Hello to all
I'm 61 yr old male, self-employed professional, recently diagnosed with HPV16-SCC of tonsil with matastasis to regional lymph nodes. Underwent successful rad tonsillectomy but elected not to undergo rad neck dissection. Radiation therapy with possible chemo scheduled to start within the next couple of weeks or so. My concern is whether or not I will be able to keep working during treatment. If anybody has experience with this, please let me know. Thanks.

Welcome to OCF. Radiation affects everyone differently. Most of us were unable to work thru treatments. I stopped right around the time when I began my treatments and I only did office work. A physical job would be very difficult to continue with during radiation. I hope you have an easy time of it. A few lucky members have been able to still work, but its pretty rare. Best thing to do is to get the best nutrition you can with 2500+ calories and 48 oz as a minimum of water daily. I see a correlation between the better a persons nutrition and the easier time they have with treatments. Best wishes!!!

Thank you so much Christine. I will definitely take any advice, especially the need to keep well hydrated & maintain proper nutrition. It would be tough not to be able to work, but I can get through it if necessary; I suppose I could work from home. Take care & best wishes to you.

I am a CPA and own my practice so I was fortunate that I could arrange my office so I could take off when I needed to and I think (5 years ago?) that I stopped working in the office around week 5 or so of Tx. I tried working from my home computer linked to my office but that didn't last too long. Even when I was in the office I had to arrive late since my rad was at Moffitt at 8:30 am and 45 miles away. I returned back to work many weeks ( hard to remember but I was a real sick puppy until week 3 post Tx) post Tx and only for a few hours a day at first but within no time I was back to 12-15 hour days and loving it!

My advice to you is to plan for not being able to work at some point but continue to work until you can't. Your body will tell you when it's time to stop and when it's time to slowly start back. FYI the typical worse time of Tx is usually from about week 5 thru week 3 POST Tx with the time post Tx usually our worse of the worse. Now that's not cast in stone but I think that describes the majority of us.

You will be glad you found this site and we encourage you to use it as often as you wish. That's what it's here for.

these folks are spot on. welcome to this space, you will learn so much from great people. have met several throat warriors since we started this journey, and they say pretty much the same. the 3rd week seems to be around the time rads kick in (drs shared this with us early on as well) but again that varies. but meds, nutrition, hydration, exercise, all critical. very best to you~

As everyone has said and will say: welcome. And also that we're all different. Personally after about 2 weeks I found it impossible to do anything but drive my butt to RT every day, come home and collapse. Stopped working about that time and didn't have the strength to resume until about 5 months after the end of treatment. Maybe I was coddling myself, but since I was able to do so I did!

Hope everything goes smoothly for you. As smoothly as possible, of course. This is a tough treatment but I'm confident you'll come through it!

Follow Christine's good advice and please keep us posted. It might also be a good idea when you can to make yourself a signature here as we all have done.

Courage!

My husband worked 4 days/week for most of his tx - did not work chemo days. He took the last week of tx off, but was back to work the week after for Thursday and Friday; I drove him while he was on the opiates for pain. He works with computers at a university, and has a lot of flexibility at work, otherwise he couldn't have done this. For the first couple of months post TX, the weekends were devoted to resting! Also, since he didn't have the platinum based chemo, he didn't have the immune system issues that would have made working with the public problematic.

Everyone will be slightly different as to how much the beastly treatment knocks them for a loop. I think that arranging to work from home for, say, the last half of your TX as well as for some time thereafter would be a good idea. The last week or two of TX and the following two - three weeks post TX seem to be the worst, so if you can get your firm's ducks in a row to manage with less imput from you during that time frame it would probably be good.

Talking may be an issue - it may hurt to talk for an extended time period, and it may be difficult to be clear the nasty sticky mucous in a genteel fashion. Not everyone has this problem, but better to know in advance that it might be an issue.

Best wishes and keep posting!

As some folks have already mentioned, the effects of Tx are different for everyone and I can only tell of my experience. I am also self-employed and was so back in 2006 while undergoing treatment. My office was/is in my home with me and the wife being the only employees of a service type business as a private investigator. Most (probably 65%) of my work is typically done from within the office with some being "on the street" but not involving anything strenuous. My hours were/are very flexible to where the daily radiation sessions were no problem to work around which was a blessing. Around the 5th week of Tx I began to feel lousy in more ways than can be described and I probably spent at least half the day resting in bed after getting back home from morning radiation. I refused to let it get me totally down and forced myself to get into the office for at least 4 to 6 hours each day if at all possible. I was then able to work on the computer and telephone but certainly didn't feel like having to travel anywhere. I had a close friend in the same business and farmed out all work to him requiring any form of travel and all went well. There were probably just a few days where I just couldn't get into that office in an effort to keep the "revenue pipeline" flowing. I do think it was a bit more stressful from the standpoint of being self-employed and would have been a bit easier as an employee of a company offering time off for such things. All in all though, I think it ended up making me an overall stronger person for working it out under pressure as necessary.

I look back on things at this point and really wonder how I was able to pull it all off, pretty much without a hitch. It's amazing what you can do when forced and I'm sure you will have the same experience!

Good luck and have a smooth and safe ride,

Bill Dozier

Hi - welcome and as everyone here said we're all different. Some people are layed flat by rads - some do okay! None of us do great - no one will lie to you and tell you it's a piece of cake that would be an outright lie!!! But it is manageable - and Christine's right - nutrition and hydration are extremely important - to healing, recovery, and fighting this disease. Working is dependent on how you feel If you can work at home then you can pace yourself... A nutritionist will tell you how much protein you need - try to take it all in, it helps - best of luck!

I don't know what everyone else is talking about but I breezed through rads/chemo. Where I took time off from the hotels I ran during the day, I managed to keep my second job...hunting ninjas sent by the government to assasinate me in the night!

Funny but true.

I suffered pretty bad side effects from Ambien and Lunesta, the sleep aides prescribed to counter the opiate induced insomnia. I don't remember much of that time due to the sheer amount of drugs I was playing with (liquid oxycodone is effective and the type I had tasted like cherries!) but I know I had an easy go of it!

I did go back to the hotel a week after rads and my last chemo, I lasted two days before physically before I had to stop again.

Just take it one step at a time and listen to your body, it will start talking pretty loud at you at some point and let you know when's a good time to take a time out.

Good luck, we all did it so can you!

Eric