terms of predicting future outcomes. Also, don't mistake confidence for certainty. I have no idea the doctors you are dealing with and I hate to make assumptions, but many doctors are confident people...and some patients can mistake that for certainty.

I also know you well enough to know you probably realize all of this already 😀...But just in case you didn't, or just as a reminder, I hope this helps.

This advice is something we should all keep in mind when visiting our experts.

3:30PM – Dr. D. Gives Good Appointment

This section was added on September 9th. I didn’t realized that Facebook would be keeping my posts in non-chronological order, so I didn’t find it on the day. It was a BIG day, too.

Staples out along with most of the stoma stitches (remainder will be absorbed). Kathleen and I learned a lot more about the type of cancer, next appoiblah blah blah I CAN TALK.

*ahem*

I may be a little excited.

Do I seem a little excited?

New video by Julian Sammy

I think I need to go change my pants.*

I’m pretty sure I’m a little excited.**

Right, I’m finishing my water, putting the harnesses (on the dogs why do I need to clarify this for you people oh my raviolis you’re all wackadoodle), and going for a stroll.

…Yeah. Excited.

_____

* Because it’s freakin’ 28°C out in the Beach and I’m going to walk the dogs and long pants are just not on.

** Why, what did you think I meant? Perv. You know who you are. Don’t ever change.

For comments on this portion of this post, see the entry for September 09, 2016.

2016.09.01

Estimated Energy Budget – 2016: 50¢

7:30PM – Stoma, Then and Now

Kathleen and I have been talking about my stoma. I was looking though pictures I took before, during, and after radiation. You’ll see some of these again over the coming months.

The stitches on top are silk, and dissolved away eventually. The bottom ones are nylon or something, and had to be cut out and pulled.

The bit of plastic is the one way valve that lets me speak. When I press against the big hole – the stoma – with my thumb, air I exhale is forced through the value, into my food way. That area vibrates – like a burp – and allows me to produce sound.

The flash shows the valve inside the TEP. The yellow bits are dried mucus – that is, boogers.

If this disturbs you, stop reading. This is just pretty compared to what you will see below.

This was taken after the bottom stitches were removed, along with the remaining staples.

Having the stitches and staples out made it a lot easier to clean off the snot. Normal respiratory systems eject that lung-goo into the mouth and then swallowed. Mine needs to be collected and cleaned some other way.

Mucus is amazing stuff.

This dried goo glued the silk stitches together, so three of them peeled off all at once, and the fourth was easy to peel off.

I’m telling you, that goo is amazing stuff. I recall peeling this off with tweezers.

That long streamer of snot was peeled off around the edges of my stoma.

This was taken just around the time I started radiation treatments.

You can see that the stoma is now more elongated than round. The shape has stabilized now, and is pretty similar to what you see here.

See that little white bump inside the stoma?

I didn’t know what it was, so I took a picture of it. Later, I discovered that it was a nylon stitch working its way out through my tissue.

The flash turned my skin white, but the autofocus caught something I didn’t expect.

This shows my airway, down to the point where it splits into two branches – one to each lung. I never noticed this before today. I just through it was a washed out and blurry picture that didn’t show the white bump that I was trying to see.

After a few weeks of radiation my skin was very tanned, and starting to break down in a few places.

You can see how raw and red the inner tissue is too. The granuloma on the right side of the picture was pretty gross looking.

This was November 2nd, about 5 weeks into my radiation treatments.

The granuloma did grow a bit over my treatments, but shrank away eventually.

This was November 16th. My last zapping was November 20th.

This is not the worst condition my neck was in. The damage from the radiation treatments really shows up about two weeks after the zap. The last week of November and first week of December were quite a bit worse. Some of the crusty bits around the stoma are snot, but there’s a fair bit of scabbing and such where my skin was burned.

By the time we reached January 2016 it was a lot better.

This was taken in the first week of January.

I’d lost a lot of weight at the time.

I’ve gained the weight back. :)

Okay, that’s all for tonight.