Crossing seventy years, I understand that when my health goes down for whatever reason, I want and need ft to come back. As age progresses, it’s reality presents a prognosis of diminishing returns, bleak but true.
When I was a “healthy kid" I would get sick then I would get well and be as good as I was before I got sick, a perfect rebound! Now, with seventy years behind me, my health problems are more serious like Leukemia and neck cancer. To combat these mortal enemies, my wife and I made the decision to enter a long term, very expensive, thank you SSI, sophisticated, cancer treatment program. It includes virtually digi-contoured radiation as well as chemotherapy. and today, at five weeks, we are moving into pain management.
Here’s how THAT works.
I can’t swallow very well because there’s too much pain resulting from ongoing radiation treatments. So I use narcotic pain medication to mask the pain to enable me to swallow. I need to swallow! It’s imperative for me to swallow in order for the cancer wounds from the radiation damage to heal. The pain medication over time will have to be increased because I still have to endure two more weeks of intensive daily radiation. During those two weeks they will further destroy the cancer cells in my throat which will increase my pain and difficulty in swallowing and speaking.
Then… maybe in about ten weeks, the things I have lost, saliva, taste, probably voice may or may not come back, but regardless of whether it will, there is much work I need to do to rebuild myself in an attempt to bring these crucial things back into my life. I’m not even talking here about the continued check-ups, doctor visits, speech therapy and pet scans.
It’s like coming back to health before all this used to be just kind of living life.
Now.. Coming back will be lots and lots of work. So much work, that life as I knew it, is gone and still all this perplexity isn’t even here yet.