This is Shannon’s last week of radiation… hooray! It has been very rough on him but having the end in sight helps a little bit. He is unable to eat any solids at all and keeping his weight loss to an acceptable level has become difficult. The doctor wasn’t very pleased with his weight loss this week. He is still over the acceptable total of weight loss but he is losing weight too fast right now. Five pounds a week for the past 2 weeks. We are working on raising his calorie intake and he’s been doing better with it the past couple of days. The combo of chemo and radiation together have taken a bit of a toll on him and he is weak and tired. Still fighting though and that’s what matters most. He and I are both still very hopeful that all this is going to be worth it in the end and he will have a good outcome.
The radiation oncologist has scheduled a CT scan for him the first week of January and we will see him again in the second week of January to go over those results and see where we go from there.
After our big scare last week, we have been in touch again with the chemo oncologist. He would like to do more chemo but doesn’t feel Shannon is quite up for it. We will be going back to see him again on December 19 and it is likely he will have at least one more treatment of chemo starting that day most likely. We will see that doctor first though and he can assess how Shannon is doing and make a better decision then. For right now the plan is to let Shannon rest and heal a little from the treatments, get his strength back up a little and then go from there. The chemo alone will probably not be as hard on him as the chemo radiation combination he’s been doing. They have assured us that waiting to continue the chemo will not hurt his outcome in the long run and it is much better for him to wait until he is stronger.
For now, we are waiting for Friday… the last day of radiation. We may not go out dancing but we will celebrate quietly and look forward to a time when he is well and feeling better. One day at a time is what we are trying to do but we are also trying to look forward to a better time. We know this is all going to work out and so we are still hopeful and determined not to let this rough patch get us down.
To us the waiting in between procedures seems so long. Really things have gone relatively quickly from the time Shannon discovered the mass in his throat but it seems like things drag on and take forever. We have a million questions between us and yet whenever we get the next bit of news from any of the doctors we are so blown away by what we are hearing, we can’t remember to ask. I’ll be having to keep a list I think.
Our Radiation Oncologist (Dr. Sombek) sent us to see a regular Oncologist because they are considering doing radiation and chemo at the same time to try and shrink or maybe even completely get rid of the tumor and the swelling in the lymph nodes without needing surgery. When we spoke to that Oncologist (Dr. Grow), he was thinking of a more aggessive treatment that would entail 5 days of chemo in a very strong coctail of drugs and then moving forward with the radiation and once a week lighter chemo. Dr. Grow and Dr. Sombek are supposed to get togther and come to some conclusion and some choices by tomorrow when we see Dr. Sombek. They will both have the results of the PET scan by then and can make a more educated plan.
The waiting is so very hard for us but we want the doctors to come up with the very best plan of attack. So we wait. Maybe tomorrow will bring us some more information and a little bit closer to whatever treatment it will be. I think at this point both of us just want to get started so we can put something behind us in this long road we are facing. We try our very best to live in the moment and not get ahead of ourselves in our thoughts. It isn’t easy but we both feel it’s best to try and be that way. We can’t change the past, we can’t predict the future. We can only live in the here and now and try and be happy in it.
My husband had woken up with a bit of a scratchy throat and so he looked into the back of his throat. He saw some specks and odd colored flesh at the back of his throat where his tonsils would have been had they not been removed when he was a child. He probably wouldn’t have worried about this and just written it off as a cold starting but he also saw a mass back there beginning from that place on his tonsil to the back of his tongue. It didn’t look right to him so he called and got a walk in appointment with our Primary Care Physician. He didn’t like the look of it at all and sent him to an ENT doctor. We had an appointment for 2 weeks from that day. It seemed too long to wait for something this serious and this scary. We called and found a cancellation for a week sooner to see Dr. Baylor our ENT. He didn’t hesitate and gave us the diagnosis we had been dreading. Nasopharangyl Cancer. A biopsy was done the next Friday and confirmed Dr. Baylor’s suspicisions and our fears. He referred us to Dr. Sombeck a radiology oncologist at the Florida Hospital Cancer Center. We are looking at a squamus cell cancer in Stage III. This means while it’s still small it has spread to two lymph nodes in his neck.