I now have a date with a tube. A feeding tube, that is. On the 19th, I will be the proud recipient of a tube that will help me reach certain goals, like staying nourished in order to stay alive through treatment.

Last Thursday, we met with the dietician and then the radiation oncologist.

I’m not having any particular issues eating at the moment – that is, I can get food down, although it takes me awhile to do it. There are very few things I really can’t eat at all. Bread is one of those things, which is too bad, since I really like fresh bread. It’s simply too dry and takes too much water for me to work my way through a single slice. Anything else is pretty much fair game as long as there isn’t too much of a skin on it, as that gets caught on the roof of my mouth and I either have to fish it out with my fingers, which disturbs whoever I’m eating with, or I have to swish some water around in my mouth, which often just works to move the stuck piece to another place in my mouth where I can no longer move my tongue to get it down, resulting in me having to reach in again.

Anyway, back to the dietician. She did ask me about my eating habits, and at my weigh-in, I was at about the same weight I had been the week before at the surgeon’s office, so I guess my weight regain is slowing down. She did the calculations, and to maintain my current weight during treatment – especially when we really start going into the heart of it – I’ll have to take in 2200 calories a day. “How many calories is that again?” I asked. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten that many calories in a day. Fortunately, there are all sorts of liquid meals available to provide calories and nutrients. The dietician also showed me one item I thought was amazing: it’s a little tub, 1.5 ounces (yes, ounces) of a colorless, tasteless liquid. That little tub has 330 calories by itself. Amazing what modern science can do.

The radiation oncologist had a look at my neck, said it looks good (and it does), and that we should get the all clear from the surgeon and get going. He also wanted to schedule the sim(ulation) for that day, but their machine was down, so it was rescheduled for Monday. The clinical research nurse came in and I signed off on the consent forms for the study, then headed upstairs so the lab could draw some blood for a baseline workup before starting treatment. It’s a little nervewracking to know we’re very close to beginning the next phase.