Only yesterday — reading insightful comments on this page — did it dawn on me what my doctors are planning to do. They are going to totally burn off the mucus tissue covering the interior of my throat, mouth and nose. They are going to parch me, elephant-hide me, turn the inside of my head into a Gobi desert full of dead carcases and whitening bones. By killing every other living cell in this whole area, they are hoping they will also kill the original cancer — if it exists — and all the entrepreneurial little cancer cells that happen to be floating around. Or, in the medical vocabulary, I might experience “extreme dryness of mouth.”
It sounds like I won’t be able to eat much, drink much, or even swallow. It sounds like I won’t sleep much either and like I’ll be in a permanently grouchy mood. Six and a half weeks, did you say? Great!
Of course I’ll go through this. If it’s what needed, I’ll go through it gladly. But chemotherapy and radiation seem like such a brain-dead form of medicine. Like some village idiot on a rampage it just hits away at everything that moves. I can’t help wondering whether there isn’t a slightly more intelligent solution.