Hey Natalie,
As best as possible, make the best of your holidays. Going through the cancer journey is definitely a battle. But like any war, soldiers, always regroup, refresh, and cut loose when they are on leave. Then they get back to the battle. I hope you both can do this. So really try to enjoy and take your mind off of it, and then get prepared.
On the first pet scan, they found A couple lymph nodes, but they were called marginal. Unnecessary and not attached organs. They did light up the first time. Because my husband had what they called the 1:2 punch, layman terms, they did chemo and radiation simultaneously. So we don’t really know what killed the cancer more. The chemo or the radiation but they do feel it’s the combination is the most effective. Maybe not every doctor uses it but at our cancer clinic, the radiation oncologist and the oncologist worked very closely as a team to keep an eye on my husband’s labs and progress. Any symptoms that came up, either one could respond to. They were very good. The only rough time my husband had is when he got dehydrated around the Fourth of July holiday weekend. My husband needed rehydration pretty badly and we didn’t want to go to the emergency room for that. The first day they were open, they opened a spot for him to come in for IV therapy. I advocated for him to have it more regularly until he was replenished. This was just after he finished the chemo and radiation regime. Good thing they keep the Mediport in him until the very final assessment of recovery.
The tumor seems to take different shapes in the esophagus during that regime of chemo and radiation. My husband had coughing, nausea, chest pain, etc. They were on fillings. Severe chest pain, radiating down his left arm alerted the nursing me to get him to the emergency room under cardiac presentations . That gives you a ticket to the front of the line so to speak. Especially in a very busy emergency room. However, his heart appeared to be fine. They thought it was pleurisy according to the CT scan. They actually just gave him some Nexium and sent him home. We conferred with his doctors after the weekend and they felt it was more referred pain from the esophagus. The chemo was doing its job and so is the radiation. However, it comes with a price of pain.
That was the only time we went to the emergency room. My husband is very stoic when it comes to pain and medicine. So when he was in excruciating pain, and looking like death warmed over, I knew he was struggling. Of course, he really didn’t want to go to the emergency room, but I had to put my foot down.
Have your husband slow down with eating and perhaps just go straight to the tube feeding. My husband states four weeks on tube feeding if not longer just because he didn’t like the feeling of any food passing through during that phase. It’s quite all right. He should get used to the pump feeding at night, and when he sleeps. My husband slept on the couch many nights just so he could be upright. He hooked himself up to the tube feeding whenever he wanted and unhooked himself when he just felt like walking around or going to the bathroom.
I hooked him up when he just felt too tired and weak to get up at that point. Just to go to the bathroom was enough for him. Like I said, the worst of it came the last two weeks of chemo and radiation and the first 2 to 3 weeks of recovery. The symptoms just kind of got worse. But then it gets better. I was shocked to see when my husband started being more alert, conversing a little bit more and the first time he chuckled about some thing let me know that he finally turned the corner.
Please feel free to ask anything. I hope I can help you through your journey. Remember, it’s not just his journey but it’s yours too. For me, it was hard to wear both hats of being a wife and a nurse. Sometimes I removed my wife hat and was his nurse when I should’ve been his wife.
Patti