I’m halfway through my third week of recovery at the time of this writing and it feels like it’s been three months. Time moves differently when you’re a cancer patient that’s more or less bound to your home or a treatment facility, it stands still, drags, and flies from moment to moment. This is a point in my life where it seems like the clock just sort of does what it wants to, depending on how I’m feeling.

I’m going to remain on publishing schedule and keep this post focused on week two of recovery because it sets up the hum-dinger week three has been so far very nicely.

============

Feeding Frenzy

When I left off talking about my recovery last week I’d mentioned how I was steadily increasing the pump rate to increase my formula intake through my feeding tube. I saw this as a sign of progress and the slow climb back to how life looked before the last week of my treatment and first week of recovery when the wheels totally came off.

The problem I’d started to encounter slowly was the site in and around my feeding tube. It was starting to ooze more puss than usual, and leaking stomach contents, in addition to being more and more resistant to taking higher rates of pumping or manual syringes. This is obviously an issue because this is my lifeline of nutrition, what with my throat being at too high of a pain level to swallow and all. I still wasn’t taking any of my pain meds save the patch and occasional tylenol because my pain management doctor was afraid to let the breakthrough nausea out of the barn by reintroducing morphine.

It finally came to a head when I could barely flush my tube from a physical and pain standpoint; we decided to call interventional radiology and asked that I be seen about an emerging issue with my tube. Whatever was happening wasn’t good and I did not want to earn another hospital stay.

We showed up to IR at the Army hospital early Monday morning and were met by an IR nurse that examined my site and said everything looked normal and everything I was experiencing was normal aside from the pressure. She cranked down on the rubber guard to push it closer to my skin and said short of replacing it there was nothing she could do at the moment. She did a test syringe flush and there was some pressure but it did seem to go a little smoother than my previous attempts so I just accepted her assessment and we went on to my normal daily hydration appointment.

============

Family Feud

At this point I was still sleeping in the recliner every night, doing daily hydration at the Army hospital, and regularly taking what meds I was still allowed to take while trying my best to feed myself around this schedule. The routine was mostly unchanged, except that I finally had visitation with my kids again this weekend. This was especially one to look forward to because of a quirk in the parenting plan that had them away for nearly three weeks. It was also really important to me because throughout the week their mother had been putting me under siege through an aggressive text thread between us attacking my character, exposing her desire for not only more of my money but more of my time with the kids, and being generally allergic to accountability or responsibility. This isn’t uncommon and it was probably a bit overdue and she was probably tired of pretending to care about my struggle. We are good co-parents 98% of the time, but that 2% when she decides to have a meltdown and blow up our relationship for a little bit of time is generally out of nowhere and the result of whatever stress in her life building up and manifesting itself into blaming all of her problems on me. I’ve survived far worse, and eventually she’ll pull her head out of her ass and start being friendly again- it’s usually a waiting game. C’est la vie.

My daughter went with my mom to a small street fair outside a movie theater, so they grabbed lunch at a nicer place than she’s accustomed to going, she got her face painted with a Minecraft character, and then they went and say Minecraft- a film she’s been begging to see ever since the previews came out. I’m glad they were able to spend a quality day together.

After the kids left the pressure returned to my feeding tube and it was not budging, there was no way I was going to be able to feed myself or even give myself medicine anymore by this point. It seems as soon as I fix one issue, something else fails. Hell yeah brother, cheers from the Army medical center.

============

The views and opinions presented herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Army.