Oh, for something crunchy!

Okay, final stretch: Three more treatments to go. The plan is to finish on Wednesday, but that may change.

I'm not pretty right now. The left side of my face is ... icky. Blistered and cracked and red and scabby, with occasional pustulence. Requires daily soaking in an astringent solution and then liberal application of petroleum jelly.

And when I go in for radiation, and they fit the mask over my face (which is also swollen, so the custom fit is a little tighter than it was), the wounds start to bleed, and I spend the 15 minutes of treatment feeling blood trickle down the side of my face and onto my neck.

I must have looked especially gory on Friday, because the technician made a note to check with my radiation oncologist to see whether we should take a break until my skin has healed a little. I do not want. I've been focusing on the finish line for seven weeks now. I want to end on time.

Happily, pretty much everyone I've talked to at MGH has said that the skin will heal quickly; apparently it's almost miraculous how fast it happens.

In eating news, there's nothing new to report. I still have no tastebuds, and I'm still on semi-solids. An average day's menu looks like this:

Breakfast
Fresh fruit smoothie
Weetabix, sogged to pablum with milk and yogurt

Midmorning snack
Odwalla protein shake

Lunch
Scrambled eggs

Afternoon snack
The Boy's milkshake of the day (could involve ice cream, yogurt, almond butter, maple syrup, banana, avocado, coconut milk)

Dinner
Soup

The other night I dreamed I was eating a grilled cheese sandwich that looked like this:



In my dream, I thought, "Oh cool! I'm using my whole mouth again! Yay!"

And then I woke up.