Catching up

Well hello there. It's been a while. 

So, let's catch up, shall we? It seems that I've survived surgery. Either that, or the afterlife is sort of anticlimactic. 

The hospital was just a blast: No food for nine days, six different tubes sticking out of my body, a dangerously understaffed nursing corps furious that they had to work extra shifts due to the blizzard, endless waves of bizzarre dreams and visions whenever I tried to sleep...it was easily the worst nine days of my life. During my second night there, I woke up in a panic. I had no idea where I was or why, so I pushed the call button for the nurse. The look on her face was not exactly compassionate. It was more like, "I was on my coffee break, asshole. I wasn't even supposed to be working this shift." This pretty much sums up my Brigham and Women's experience. 

I've been home for around four weeks now, and every day, with the help of Cindy, my dad, and the visiting nurses, I feel better. We met with the surgeon last week for the first time since the big event. He is thrilled with how things have gone and told us that the pathology reports on the stuff they pulled out of me indicate that the operation, along with the chemo and radiation, was a massive success. They found no living cancer cells.

The surgeon pulled out my staples, meaning the last remnant of this whole ordeal (other than a truly badass scar) is my J-tube, through which I currently get about half of my nutrition. But I'm close to ditching that as well. All I have to do is prove to the surgeon that I can drink five Ensures a day. With my new stomach, this is akin to proving you can squeeze ten pounds of crap into a five pound bag, but I'm trying my best.

Revisiting the Cancer Center has been surreal. Everyone we know sees us and looks at me as if they're seeing a ghost. "Wow, you look...good," they say. By the shocked look on their faces, you can tell that they hadn't expected to see me again, which is a little eerie. 

Up next, after a few more weeks of recovery from surgery, are more rounds of chemotherapy. This is just to clean up any possibility that there are any cancer cells that survived. Then I get my life back. In all, this ordeal will have taken about a full year of my life away. But at least I didn't have to shovel during the blizzard.

As always, thank you all for your kind thoughts, words and prayers.