Erik MH:

T minus 40-odd hours and counting…

First, let me apo­lo­gize to friends who may have received one or more per­haps con­fus­ing mes­sages from Pos­tHope over the past couple of weeks: I added com­ments to each of my posts there with a link to my “offi­cial” per­son­al blog at erikmh.org, and those com­ments appar­ently caused mes­sages to be sent to every­one who had pre­vi­ously com­men­ted. Now we know!

So, just to cla­ri­fy: no can­cer, still! How­ever, yet again, my entire small intest­ine (at least!) has man­aged to migrate from my abdo­men into my thor­ax. Appar­ently, I’m one of the 10% of eso­phagec­tomy patients who exper­i­ence this — and I’m one of the 10% of those 10% who exper­i­ence it repeatedly. Which makes me a 1%er! (A dubi­ous hon­or, to be sure.)

Wed­nes­day will be the big day, pre­ceded by two days of com­plete fast­ing (oth­er than clear liquids), and fol­lowed by sev­er­al weeks of slowly return­ing to a “nor­mal” diet — well, nor­mal for me, any­way.

Last night, Kar­en took me out to our favor­ite res­taur­ant (Sarducci’s) for din­ner, to “cel­eb­rate” my last sol­id food until some­time in July. It was lovely!

And today I’ve had cof­fee with a little milk (that counts as clear! yea!), chick­en broth, clear cider, and honey. Since I can’t deal with table sug­ar, that’s about all I’ll be able to handle today and tomorrow.

Tomor­row I’ll hear from the hos­pit­al as to when they want me to arrive on Wed­nes­day (it’s likely to be early morn­ing — and they’re 90 minutes’ drive away). When I had this same sur­gery in 2019, check-in involved some ser­i­ous grilling about what I’d con­sumed in the pre­vi­ous three days, so I’m keep­ing metic­u­lous track this time. There will also be an ekg (to make sure I’m in a fit state for the oper­a­tion, I think), and then they put me under for the (at least) three-hour sur­gery. As before, Kar­en will come down with me for emo­tion­al, logist­ic­al, and sec­ret­ari­al sup­port before and after: I can’t pos­sibly express how grate­ful I am for her unwaver­ing help through all of these adventures!

They will cer­tainly have me stay overnight on Wed­nes­day. With any luck, I’ll be dis­charged on Thursday, but Fri­day is also quite likely. Kar­en will again be stay­ing with friends nearby (thank you, Chris and Bar­bara!), so she’ll be able to stay into the evening(s) and return fairly early in the morning(s) for doc­tors’ rounds.

I’ll try to post an update on Thursday — or at least Fri­day — to let y’all know how things have turned out.

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