Hello,
My 37 year old husband was diagnosed with stage 4 SCC on January 4th. He had none of the risk factors. He bit his tongue and it just refused to heal after months of his family Dr as well as urgent care Drs a biopsy was ordered.
We have been lucky that University of Iowa otolaryngology had an opening available so soon. The surgery couldn’t happen soon enough. In the last week he hasn’t been able to control the nerve pain and has barely been able to eat or even drink.
He is having a tracheotomy, a subtotal glossectomy (maybe total depends on the tumor spreading in the last week), a mandiblectomy, all of the lymphnodes in his neck removed, a free flap graft from his thigh.
As if that wasn’t daunting and terrifying enough, with all the COVID restrictions, his family and I can’t even be at the hospital for his surgery. We are supposed to receive text message updates as his surgery progresses. Then once he in in his room after going through recovery, 1 person can see him for an hour. Then everyday he is in the hospital, 1 person per day can see him for 2 hours, and the time can not be split between multiple people.
He is really close with his family. He is concerned that with him not being able to communicating well verbally that he will have to rely on his text to talk on his phone which will make FaceTime or phone calls very difficult. Does anyone have any suggestions?