Several people have asked me whether I’ve been sugar-coating my posts here — or at least choosing to write about only the good, rather than the bad or the ugly.
I will admit that, especially in the early days, things weren’t that great: I suffered from nausea and fatigue (mostly from the chemotherapy, I think) and pain (from my j‑tube surgery and the enflamed esophagus). These weren’t terrible, however, and I’d been led to expect that the effects of both the chemotherapy and the radiation therapy were cumulative over time — that is, that they would generally get worse over each week of my therapies.…
So it occurred to me that perhaps some of you know as little about tube-feeding as I did a few weeks ago, and that you might be curious.
You can see from the photo that I’m relatively portable even when connected.
I’m eating a little solid food now — more than I was last month, in fact, because they widened my esophagus a bit during surgery in August, and perhaps also because the radiation is ensmallenating the tumor, too....
Well, things have been quiet here this week in Lake Wobegon….
Really quiet, in a way, though my dear friend Andy came up from Boston for the weekend to shake things up a bit (hi, Andy!). It was good to get the mental juices flowing again: Andy helped re-shelve piles of books in the library — which was very welcome! — but even more he acted as a terrific sounding board to help me figure out priorities for the Mordor project and for working out backup contingency plans for various other Tolkien-related things I’ve been doing (a few of which are spelled out at Vermont Softworks).…
This actually is the radiation machine. I lie on the bed (left), which is rolled into place. I’m pretty sure that the low center “drawer” extends out when it’s in operation, and that that’s what orbits around my body during the two- to three-minute session.…
**UPDATE 2017-09-14: No, I had it completely wrong! …
‘But you’ve left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted. “I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn’t they put in more of his talk, dad? That’s what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, dad?”’ — The Lord of the Rings, §4.08.065 …
