Yowch! 4 more treatments

After today, I have 4 more radiation treatments.

And how am I doing, you ask? Well, as expected, symptoms have continued to increase. Yowch! No surprise, but it sure is grueling. I didn’t lose weight last week, so that’s good…but eating is so darn painful!

I’m currently minimizing my talking, because my mouth hurts so much. It’s also hard to understand me. C is being a good sport making various phone calls for me (pharmacy, insurance, FSA, etc.). Over the weekend, I went for a walk with a friend, and planned in advance it was both our jobs to make sure I didn’t talk much.

Also, the skin on the right side of my neck is getting burned, like a very bad sunburn, from the radiation. If you see me, I’ll have a white thing around my neck. It looks somewhat dramatic. From my perspective, though, it feels soothing. It’s a “dressing” which basically means a wound covering – in my case, manuka honey beneath a pad, and light elastic to keep it in place.

I expect over the next few weeks my symptoms will continue to increase before they turn around. In that time, I might not be up for posting as much (especially if I start some more significant pain meds), but tomorrow I’ll post about the radiation treatment itself. Spoiler alert: the treatment is surprisingly short.

Here are recent photos, snapshots of my daily experience: