Well, I’m happy to report I’m able to nibble on some solid foods finally. This is a big deal because it opens up my possible menu choices each day and I’ll be relying less and less on Ensure drinks and protein shakes. I had a bowl of cheerios a few times this week, and it’s pretty easy to eat, since the milk helps keep things moist. I’ve also had some more helpings of tortellini, ravioli and some small pieces of chicken. Yum!
My tongue is still pretty sore with what feels like an open gash along the right side, but I’m able to eat on the other side of my mouth until that heals.
My first day back at work on Wed went very well. I shocked a few people that weren’t prepared to see me and along with them and many others, I was greeted with hugs and smiles all day long. It’s nice to be back and feel connected once again. My lunch that day consisted of a few Ensure drinks and some pudding. Pretty boring, but it kept me energized throughout the day. The train ride there and back was so lovely along the bay too. I had missed that beautiful commute into work and was happy to again ride the train.
The Soloist
In other news, I had another band practice this week, which is always fun and invigorating. And I finished a book entitled “The Soloist”, which is the very same book that was turned into a movie last year starring Robert Downey Jr.and Jamie Foxx. It was a quick read and a great story about patience when dealing with mental illness. I’ll have to now see the movie and hasten to make the obligatory statement that the book was better then the movie.
Last week I took vacation time off so I could hang out with my visiting Aunt Nell and cousin Deirdre who were here from North Carolina and I have to say, a week off felt very nice. This week I’m back to work and digging back into my daily work routine. I’m feeling better every day and have started to nibble on some solid food here and there. So far I’ve been able to eat tortellini, ravioli and the meatballs from a Subway meatball sandwich. My mouth gets very nervous when food is entering, but other than some mild discomfort, I’m able to eat some new things, as long as I have my water bottle close at hand.
I’m still doing my swish and swallow routines, along with a baking soda and salt water rinse a few times per day. My face is clearing up, although I still have the remnants of the red rash on my cheeks and temples, but that’ll clear up soon hopefully. I still do not have much hair on the back of my head, but Denise tells me it’s starting to grow back slowly. I can’t grow a beard or full mustache yet either, but that will change as the months go by.
Grant's Graduation
The big news last week was that my oldest son Grant graduated high school. It’s unbelievable really, but he’s heading toward 19 years old and now ready for some college. I’m very proud of my boy and excited to see where this world after high school takes him.
The big news this week is I’m going to start going into the office on Wednesdays and work with my team at Key. I can’t wait to see them and start feeling like I’m no longer a remote and lonely employee. I’ll have to take my day’s food with me, along with my mouth care items, but I feel good enough to make the travel there and start my reintroduction to the folks at the office. My energy levels are good these days and the fatigue I was having has seemed to diminish.
I think now that the heavy stuff is now really behind me and things will only get better each day. The move into solid food is a real mental boost for me too.
 At Pedroncelli |
 Pedroncelli Vineyards |
 Pedroncelli Vineyards |
 At Raymond Burr  At Amphora |
Well, I’ve been pretty busy since my vacation started and having a great time too so I apologize for the lateness of this update. My aunt Nell and cousin Deirdre are visiting this week from North Carolina and we’ve scheduled some fun day trips to show them around the Bay Area. So far, we’ve taken them for a day’s adventure in San Francisco, and yesterday we spent the entire day in the Sonoma/Alexander/Dry Creek wine region doing a whole lot of wine tasting. I didn’t have any wine, so I guess that made me the natural choice as the driver for the adventure. We visited the following wineries: Pedroncelli, Raymond Burr, a late lunch at Amphora and finally Everett Ridge.
Yesterday was such a nice warm and calm day in the Sonoma wine country and we wrapped up the day in the city of Sonoma and had dinner at a local Italian restaurant. I was feeling brave throughout the past two days with my mouth and decided I might try some tortellini with cream sauce. I found that with the proper amount of water sips, I was able to enjoy the pasta fairly well. My tongue is still very tender with some healing wounds along the sides, but I’m getting better at trying some new things here and there.
Today we’re all relaxing and will be attending my nephew Owen’s graduation from Bethany Preschool tonight. Tomorrow is my oldest son Grant’s graduation from high school. It’s amazing to think he’s already done with HS and planning college life and beyond. I’m so proud of my boy.
Denise and I got up early and made it down to the Fiesta Day’s parade in downtown Vacaville where we were joined by Sarah and Owen. It’s certainly important to get there early because alot of people leave their chairs in the choiciest places for viewing the night before. Fortunately we found a good spot by the Veteran’s Hall in the sun, which is good because the weather wasn’t that great to start with. The winds have been picking up yesterday and into today, so by the time the parade started, the winds were fiercely cold.
Regardless of the winds, the parade was great as usual with lots of people, cars, groups, marching bands, fire trucks, horses and garbage men. Seems like the parade gets bigger every year, although it was nice to see some of the regulars like the local marching bands, including my alma mater Vacaville high school. I would think the sharpest band I saw was Vanden HS. They’ve clearly got great funding from parents and boosters because they always look good and sound fantastic.
Denise and I had a “date” night last night, meaning we had no kids and didn’t want to stay home all night. Going out for dinner wasn’t really an option, since I’m not thrilled about sitting and watching someone else eat a yummy dinner, so we decided to go get some yogurt and see a movie. Denise picked having yogurt, and I, having already drained my dinnertime Ensure, decided to enjoy watching her enjoy some yummy yogurt. It was nice.
Star Trek
So we went to go see Star Trek and it was fantastic! From the start of the movie, it was pretty much action packed, and these days, movies can sometimes be so packed with action that watching the movie is like being batted about the head. But I believe this movie had the right amount of action and plot moving moments, and I can say there were a few action sequences where you forgot it was a movie and really felt as if there was real danger imminent. Amazing. I really feel like this is a great “reboot” of the franchise and will lead to some great follow-up stories as well. It was great to see younger versions of characters you know so well and to see Leonard Nimoy as the older version of Spock was so cool!
I tell you, when the end of the movie came and you heard Nimoy’s voiceover starting with “Space, the final frontier…”, I couldn’t help but become a little choked up. Great movie. I’ll see it again or even own it on Blu-Ray later this year.
Well today was my first Dr.’s appointment in a quite a while and I met with Dr. Woolf in Fairfield. The appointment went well and he poked and prodded my mouth like a real pro. Ouch!! He jammed his finger back into my tonsil and said he was glad he felt nothing out of the normal back there and I took that to be good news. He also snaked that remote camera down my nose and throat again, yuck. He said from the back of my throat down to my vocal chords, there’s just a slight redness and it looked fine. But that my mouth, tongue and some other areas are still pretty swollen. No surprise there. He scheduled a follow-up Pet CT scan for July 3rd in hopes that any swelling in my mouth would have subsided by then.
I’ve been still dealing with an extremely sensitive wound area alongside my tongue, which at this point is the only thing keeping me from eating some solid foods. He said it didn’t look like thrush, but seemed more indicative of mucusitis, and if I kept up with the swish and swallow, I’d be in better shape pretty soon. I hope so, because I’m about at my wit’s end with this crappy Ensure, soup and protein shake diet. In fact it get’s monotonously depressing sometimes.
Another thing that’s come up as of late last week is a real sense of fatigue throughout the day. My energy level has dropped off a cliff. I feel like napping all day, and sometimes barely see the need to even get out of bed (just this past weekend). Seems like this change in energy happened almost overnight last week. I thought maybe I was sick with the flu or a cold, but I wasn’t at all. I know my caloric intake hasn’t changed, but I’m wondering if something in my blood chemistry has. So after my appointment with Dr. Woolf, I went to Northbay and had my blood drawn for testing.
Well, progress is slow these days. Some days feel better than others, and I’ve been able to remain consistent with my mouth medications each day, so I know I’m headed in the right direction. Generally my mouth feels slighty better overall than a month ago. The sides of my tongue are still very sensitive and can sometimes become quite painful, especially after talking for a while. Swallowing is not much of a problem, so eating my food each day is not too hard. I feel like once my tongue has healed, I could start eating some different things again, and that is an exciting prospect indeed! I’ve tried scrambled eggs once again (twice now) and was able to get them down. It’s a challenge, but my mouth hesitantly rose to the occasion.
So just to catch up a bit here, other than my mouth, I’m in pretty good shape overall. My energy is good depending on how many calories I can take in each day. I’m able to work outside and get caught up yard work a bit, but for the strenuous things, I’ve relied on my big strong boys. I’ve played drums with the other band mates several times now, which always is a joy. And I love to play my guitars and write silly little songs each day too. Well not really full songs, but more chord arrangements that could evolve into songs.
I also have a checkup appointment with Dr. Woolf next Monday, where we’ll begin to plan for the next Pet CT scan to see how this treatment has fared so far.
Well it seems my consistent use of the swish & swallow (containing nystatin) has kept the thrush at bay and I’m not having the intense mouth pain I had a few days ago. I just have to make sure I do it on a schedule, along with the radiotherapy mixture I was prescribed. Using that just before eating has helped amazingly well.
So I feel that once my tongue has healed (hopefully very soon), I’ll be attempting to eat some different things, which is exciting, since my diet is dreadfully boring and repetitive. I’m feeling stronger every day and have been able to maintain my weight at 195 pretty well, considering my limited caloric intake each day.
Cheap Trick
Denise and I attended a Cheap Trick concert last night at the Dixon Mayfair. The concert was great! The band played as well as I’ve ever heard them and the sound overall was mixed quite well for an outdoor venue. Near the end of the show they allowed everyone to rush the stage, so we ran up with Denise pulling me along and actually got very close. A funny thing happened earlier in the show though. Denise and I had to walk right up near the stage and make a right turn to get to the t-shirt vendors, and when we did, Robin Zander (the lead singer) came hustling over to that corner of the stage where we were. He and I made eye contact, then he started checking out Denise. Then he glanced back at me and gave me the nod of approval. Awesome. My gorgeous lady had been scoped out by the singer of Cheap Trick. (with a few Ensures in me, I think I could still take him down though 
)
Windows 7
Today, I downloaded the newly available Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 and was able to get it installed on my Mac using Parallels. If you’ve been following the news as Microsoft pushes Windows 7 along this year to a hopeful commercial release in time for Christmas, you’d already know it’s getting favorable reviews as being faster, easier to use and overall a much more viable release than it’s predecessor, Vista.
Well you can add my name to the list of people feeling pretty darn good about Windows 7 so far. I actually downloaded and installed both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions on my Mac and found the installation for both to be very easy and amazingly fast. I can’t remember installing a version of Windows that didn’t take over an hour or more to get completely installed with all updates and drivers settled and functioning properly. Well, I can tell you that my two installations today had to be less than a half hour each, and when it was finished I was left with a completely functional, working version of Windows 7. And what is more amazing is I installed both on my Mac with little or no hardware issues whatsoever.
So far I can report that for me, Windows 7 seems dramatically snappier and responsive than Vista. I only allocated 1GB of memory and 15GB of disk space to each installation and still the OS is quite snappy. Starting, stopping and rebooting seems quicker too, but that could be due to having nearly no start-up software or non-OEM software installed yet. But I still have the feeling the OS would be quicker in these situations regardless.
One thing I really like in contrast to Vista (not including the increased responsiveness) would be the OSX dock-like icons that can stay in place for applications you frequently use. The desktop gadgets are no longer tied to a particular side of the desktop either. There are many other items to report, but I’ve only played around with this for a day so far.
I’m pleasantly impressed so far and can’t wait until this is released commercially, so I can install and use it on my daily work laptop from home. And thus relieve myself of Vista once and for all.
And things were going so well!
Anyway for about the past 4 days, my mouth has really started hurting. I’m having sharp and dull pains all together for nearly the entire day and it’s been making it hard to sleep. I’m not sure what’s going on, but the pain seems to be along the sides of my tongue and near the tumor site, so I’m thinking I’ve got some form of thrush or the makings of an infection starting. In any case this is the first real pain I’ve had since the initial biopsy and I’m not embarrassed to say it can bring me to tears occasionally since it feels like a thousand tiny razorblades slicing the sides of my tongue. I’ve contacted Dr. Vikstrom for an opinion, but in the mean time I’ve started think I may have brought this on myself by not being entirely consistent with the swish and swallow medication each day.
Fooling myself into thinking the healing was going well, I cut back on my swish and swallows each day and I’m thinking with the nightly build-up of mucus and going longer between the swish and swallows has allowed the thrush to occur. So I’ve really been consistent with it for the last two days and the use of a new radiotherapy medication mixture I’ve been taking just before eating has helped as well. I think I’m tipping the scales back the other way now and the pain has started to lessen.
By the way, I got out of the house last night and did some drumming with my band. It felt great to play music once again. My minimal daily caloric intake caused me to run out gas a bit earlier than I’d hoped, but I had a great time playing.
Weight holding steady at 195 lbs.
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