Ok, end of week 4 (19 rads 4 carboplatin.taxol). Thought I'd keep all my ramblings in one place so as to make the details of my particular journey easy to track if anyone cared to.

Still eating solid-ish food. Lots of chicken noodle soup, yogurt, even found the Dunkin' Donuts breakfast wraps go down. Keeping the hydration level up.

Managed to shake most of the cold I have had for two weeks now. Still cough at night but as you can imagine the level of overall soreness in my throat has gone down with 80% of the hacking done. Still not taking any pain meds and able to sleep.

Had a reaction to the carboplatin (flushing and splotching of the skin from the face to the waist). MO has decided that I'll be taken off of it and probably do 2-3 more doses of Taxol. The prescribed antihistamines for me to take the night before and morning of so we'll see how that goes. Mixed feelings about stopping one of the drugs as I had no side effects till this week and the flushing caused me no discomfort. I guess the risk is that the next reaction could be respiratory arrest.

Neck is doing ok. I upped the number of times I lotion per day and spread them out more. When I get up in the middle of the night I reapply. Also I have found sleeping with no shirt and keeping the covers pulled down below the burn area seems to help it heal up some over night.

Only other issue is that i developed a small sore patch on the bottom right part of my tongue. After a couple of misdiagnosis it turns out that radiation scatter is bouncing off my metal molar filling and burning my tongue. Would have been nice to know of this possibility as I would have had the filling replaced with a ceramic. I find that trying to keep my tongue below the level of the teeth this week has helped it heal a bit.

That's all. Stay strong everyone.

-Rich