Erik MH:

Happy New Year!

I’m sorry not to have pos­ted for so long. tl;dr: Con­vales­cing takes patience, but all is well.

I’ve been home for three weeks now, and I’m very very happy to be here with my fam­ily and kit­ties. Gradu­ally over these weeks I’ve reduced the pain killers they had me take, and gradu­ally I’ve been able to expand what foods I can eat (almost any­thing at this point, but I need to be care­ful to eat it slowly and to not eat too much).

After my first week, I returned to the hos­pit­al for a fol­low-up vis­it with my sur­geon — who liked what he saw well enough that he said, “OK, we’ll see you in six months!” In short, the chemo-radi­ation ther­apy had knocked out almost all of the can­cer. The sur­gery then went really well: they removed most of the eso­phag­us, includ­ing the few remain­ing can­cer cells; and 40-odd adja­cent lymph nodes — only one of which had any can­cer. So the pro­gnos­is is really very good.

The tube feed­ing, for vari­ous reas­ons, was not going very well this time around — but since tra­di­tion­al eat­ing has been very suc­cess­ful, the sur­geon and nutri­tion­ist basic­ally shrugged and said that I might as well have the j‑tube removed imme­di­ately: so as of two weeks ago there have been no tubes pok­ing into (or out from) my body. Yea!!

At home, I nap most days — and I have to eat a small meal every hour or two — but oth­er­wise I’ve been main­tain­ing a pretty nor­mal sched­ule. I have not been get­ting much writ­ing done, either here (obvi­ously!) or on my “Map­ping Mordor” chapter: sus­tained men­tal work has been dif­fi­cult; each day makes it a little easi­er, though — I’m feel­ing more nor­mal all the time.

Karen’s folks stayed with us right through Christ­mas — which was won­der­ful! — but they did finally have to leave. My broth­er and his fam­ily came a couple of days later for a second Christ­mas and stayed till Sunday morn­ing, so it’s been a lovely flurry of activity.

I’m tre­mend­ously look­ing for­ward to 2018 and all that it will bring. For now, I’ll leave you with my mid­night mes­sage on Facebook:

My friend Erin pos­ted this list of pro­posed res­ol­u­tions for the new year, and I hon­estly can­not think of any­thing to add to it. Happy 2018 to all!

• Let’s flip every single state blue. We’ve been a world embar­rass­ment long enough. Let’s restore san­ity, dig­nity, and sen­tences to the White House, and every state house, and every county and city house. And if we have to run for some­thing ourselves to replace an idi­ot, let’s run for some­thing ourselves.
• Let’s live like we enjoy life and our work and the people around us, and if we don’t, let’s do some­thing about that, because we can’t fix the world when we’re unwill­ing to get out of bed.
• Let’s remem­ber that work is to pay for life, not the oth­er way around.
• When in doubt, apply music or good food with friends to the prob­lem. Or both. When music or food are work, remem­ber the previous.
• Pet someone furry as often and as long as pos­sible. When they start bit­ing, move on to the next someone furry.
• Say yes. You can always say no later as needed, but the same is not true of yes.

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