The last couple of months.

So I am officially a slow healer. A normal expected recovery from this type of radiation is around a month. I am currently at 2 months and counting. The Dr. says it could be 3-4 months if I’m really an outlier. He also said that my cohort, middle-aged, non smoking males struggles to recover from this treatment for some reason. So it’s not totally unexpected that I’m taking longer to heal. For the most part the pain has been manageable and that does seem to be moderating a bit more every week. My recovery is going slowly but I’m doing okay because I knew this would take time and most of it is out of my control.  

Backing up a bit I’m not sure if I’ve explained the totality of the treatment and recovery timeline. From the beginning Lucy and I understood this to be a minimum year long process. 7 weeks of treatment is quite brief in comparison to the year the recovery takes (years if you count all the follow ups). I’m not sure how well I’ve relayed that information but it goes a long way to explain my attitude regarding the pace of my recovery. Most of this next year will be me slowly waiting for my taste buds to come back online. I’m told it’s normal to only have about 25% taste immediately after treatment. That feels about right from what I can tell. I may recover 90-95% of my taste after a year. No guarantees on how quickly or completely my taste returns. Last month I tried a canned coffee I like and I got zero sweet and cream, it tasted like roast dirt. I think I now have an idea of how Lucy experiences coffee.

I am in good spirits regarding all of this because I knew that this first year was going to be rough. So any short term setbacks don’t really matter when the timeline is so long. If I’m delayed getting back to solid food I can’t taste, have I really “lost” anything? In my mind I have not. I look forward to returning to solid food whenever that may be. Hopefully I can even taste and enjoy some of it by then. 

~Brian