The short and the long....

For those of you who would like to cut to the executive summary, I've divided this week's post into two sections: The Short and The Long.

The short version of how I'm doing this week: cranky, bitchy, hoarse, irritable, insomniac, eating most food through a straw, and my fingernails still hurt.

Type A personalities may stop here -- all others, please continue ;-}

Me, with squeezy applesauce last night.

The long version is a bit more positive, thankfully. ;-} In spite of all of the above, I'm hanging in, and the doctors continue to be pleased with the progress that I'm making.  Most all of the negatives are directly attributable to the side effects of the various therapies that I have going on, and it appears that even though they expect the esophageal irritation to continue to worsen over the next couple of weeks from the radiation, it's not intolerable, and we don't expect that it would become so.

The other good news from my doctor's appointment this week is that next Monday is tentatively scheduled to be my last chemo treatment. YAY!  We're still waiting on confirmation of that from the oncologist, but the standard course of treatment does not include chemo during the last partial week of radiation. 

And speaking of waiting, we're gearing up to do a lot of that.  As I've mentioned in the past, after the end of radiation, there's not too much that can be done until my body repairs the damage that has been done by the x-rays.  The beauty of radiation is, in fact, that the healthy cells in the body have the marvelous ability to reconstruct themselves -- the bastard cancer cells lack this, and are therefore consigned to oblivion.  So we're going to have a quiet period from mid-October until around the Thanksgiving time frame, when my next PET scan is scheduled.  Right after Thanksgiving, I'll have another endoscope and biopsy, and then we'll get more of an idea of what progress we've made.

Sounds like a lot of waiting to be done, and I'm not a very patient person, so I don't look forward to it much -- I'm a lot more at ease when we're actively working on fighting the thing, but if the point of all of this is to learn something, then perhaps one of my lessons is on patience.

My apologies for a rather disjointed post full of flotsam and jetsam -- I think my fitfully sleepless nights are starting to catch up to me and dull my otherwise razor-keen intellect (HA!).

Thank you all for sticking with me -- and I know I'm behind on some emails and text messages.  Please don't be offended if I haven't been in contact as closely as in the past -- things are catching up with me a bit, but every communique is much appreciated.

Y'all take care.  Until next time,

J