Welcome to OCF, Tim. Its always great having survivors join our ranks!
At 6 month post rads, you actually still have a lot of recovering to go before you are finished. A complete recovery takes a full 2 years. At the 6 months post rads most patients are feeling pretty good with a few complaints about food tastes and dry mouth. Over the years Ive seen patients report advances in their recovery with their sense of taste and dry mouth until around the 2 year post rads mark. A few even have said they have had improvements a month or 2 post 2 years. You should be like most of us and notice many more improvements with your sense of taste, dry mouth and mucous. Those 3 things are nasty reminders of what you just went thru but at least they are only temporary. In time, everything will improve and hopefully you will return to almost as good as you were prior to getting OC.
With losing so much weight in such a short time, you also lost muscle as well. Just telling me you lost 70 pounds is all I need to hear to know you must have struggled thru your treatments. I also lost a significant amount of weight in a short time and had a very difficult time getting thru rads. At 10 years post rads, I have yet to put any substantial weight back on. Your body has been beat down and needs lots of fuel to rebuild itself. At the very least until you hit your 1 year post rads you should be taking in a bare minimum of 2500 calories and 48-64 oz of water every single day. Since you lost so much weight, even taking in 3000 or 3500 calories will help you get back on your feet. Your body is burning up calories like crazy trying to rebuild itself, even taking in 4000 calories daily probably wouldnt result in weight gain right now. Your body desperately needs this extra fuel to rebuild what its lost and to return your strength and stamina. A high protein diet will help to build you back up. Check this with your doc to make sure it will work for your particular situation as they know your full medical history and whats best for you. What Ive seen here over the years is the better a patient does with their intake, the better they do with treatments and recovery.
As far as recurrences go... that is the number 1 fear of every single OC patient on here. After the horrors of treatment and what seems like a very slow, long lasting recovery we all are afraid of going thru it again. The odds actually are in favor of not going thru a recurrence. Your doc has your scans scheduled like what most of us have had, 3 or 4 months post rads, and at the 1 year mark. Its all part of the routine check ups to ensure if anything would look suspicious it would be found and taken care of right away. You know your body the best and if you notice anything different that is not normal or something appears out of the blue, call your doc and get checked out.
Best wishes with your continued recovery
