14-15%

As of today, I am about 14% complete with chemo and 15% complete with radiation.  As with this entire ordeal, this last week has been filled with ups and downs.  I am now finished with an entire week of treatments and so I somewhat know what my schedule will look like for the next 40 days or so.  I am going to add a countdown to the blog that will count the seconds until that glorious day in late August when I will be finished with my scheduled treatment.
Radiation this morning went very smoothly.  In and out in about 20 minutes.  There is one fun thing that I don't believe that I have mentioned yet, and it has to do with the last dose of radiation that I receive before I am allowed off the table.  After the majority of radiation has been applied to me from various angles, the head of the machine rotates from behind me and stops directly over my head.  The operators come back in the room with me and attach some additional apparatus to the head of the machine and insert some lead "blocking" to only allow the radiation to hit me in a certain area.  As part of this, they run me up on the table vertically until my chin is pressed against the machine and then manually rotate the machine until they get it and me in the correct position.  Every day this week during this step, they have managed to get a significant portion of my beard caught in some part of the machine so that as they are positioning me, my beard is being pulled in all kinds of different directions.  And the coolest thing is that I can't even say anything about it to them as my mouthpiece prevents any communication other than a meager grunt.  
Couldn't make myself drink my whey protein and almond milk this morning.  I will have to get better about that and maybe switch it up so I am not drinking the same stuff all the time and hopefully that will give me a better chance of keeping up with my nutrition.  Just looking at the tub of whey protein made me queasy, and smelling it probably would have put me over the edge.  I have decided that the act of eating makes me feel ok, but the thought and smell of food makes me somewhat sick.  I am still eating fine and my jaw is even loosening up some more (post surgery) and making the process go a little smoother.  The other discovery of the day is that when I have to talk for extended periods of time, my mouth gets very dry.  It's a good thing I am drinking over a gallon of water a day to help with that, I suppose.  It is probably also a good thing that I don't like talking as well.  I physical side not also, is that I am starting to feel some soreness in the left side of my throat when I swallow.  It is not all that painful and nothing that I will be concerned about right now.  I have yet to master the fluoride trays, but the last 2 nights I have made considerable progress toward making the process bearable.  I am currently down to only wildly gagging a couple of times when I first put them in, versus the 10 minutes of continuous gagging from earlier in the week.
I close with a picture from May of this year (a time between surgery 1 and 2).  This was taken at The Reef Resort in Grand Cayman while we were down there for Robby's wedding.  It was actually right after we got back from this trip that I went in to see the doctor about what I thought was a growing lump in my neck.  Only 6 more chemo sessions and 28 radiation treatments to go...