I gotta go make a milkshake.
Ok, that’s better. Big slug each of Breyer’s chocolate and coffee, a few crystals of decaf instant, heap of artificial sweetener (no sense re-triggering blood sugar problems just because I’m trying to learn how to eat like a human being), big glug each of heavy cream and milk. Delicious. Still hard to get down. After half a dozen swallows, the sore spot on the back of my throat starts to sting. With each swallow a tiny drip slips down my airway, and another perches annoyingly on my epiglottis. Sigh. I’ll get through a few hundred calories of it before giving up and going to take a pain killer.
Felt good enough on Friday to take the day off and go out to the Catoctin Ridge to look for copperheads. Didn’t find any. I did manage to get in a pretty good--almost too good—hike. By the time I’d gone a couple thousand meters into the woods and gained a couple hundred in altitude, I was completely lost and exhausted. Had to turn back to my sore muscles and a wheeze rhythm—walk 6 steps, crouch for 30 seconds, walk 6, crouch, 6 more, sit and pump water into the tube… . Talk about annoying. Except, it does make for very quiet woods stalking, something I find difficult when I’m at full strength. On one of my longer sit-downs, a waterthrush flew into the understory vegetation in front of me and picked insects off the branches for a good 10 minutes. Oddly, it was 6 or 7 meters up off the ground. I can’t recall ever seeing one off the ground in my 50 odd years of birding.
I visited my radiation oncologist earlier in the week. She palpated my throat, stuck an endoscope through my sinuses to poke around visually, sniffed my breath (did I mention she’s a very hands-on kind of doc?). She says there’s a mess of scar tissue all over the place, but she believes I’m clean of cancer. We’re gonna have to await the PET scan upcoming and the neck dissection to follow to be sure of that. But this lady doesn’t sugar-coat anything. I’m pretty sure if she didn’t have good reason to say so, she would have kept silent. So that’s good.
Got to see the hospital staff who were my all-day every-day buddies while I was being treated. Everyone was in a good mood. Only Tracy (of Tracy & Traci, my radiation technicians) was in, but she thought I looked svelte at 195 pounds. I suppose so. I’m pretty sure the last time I weighed less than 200 pounds was my freshman year of high school. No wonder I’m weak. My physiology isn’t used to surviving without a big honkin’ backlog of lipid deposit to call on for energy reserves!
Did I mention that cosmetically I’m pretty much a wreck? The surgeon is going to do some cosmetic reconstruction on my throat, which will look hollow when the big hunks of scar tissue are gone. I’ve aged noticeably, so instead of looking like a jovial overweight dork, I resemble a frail old-guy dork. Can’t go to the barber because the skin on my neck and scalp is still peeling from the radiation frying. So I purchased a hair clipper to do an interim buzz until I’m back in a regular grooming regime. If my first attempt looks wacky enough, I’ll a post photo for you next week.
Hang in there, everybody. Thanks for stopping by. There is new material up around the horn this week, and hopefully I’ll be able to keep on top of it for the next few weeks at least. So if you have a mo’, surf on over and visit http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/, http://docviper.livejournal.com /, and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . Talk to you next week!
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