Well I am way behind on an update but wanted to have some pictures to show as well.

I am two weeks removed from treatment and am down about 33 lbs from the start of treatment. I have dropped a lot of the weight in the last few weeks as it has been a real chore trying to get enough calories in me to prevent the loss. The picture above was taken on Monday Jan 11th, so it shows the current me. The picture below was me on Christmas Eve, before shaving the Mutton Chops off.

I had to shave as the radiation caused my beard to fall out on the upper chin and lower cheeks and looked weird. You can see the hair loss a little better on the next picture.

This is a picture of my daughter (Erika) who came home for a few days around Christmas.

We had a great time and did the carriage rides in our town just before Christmas. The people shown are some of our close friends that we have been able to see during my treatment and share a lot of laughs and fun. The second picture is of my daughter and wife (Stacey) after the carriage ride.

So enough about what we did, here is my current status. As mentioned above, I finished my last chemo two weeks ago and radiation the week before that, so I am done with treatment, but the treatment is not done with me. My skin is healing nicely, although I have an area which is a worse than the rest as it received a major blast of radiation and was where they had removed 10 lymph glands in an operation at the end of September and was still healing when I started treatment.

As you can see from above, I still have very raw skin on the left side of my neck and have to treat that with Domeboro solution twice a day and special skin cream several times a day as well. My tongue is down to only 1 sore, but it is a big one, the entire left side of my tongue is one large sore. Additionally, it hurts like heck to swallow. The pain of swallowing is helped by the pain meds I am still taking, but the tongue and neck hurt irrespective of the pain meds.

I can see the daily improvement, but it is not as fast as I would like and the lack of eating is disconcerting, but I am able to eat soft foods now and should getting some weight back on soon.

The post operative MRI and PET Scans will start in about 2-3 months so we should see that the cancer is gone and I start counting on duration of being cancer free.

Here is a picture of some of the folks helping with the care and feeding of Rich :) We have some other friends that are providing some great food as well, keep it coming folks along with the smiles. Note the glass of water for Rich....no wine yet.

Look for an update next week at this time.