Greetings all! It is time for a medical update… well in fact it’s very overdue. And the thing about my physical health is how much it affects my mental health. I really don’t feel like doing anything I mean literally anything which includes for instance, posting an update in my blog. Even something as simple as the emails that I have been meaning to send for over a week and that’s just an e-mail so the point is that during much of this journey I sometimes just wanna stare out into space. I mean television does the job as marginally better than staring out into space, but that’s about it.
That’s especially true at times like these past few days. Every once in a while I am going to a hospital which is located over an hour away to get chemotherapy where they attach a kind of mild chemo to me by way of a bottle to a semi-permanent port I now have under my arm going into a vein close to my pit as you’ll see in the picture I will post and facebook. I’ve spent the last five days with the slow drip of poison going into me. For more details go into the blog with a link here for anybody that doesn’t have it and wants it. D-coda-blog.com and if you go to end the section that says cancer this time as scroll down to medical update January 23 to get the rest of this update the
I estimate that I have had the port for a couple of months now and it needs to be cleaned once every week or so and it got infected one time and then the most recent time something that they did where there was a whole lot of twisting and turning going on with a needle entering my arm and that was less than pleasant. But it is just part of the process and by no means the worst of it. But not complaining because I can still move around and those parts of my life that are joyous are very joyous so I will take it.
I do try to keep moving and Diana is great for that because she loves to walk and I love to be with her so I push myself to go for walks with her almost daily but still a walk of 100 or 200 yards has me gasping for breath as though I did a fast jog the whole way even though I’m just walking slowly.
My coordination is suffering as well. And there are multiple occasions where I stagger and almost fall during the course a week and in fact one time I did land in the mud. Anyway I’ve developed a new pain in my right hip joint which they say is related to the cancer and is coming on fairly rapidly and as far as intensity and duration end. It is one of the areas of most intense pain for me now hope especially when getting out of the car or walking upstairs so any kind of weight is pretty darn unpleasant. There’s been a pain developing that is often on located in the general area of my lower left area of my rib but my guess is that it feels muscular but it comes and goes in a way that tells me this not muscular and more than likely cancerous lung.
Some really good news is that I went to the dentist recently checked my teeth and jaw bones which were placed at risk during the radiation into my throat during that tongue cancer and that all looks perfect which is great news. Another bit of great news for me relative to that matter is that I just learned recently that that is not a lifelong concern as I had believed and are just a concern that lasts for a couple of years post radiation so I suppose that means that the worry about getting infection in my jaw bones and having to deal with those complications is over, so one less thing to worry about.
So the next thing is that on the 31st we are going to get a full body scan to see what’s happening with the cancer and to get another 4 day chemo drips and the doctors will assess what is happening their self that will be an exciting post regardless of the what the results are so if you follow this then early February will be the next post with pretty important information.