I'm doing alright! I got hospitalized like over a week ago (hopefully going home today) - I don't remember the first few days at all. I had my first chemo (for my recurrence) and somehow in like 2 days lost too much weight that I had two arteries that closed off my small intestines and kept me from being able to eat?! It's weird, and I don't really know all the details - but I got really sick from it - somehow lost over 20 pounds in like two days (I'm 5'10 and according to my scale at home before I was admitted I was about 125 pounds). (I'm still down about 10-15 from 2 weeks ago - 131ish) - and had to have my stomach pumped and yada yada because I could not stop vomiting bile (I forget how many liters of stuff the pumped out of my stomach that one night that was just sitting in my stomach unable to go through my intestines but I think it was like 6-8 buckets). I'm on a liquid diet for now, but I'm putting weight back on slowly and hopefully will be back to normal in a week or two. I'm just dying for solid food! I'm eating lots of broth and I have a NG tube into my jejeunam (??) and I have that running as kind of an added nutrients thing - they want me to eat as many calories by mouth as I can. So, I'm just hanging out waiting and trying to gain weight to open that passageway back up so I can eat!!!! So, as usual, no one is really sure why this happened to me. Originally they thought it was chemo related, but now they think it's unrelated! So, hopefully I'll get some answers! I don't want this to possibly happen again if I lose 5 pounds in the future. So, here I am once again being the weird one!


Stephanie, 23, SCC on the right side of my tongue, surgery on 5-19-08, over half my tongue removed, free flap constructed from my forearm, bilateral neck dissection, one positive node. Radiation (32) and chemo (carboplatin) started on 6-16-08. Recurrence 4/09 in lungs.

**** Stephanie passed away 12.15.09.... RIP our dear friend****