The Swallowing Adventure

If you remember last week's lame blog entry, you may remember that I promised pictures, so here we go.

First, Bryan was here for a visit. Here are my men together:

Vic's family came up to visit Bryan. Vic's sister Alice brought a lovely tart:

Vic's sister Patty brought delicious cupcakes:

Vic was his usual selfless self, foregoing these treats to make sure there was enough for the rest of the family. However, he did have his regular lunch, which he thoroughly enjoyed. Much more than he would have enjoyed the tart or the cupcakes. Much more. Mhm.

This is about as close to pouty as he ever gets. Poor baby.

In addition to promising pictures, I also mentioned his endoscopy. So what could be better than a picture of him at his endoscopy?!

Don't worry, peeps, he was just mugging for the camera. He wasn't really nervous. ;-)

And here he is after:

Pretty much the same; maybe a bit less perky.

I also mentioned the barium swallow on last week's blog. So that happened on Wednesday this week. It was awful. Not for me, because I was just in the waiting room. But Vic said it was one of the worst procedures he's ever had, and let's remember that he lost a kidney 15 years ago, had an angiogram seven years ago and died last year. The doctor wanted him to take a pill. A pill! The same evil contraption that nearly choked him to death a couple of weeks ago! He warned the doctor, "Uh, this isn't going to work." And they said, "Well, take it anyway." So he did, and guess what happened? You can't? You're not trying hard enough. That's right. It got stuck. Now, except for the fact that he had a pill lodged in his throat, this was actually a lot of fun for Vic as he watched the medical community kick into high gear trying to find something to help him get the pill unstuck. And the upside to all of this is that he was vindicated—the pill got stuck while someone was watching, and now he doesn't have to feel like a hypochondriac.

The doctor's office called us the next day to tell us the official results: there is a narrowing of the throat that is causing pills to get stuck. And what did they want Vic to do? Another barium swallow. That's right. Another of the worst procedure he's ever had. Fortunately, they made it very clear this time there would be no pill involved.

So I called over to get it scheduled. This was on Thursday, October 27. "The first available appointment we have is November 9," the scheduler said. I deflated. Now we know there is an obstruction, and we have to wait for two weeks to get it taken care of? So I put on my best disappointed voice—which did not take much effort—and said, "Oh, really?" "Yeah," she said, "the speech therapist only has one appointment a day, and she's booked until then." "Oh," I said, continuing with my disappointed voice. "I see. Well, maybe you could call us if there is a cancellation? My husband can't swallow, you see, and the only thing in the way of his getting rid of his feeding tube is the ability to swallow."

The scheduler took pity on my and must have taken my sob story to the speech therapist, because she called back a few hours later and asked if we could do it the next day. Normally the speech therapist is off on Fridays, but she was going to be in for some other reason and agreed to give Vic his test. And once we got that swallow study scheduled, we were able to schedule another procedure with the gastrointestinal (GI) doctor on Monday (more on that later), which is great, because after that, the GI doctor goes on some sort of vacation (can you imagine?) and isn't available until November 11.

Vic's second barium swallow was much less traumatic than the first, and he got to see a video of his swallowing. It was extremely cool because it was an X-ray video, and he was wearing his glasses. So he looked like a skeleton wearing glasses and drinking stuff. Ummm, OK, it was much cooler than it sounds. Anyway, the kind and flexible speech therapist showed us all the things that were going on:

• He definitely has a narrowing of the throat. She thinks it is scar tissue from the radiation.
• He is getting a little liquid stuck in his epiglottus (no, I am not going to look up how to spell that at 9:30 on a Sunday night), which then trickles down his airway.
• He is getting a little liquid trickling down his airway even without the epiglottus (no, I'm still not looking it up) situation.
• Then he is getting a little liquid on his vocal chords, which is causing his raspy voice.

We really learned a lot about the mechanisms for swallowing and breathing, and she gave him some swallowing tips that have been really helping him.

Now, about that second procedure—he's having another upper endoscopy tomorrow, but where the last one was exploratory, this one is a treatment. They're going to do a dilation and try to open up his throat. This is awesome news, but of course, it is a little scary. So please be thinking of him tomorrow at 11. (Don't think about me; I'm not having a procedure. I'll just be in the waiting room. Send all your thoughts to him!)

So what are we looking at now? Well, the corner is still a long way away, but he is marching inexorably toward it. (Not really. He's baby-stepping toward it, but "marching inexorably" makes me sound smart, and let's face it: this blog is all about me.) Because a lot of good taste is coming back, we are hoping tomorrow's dilation allows him to swallow more than just Jell-O and ... well, Jell-O. The sooner he can swallow, the sooner he can get off those [insert long string of adjectival curse words here] cans of "food." They make him nauseated all day long every day, which pretty much makes him unable to do anything but recover in between feedings. [Insert long string of adjectival curse words here] "food"!!!!! If he can do that, then he'll be at the corner before you can say "Bob's your uncle." Or maybe "Bob's your uncle who farts a lot at Thanksgiving and always gets drunk and tells secrets that were much better left untold."

So that's my much longer, much more informative and (hopefully) slightly more entertaining update for the week.

I often like to leave you with a picture of Vic and Wags, and I happen to have a really good one:

Have a good week, everyone, and I'll catch up with you as soon as I can!

Quick and Dirty Update

So, I want the blog to be entertaining, but mostly, it's about disseminating information. So since I skipped last week's post, and this week I'm too tired to make it entertaining, I'll do a little Jack Webb: Just the facts, ma'am.

• I'm sure we all remember the good news from the last blog post—taste is back.
• Well la dee freakin' da—swallowing is not. That's right. Now that food tastes good, he can't swallow it. In fact, this week, he got a pill—a tiny little pill—stuck in his throat and he felt like he was going to choke to death.
• The ear, nose and throat (ENT) doctor said he should go to a gastrointestinal (GI) doctor to open up his throat. Our regular doctor agreed, so Vic had an upper GI endoscopy procedure done on Friday. Unfortunately, they didn't find any constriction in the throat. There was a little inflammation in the stomach and esophagus, so the GI doctor prescribed him a Prilosec-like drug in a powdered form (since it was the Prilosec that got stuck in Vic's throat). Also, he will be having a "barium swallow" on Wednesday to see if they can see anything wrong with the swallowing mechanism. He might need a little swallowing therapy. We'll see.

So next week, I'll write a better post that includes pictures from last week (Vic's son visited, so the whole family came up!), maybe a picture of Vic before his endoscopy, and news about the barium swallow. Maybe I'll even scare up something funny.

Sorry for the lame post, but at least you're updated. :-)

Here Comes the Sun

Here comes the sun, doo doo doo doo,
Here comes the sun, and I say,
It's all right.

And besides beautiful sunflowers from a friend (thanks, Linnae!), nothing says "sunshine" more than a recovering spouse.

So let's get to it!

What's still bad this week? Well, sure—the mucous. Plus he's having one or two coughing fits a day that are like coughing up a lung. And although most pain is gone, the pain that remains is so far down his throat that existing pain medications can't reach it. What about the Vicodin, I hear you ask. Well, the Vicodin is a really, really, really big pill that's hard to swallow, so it's not working out so well. And finally, there's still an overall feeling of malaise—just an "I may be feeling better than before, but I'm tired of not feeling good" feeling. I know. That's a lot of feelings.

But what's good this week? Taste. That's right, folks, you heard it here first. I said taste. TASTE. No, it's not perfect, but it's a pretty big baby step. I went to Atlanta for a few days earlier this week and brought home some pralines—always a Love Shack favorite. I handed him a small bite. He gingerly put it to his lips and took a bite. And ... and ... not only did it not taste horrible, but it actually tasted good! Now swallowing—that's another story. He couldn't swallow the praline very well. It got hung up in (what's that, Liz? You know the answer already?), that's right, the mucous. Same with the oatmeal he tried the next morning. But he did drink a whole can of Pepsi the day I came home, and now he's trying other new things. Last night:

Vegetable soup! No, it's not what I would have tried for my first foray into food, but I don't suppose bun-burger-cheese-bun would have been advisable. Anyway, no he did not eat that whole bowl, but he ate some, and it wasn't disgusting. Then he tried some ice cream. Guess what? Yummy! And he drank another whole can of Pepsi! This morning, a bite of banana (yum) and a bite of apple (yum, but stuck in the throat, so no thank you).

So taste is coming back, and we're really grateful for that, but it's just a baby step. Swallowing is still an issue, and reintroducing food into a tummy that's had only an Ensure-like substance in it since July is dicey. So we're not booking a table at the Flagstaff House just yet. But Thanksgiving is looking more promising.

Now I know many of you are clinging to the edge of your seats wondering what is up with Wags? Well, Wags is doing her normal Wagsian thing, which is to say waiting for someone to throw the ball.

Also, she is really excited to report that she got a new toy this week: Snakey!

Snakey has already made friends with Ball. And yes, Snakey's squeezy noise thingy has already been destroyed. It's the first thing Wags does with a new toy—make the noisy part go away.

So the week—well, it turned cold here, but we are still warmed by the love of friends and family, each other, and Snakey.

Sun, sun, sun, here it comes.

The View

Last week, Vic went to the store for some medicine and he asked if I needed anything. I knew he wanted me to say "no," but I definitely needed something. I started writing on a sticky note, and writing and writing and writing, and I knew he was probably getting a little frustrated. Like, "I'm tired, and all I want to do is get my medicine. I can't be hopping all around the store to get you Twizzlers and shaving cream."

I handed him the sticky note.

He laughed and said he would like that too. And even though he couldn't find the cure in a jar at the Safeway, he did find that some things improved this week:

• The mucous is a little less mucousy
• The pain is a little less painful—so much so that he has stopped taking his pain medication
• The redness/sunburn in his throat area has peeled and he now looks normal in that area.
• The fatigue is a little less tiring—he is not taking as many naps
• The whisper voice has become the froggy voice

So, yea!!!

But perhaps you will notice what has not improved:

• Taste. He is still not enjoying food at all. Although he has had a spoon of chicken soup that didn't disgust him, and a spoon of Jell-O that wasn't the worst thing in the world, he had a spoon of his beloved lemon pudding that was just gross. Still waiting "patiently." And yes, those quotation marks are necessary.
• In addition, he is having great difficulty swallowing pills, which is a new symptom (I guess you can't have it all, eh?), and he is coughing and sneezing a lot more.

I like to look at the excess coughing and sneezing as his body's way of saying "Dude, I am recovering. I am trying to expel all the crap you took in during your treatment as well as these nasty, dead cancer cells. I am doing that with mucous. You got a problem with that?" No, body, I do not.

Also, we saw the ear, nose and throat doctor this week. Vic had had some pox-like thingies (the technical term) in his mouth that the radiation oncologist hadn't seen before, so she sent him to the ENT. By the time he got in, the pox-like thingies were gone, but the doctor took a look anyway. This conversation went something like this:

DOCTOR: Wow. You have a pretty bad case of mucousitis.
VIC: Yeah.
DOCTOR: Yeah, we can't do anything about that.
DOCTOR: It says on your form that you're having trouble swallowing. That's too bad. There's nothing we can really do about that.
DOCTOR: Are you still on the tube?
VIC: Yeah, I can't really taste anything.
DOCTOR: Yeah, that's going to take awhile. Six to twelve months, probably. Sucks to be you.

Then he put his headlamp on and took a look down Vic's throat. He commented again on the mucousitis and how he didn't have anything for that, and then he said, "Well, the good news is I can't see the cancer anymore."

(See, he buried the lead, so so did I.)

Now I know that it exciting news—pretreatment, you could see the little tumor sticking its ugly little head out. Now you can't. But remember, the cancer was pretty far down in the throat, so just because he can't see it doesn't mean it's gone. Still, we were pretty excited about that, and the ENT agreed with the two oncologists that he expected the treatment to have done what it was supposed to do, thus completing the medical professional trifecta of good news.

And I hate to keep bringin' ya down, but just when we thought we'd been through the worst (insert foreboding music here) ... the bills started coming. As Vic said, "Now comes the really hard part—paying for it." ;-)

So all in all, a good week. I know you're all wondering—how's the corner lookin'? Well, as you know, last week, it still seemed a long way off. Earlier this week, in preparation for today's blog post, I asked, "Do you feel like you're closer to the corner?" He said, "A little." I said, "Our loyal readers will want to know how much closer—one step? Two?" He said, "Oh, no, much closer than that. Two-and-a-half steps."

You heard it here first, folks: two-and-a-half steps closer to the corner. I like that view.

Here are a few more views I like.

Me and Vic outside my mother's apartment:

Vic and Wags playing ball:

Vic and Wags still playing ball:

(I have about 18 more of those, so I'll spare you. Suffice it to say that Vic and Wags play a lot of ball.)

And finally, our new rock garden planted by the lady I hired to weed.

All I wanted initially was for her to weed and maybe give us a little planting advice. Oh, she weeded all right. It would have taken us forever to do what she did in just a few hours. And then we looked at the areas we wanted to plant. She gave us some really great ideas, all of which started with the need to reconstitute some soil in our back yard. And this required some relocating of some plants. And as she was relocating some plants, she saw this barren area that we had never gotten anything to grow in. We tried garlic. We tried cucumbers. We tried tulips. Nothing worked. But she thought if we just took a few of the chicks and hens that our friends Larry and Paulette had given us and put them in this area, surrounded by a few rocks from other parts of the yard, it would look nice, and she was right. We adored it. But she thought it still looked a little spare, so she brought a few of her own chicks and hens that were different from ours and planted them in this area as well. She was right again, and the result is this beautiful, tranquil little area. We love it, and we love her. If you need weeding or gardening help, please let me know and I will send you her way.



Have a great week, everyone, and I'll catch up with you all next week, when I hope Vic will be a few more steps closer to the corner—even if they are the baby steps he says they were this week.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTINUED SUPPORT! (Yes, I was shouting. I'm very emphatic about my thanks.)