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.)