It Might Get Messy

Ray Davies wrote “gotta stand and face it…life is sooo complicated”… . Hard to argue with at the best of times. Ray wanted to “get away from…the complicated life son.” But you run afoul of a complex pathology like cancer in a structurally and functionally intricate area like your throat and, and the odds are good that things are gonna be complicated.


You also know from all those late nights watching syndicated re-runs of The A Team that “Plan B” is the funny one with, as Gimley the Dwarf points out toward the end of the Return of the King “near certainty of death, small chance of success? What are we waiting for?”


Here’s the deal, from day 2 in the hospital. Yesterday’s surgery was intended to plug fluids leaking into the spaces in my neck and chest where they cut out the lymphatics last  month on a more or less prophylactic basis. 


Once they got inside, they found what looked like the source of the leakage. But the tissue was too beaten up by the radiation to take sutures—they just kept ripping out. They improvised a fix with some sort of geotextile fabric stitched to the leaking vessel, but didn’t sound real confident in the post-op briefings.


Today it’s clear that things are still leaking. Thus the A-Team Plan B. In this one, they stop feeding me by tube into my gut and bring in some specialist team that hooks me up to get nutrition intravenously. Apparently the thinking is that if we can give my beat-to-shit GIT and lymph system a vacation, they will recover with less travail.


The whole thing sounds sort of wackily complicated to me. But I keep this in mind—in the A Team, Plan B ALWAYS worked. 


I’ll keep you updated. Thanks for being here for me, everyone. I’m not sure what the hell Plan C might be at this point, but it’s a sure bet it’ll be fun given the reality of Plan B. We’ll see!