The initial drama of diagnosis is well behind me. The preparation for treatment and then ramping into treatment and that drama is also passed. Reading back, I see I was blithely optimistic, and now I settle in. This is sort of the professional part of it. When the going gets tough the tough get going. The irony of that is clear, there is no place for me to go, except to treatment. There is nothing to get started each day. Only steel myself for the steps ahead. The radiation isn’t bad in itself but its effects are bad and they happen fast. Today, I was warned by the nurse that pain is coming, as if to get me to take this more seriously. (I think she was reacting to me, I am strangely cheery about all of this.) That my mouth would lose integrity is possible. The goal now is to avoid the feeding tube. (I think its rarer and rarer these days). I plan to be an outlier as best I can.

This is the best time ever to have cancer. They can manage so many things that used to be major problems. I can’t help but wonder about the future: the IMRT therapy will probably be replaced by Proton Beam therapy which can control the depth of the radiation. Then further the immunotherapies or gene therapies will come on line making radiation obsolete.