Happy Sunday everyone -

Thank you all for the helpful suggestions. : ). I think talking to another survivor his age who has been there & done that would be very helpful. It is hard to see any light at the end of the tunnel at the moment and especially would be helpful for him to see someone who is living the "new" normal.

Well, as for the update - we had Steve's first post op follow up visit at Moffitt this past Friday. First we met with speech therapy to do the swallow test. He could not swallow water or applesauce but with thickener added he could swallow water the consistency of necture. This was a big surprise and reality check for him. He has not tried swallowing since his surgery - we have all asked him to. I think it stund him with what he could not do. The speech therapist said that is a good start.

After we met with his surgical oncologists RN - They remove the staples from his neck - which is healing nicely. Then went to his wrist and they removed the stitches that kept on the dressing around his skin graph on his wrist. This was the first time we got to see his skin graph site - Gosh I was not expecting that. It looks more like a burn then anything healing well but one area where the graph did not take over a tendon - it was exposed. Not unless usual they said but it will just take longer to heal. Then they removed the stitches and dressing from his leg. Which looks good. His mouth is healing really well. Still swollen but his Dr was happy with the range and strength with back to front motion it was already showing.

Next we found out the result from his pathology report from his surgery. They removed 20 nodes from his right side and 22 from the left. On the right side 2 nodes were positive and on the left 1 node was positive. Obviously not the news we wanted to hear. His Dr said it is especially concerning that he had positive nodes on the right side - since this was the side he had radiation on earlier this year and she said cancer really should not have shown up there. His primary tumor was 3.5 cm on the anterior two-thirds single focus. They said it was a PT2. So they staged him at stage 3. The other very very hard news to take ( and I only now know after research why the Dr looked so concerned is that there is perineural invasion as well. The Dr stated that she still considers it curable but this for sure made it more aggressive then she originally thought. Gosh it feels like being kicked while already down. Because of these findings they are going to start him on 8 weeks of daily radiation with 3 rounds of chemo in between. I do not know the exact radiation or chemo they will do yet. The Dr said this will give him the best chance to fully make sure the surgery got it all and that it has less of a chance of coming back in the future but that she is going to watch him very closely for years. I am just devastated. I am such a positive person usually but after this news and knowing the hell he has been through and will go through it is hard. I give all of you so much credit. We will keep fighting - no giving up here. Just a slap in the face with reality.