April Health Update

I've been home from the hospital for about three and a half weeks now, and though I'm improving, things are still rough. I have a feeding tube in my gut that connects to a feeding pump half the day to make sure I get enough nutrition because I can't eat enough through my mouth right now. But even that is an improvement. I'm making progress. At least the tube isn't necessary 24/7 anymore.

The surgery seems to have gone reasonably well, though I lost all of my stomach. The surgeon tried to save some of it, but it just wasn't in the cards, and after getting my genetic testing back, it looks like taking all of it probably was a good idea. It turns out that I have a genetic defect that predisposes me towards getting stomach cancer, so even if some of my stomach had been saved, I think there would have been a decent chance of the cancer coming back independantly just because my genes suck.

Even though I'm home, I'm still not active much. I can really only do one or two small chores a day, and there have been a lot of times when I've had to make the choice of "Do I write this e-mail or that e-mail?" Because I just can't sit up for very long without getting tired and writing while lying down is not great either. A lot of times things get pushed off to another day, which is why it's taken me longer than I wanted to write about how I'm doing, since I know people have been wanting to know.

It doesn't help that the surgery caused some nerve damage due to my positioning on the operating table. The anesthesiologist and his team were supposed to move my limbs around during surgery to keep the circulation going, but apparently didn't do a good enough job so I woke up with severely numb hands. Though I got the feeling back in them before leaving the hospital, I still can't feel temperature in my thumb and first two fingers of my left hand, and about half the fingers on both hands are overly sensitive to some degree or another which can make it painful to type.

As a writer, this really sucks. And the occasional pain spike in my healing fingers doesn't help. They do seem to be getting better, but really slowly, and from what I'm reading online it may be months before they're fully back.

It looks like my cancer treatment will be changing going forward. My previous round of chemo didn't look like it was that effective, so it sounds like my oncologist may be trying a combination radiation/chemo treatment for my next stretch of treatment. Given that this is a genetic cancer, there might be the possibility of getting into a clinical trial as well.

I'm on leave from work for another month, and I'll probably need it. This is much worse than when I had my endometrial cancer a year and a half ago and the recovery much slower. Though there's a light at the end of the tunnel, it's still very far away.