Surgery

I really don’t expect to have much more news until after the surgery: a CAT scan and a PET scan have shown that the tumor is basically gone (or perhaps completely gone — they can’t say for certain until they’ve seen it in person), and that there’s no longer any sign of it in the nearest lymph node, either. That, coupled with my ability now to eat basically anything (so long as I don’t eat fast), some solid weight gain, and general good health mean I’ll be in good shape for the surgery when it comes.

The procedure itself is a fairly big deal: 7½ hours of robotic laparoscopic/thoracoscopic surgery; I’ll end up with twelve or thirteen incisions and — if all goes well — spend seven to ten days recovering in the hospital, with all kinds of drains, tubes, catheters, IVs, and epidurals poking out of me (or into me). I don’t think any of them will be removed until day №5....

Graphic details at Wikipedia, although do note that the mortality rates they give are old and don’t take the new laparo-/thoraco-scopic methods into account: they’re now ⅕ - ⅒ what they were just a few years ago.

The surgery is a good idea, as it more than doubles the five-year survival rate for those with esophageal cancer — significantly improving life expectancy even for those who were previously deemed cancer-free after chemo-assisted radiation therapy.

The surgeon is excellent, as I’ve mentioned; he’s done many hundreds of these surgeries (only about 2,000 are done each year in the U.S.), and has done more than 200 since he switched to doing them robotically a couple of years ago.

Once I can drink water without leaking, they’ll let me go home from the hospital. I’ll again be getting most of my nutrition through the j-tube until I can eat enough independently — essentially a week on liquids, a week on purées, a week on soft solids (that’ll be Christmas, probably), &c. Ultimately, I should again be able to eat almost anything, although I won’t really have much of a stomach left and so will need to eat six to eight meals each day. (And what Hobbit wouldn’t rejoice at that news‽) And I’ll need to sleep at a 30° angle. Other than that, life should start to get pretty normal come January, with full recovery expected by late February.

So over the next few weeks I’ll be preparing for the surgery, and madly trying to finish Mapping Mordor before my deadline slips very far away in the rear-view mirror. I may not post here again until after the surgery.

The surgery itself is scheduled for the day of 27 November (the Monday after Thanksgiving) at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, and I hope to head home sometime the week of 4 December. Visitors are welcome! While I’m there, Karen will stay many nights with friends who live nearby, and Karen’s folks and Cameron (Clara) will keep the home fires burning in Cabot.

All-in-all it’s a little scary; but I’m healthy, I’m not obese, I don’t smoke, I don’t have diabetes, and I’m comparatively young — so the prognosis is very good.

’Til December,

— Ð