In fact, all the guesstimates I can put together from the doctors, therapists, and nurses suggest that eating is going to be unequivocally messy for the rest of my life. Between the tumor tissue now gone, the throat tissue roasted by the radiation, and the dysfunctional epiglottis, my oral apparatus is no longer engineered for effective food consumption. Which may be just as well. I’ve been hungry lately. Lacking the kicked-up metabolic residue of the radiation, and being barely able to exercise without hurting myself, I’m pretty sure I could bloat up in no time. If I could eat. Given how fussy and uncomfortable swallowing is, I have at least a chance to get back into some kind of reasonable physical condition before I get too massively overweight.
Dr. H is sympathetic to my gustatory discomfort. But realistic. He points out that certain post-treatment conditions represent “the new normal”. But that while I can expect to be uncomfortable and inept when eating, I need to keep on the solid food. And that I should NOT have to deal with substantive throat pain going forward.
Which, of course, is why he was peering around in my throat with a scope earlier this week. That pain I reported weeks ago, coupled with the white-hot positive PET scan and radiologist’s positive read of the follow-up MRI got me back in the operating room as we discussed a few weeks ago. The negative findings of the laboratory analyses of the biopsied tissue were, by that time, unexpected by pretty much all concerned, including Dr. H.
Still, he figured we should keep an eye on things. So he shoves the scope in via my sinuses and says “Hmm….hmmm….things look good. Good. Except there’s a big crater in your tongue where I grabbed the biopsy tissue. Hang on, I’ll show you the film.”
And he did. And indeed, there is a big crater in the back of my tongue. A bit of a scabby spot on the adjacent throat, apparently where the remote scalpels had to swing to get the proper angle to hack out the chunks of tongue needed for the biopsy. And the biopsy itself, it turns out, was pretty violent.
Those of you with weak stomachs may want to turn away at this point. Following is a series of photos Dr. H took while doing the biopsy. First up is my throat as it was.
See that sort of red, inflamed looking area filling the right side of the triangle (apex up, whole thing is actually the back of my tongue)? That’s the place the PET scan and MRI indicated there could be new tumor tissue forming. In fact, that red inflamed scabby looking surface is precisely what a tumor looks like. Thus selling Dr. H on the concept of tumor recurrence in my throat.
Next is the trough in my tongue where Dr. H took the first slab of biopsy tissue.
That’s that nice, neat little trench through the blood.
Then there’s the much larger pit from which several biopsy samples have been removed.
Finally, there’s the tongueburger left in place after all the tissue was dissected out and sent to the lab.
And that tongueburger is where there’s now a crater. Dunno if it’s permanent. Doesn’t seem to have affected my speech much, although my tongue gets exhausted after a couple hours of lecturing (as I found out working Dr. K’s class at UMass last Monday).
But it hasn’t made swallowing any easier. Keeping my overall weight and fitness in mind, hopefully it’s made it a little more difficult. It’s uncomfortable. But it’s keepin’ me thin!
Thanks for stopping by, everyone. I got some great photos in the woods this weekend, I’ll work to get a docviper posted during the week. And to get my pro weblog back on track after most of the summer off. That’s the one problem with being healthy again—out of excuses for sloth!
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