It Might Get Messy

Bob Dylan asked “Senor…Senor…can you tell me where we’re headin’? Lincoln County…or Armageddon…?”. A couple weeks ago, still pumped on the surgical drugs, realizing that the war was won with the disappearance of malignant tissue, and that the remaining battle was to recover from the treatment and surgery, I figured I was on my way to Lincoln County. You know the place. Rolling hills in the countryside, green grain fields, wood lots, small towns with ice cream counters and ancient hardware stores (a lot like Ashtabula, Ohio, if you’ve ever been there). Comfortable. Painless. Quiet. Nice place to visit for a while.


But it was not to be. Absent an acute recurrence of the cancer or some less exotic contretemps (getting hit by a bus, say), I’m not gonna make Armageddon any time soon. But I sure as hell seem to be on the trail, and struggling with the trail at that. I’ve been incredibly sick the past couple of weeks. Partly, I suspect, because I just didn’t have any real understanding of the trauma associated with the surgery. The primary objective was to get rid of my lymphatic system in places it might have picked up stray cancerous cells. Turns out, this means Dr. H dug down to lymph-node depth, stripped  back the entire layer of tissue from my jaw through my shoulders and down past my neck, sliced out the lymphatics, and pasted it all back together. 


Oh. He apologized for not getting me photos of the surgery, but explained that he “ran into a little bleeding problem”. Which it turns out was that one of my radiation-stressed  jugular veins fell apart into shreds at the touch of the probe. Apparently it took him quite a while to figure out how to halt the blood flow and do something to replace the fragmented vein. 


Meanwhile, since he closed me back up, I’ve healed on the easy side (my right), but the difficult side, the left, continues to leak fluids into the unhealed space Dr. H opened up in my tissue layers. And it’s left me exhausted, in pain, and a bit dysfunctional. 


Hopefully I’ll start to recover a little quicker from here. I’m still losing weight, so that’s got to stop. This week I’m gonna try to kick my butt back into some functional gear. I’ll let you know how it goes. Thanks for stopping by—even if it’s just for some whining. I’ll get over it. I promise substantively non-whiny blog entries starting soon!!!