Well hello there!

I've been lurking in the shadows, reading these forums for months, gleaning information while I was recovering after my surgery. Everyone is so helpful, and most everything I wanted to know or just needed some reassurance on, was covered in other posts, so I never registered until today.

Here's a little bit about myself. (Ok, after writing this all out, I've found it's no longer just a little bit - more like a little excessively verbose, but I typed all of this up so here goes anyways):

Between Christmas 2013 & New Year's, I noticed what I thought was a coldsore. After it didn't go away for three weeks, I decided to visit the clinic and have someone take a look at it. By this time, it wasn't just a little coldsore - the tongue was starting to eat away at the side. The doctor grimaced, and sent me to an ENT specialist four days later. He also grimaced, and by now I had strong suspicions of what was to come, so that look just basically told me the bad news. Doc asked me to come in for a biopsy at his office in another four days after that. The ulceration on the tongue was getting more pronounced, day by day. Biopsy was not painful at all - I was surprised to see him just take what looked like tweezers, yank out a couple of pieces of flesh from my tongue, and plop them into a little jar of formaldehyde. Fast forward through seven extremely distressing and terrifying days & nights, and they confirmed that it was indeed cancer.

So I was off to see the team of surgeons, radiologists and other various specialists at the cancer center. After visits with various folks, CT scans, blood tests, etc., they book me in for surgery, during which they lop off 7cm x 6cm of my tongue, replace the tongue with a big hunk of flesh from my left wrist, fill in that hole with a skin graft from my thigh, chop out a few lymph nodes from my neck, pop a hole in my throat & jam some tubing in there, place a feeding tube down my nose, then to add insult to injury, they put in a catheter! Yeah, that catheter wasn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it sure hurt taking it back out. Ouch! Really, it was the tracheostomy that was by far the most difficult thing to deal with. Extremely uncomfortable.

In total, I spent 16 days in the hospital. It was kinda boring, and I had what looked like a cardboard french fry container with the bottom cut out of it, taped to my thigh. This was so that my skin graft could heal without the blood sticking to bedsheets or those goofy hospital gowns that make your bum hang out for everyone to laugh at. But at least I had a pretty doctor coming in to check up on me in the mornings, and I could catch up on old Star Trek reruns during the day.

After I got out of the hospital, they made me stay at home instead of going right back to work. It was boring, but I could still watch my Star Trek reruns. After several weeks, they started some radiation on my neck and face. As far as I know, they got all of the cancer out with the surgery and the radiation was just a precaution because they could not remove as much of a buffer strip around the cancereous tissue, in one area of my mouth. I trust the judgement of the team who recommended I still have the radiation. Anyways, they strapped me to a table and put some warm plastic on my head and told me not to move. Or breath. After a few minutes, this plastic mold was hardened enough that they could take it off of my head, and it would magically retain the shape of my melon. So every day when I came in for my daily zap, they made me take my shirt off, not so that everyone could admire my lovely pecs, but to ensure my shirt didn't interfere with my cool mask. They zapped me 25 times over the next five weeks. It wasn't so bad, except for the "light rock" station that they had the radio tuned to. I had been led to believe that the radiation would sap my energy, and/or be painful. Luckily I was one of the few that didn't have much of a problem with this. In fact, I went for a nice little hike with a 850m elevation gain over about 2900m, on my second to last radiation appointment. After a few days, I was able to go back to work for half days, and went back full time two weeks after that. I'm also heavily into paddling & have been to many practices & competed in several races since I've been back. My wrist flap donor site has healed enough that I don't worry about it too much any more. Also of note is a successful completion of backpacking along the West Coast Trail - a rugged 75km hike involving several nights of camping. We did it over seven days.

I attibute my apparently quick recovery to the level of fitness (other than that nasty cancer, of course) that I had achieved over the past few years of paddling. As a member of a fairly competitive dragonboat team, I've been on the water 4-6 days per week and in the gym a couple of times per week. In fact, I had qualified to race at the club crew world championships which were held in Italy this year. Because of the six months of training lost to my surgery and radiation treatment, I had to back away from the team, but I plan to train hard and get myself back up to that level again.