People seem to respond to treatment, and recover from treatment, differently. I know when Barry was first diagnosed his major concern was that, after treatment he would be debilitated and not able to do the things he loved, such as travelling all over the world birdwatching. (Not, which I thought interesting, that he was going to die of cancer.) Certainly a lot of the papers we read and a lot of the patient stories we heard were not very encouraging. However he went to a top CCC and had excellent, and very encouraging and engaged doctors, and although the treatment was very difficult, he got through it better than he (or I) had expected.

Last night he was speaking to another patient who is just starting treatment and told him that, 5 months out he now feels almost back to normal (I think he told the fellow he "feels 95%") except he needs to regain about 12 pounds weight and still has a problem eating spicy or very dry, sharp foods. I know when we arranged our January trip to western Mexico, a friend of mine came along as we anticipated Barry would spend a lot of time resting each day and she and I could keep each other company. Well, he never spent a minute resting and had more energy than my friend!

Of course he still is well aware that, medically, he is not out of the woods and still need to be monitored carefully in the future. But he has an optimistic outlook and like Joanna, hopes that this is just a "detour" in the road and that he can continue on with his life. He is not naive about the risk of recurrance but is not obsessing about it, either. I know we read one paper that found optimistic HNC patients did twice as well as pessimistic patients so there is apparently something to this...!

Best luck,
Gail