Day 100 – 2.02.100 – 100 days into this journey

Something that I love watching is F1. The team that I cheer for is McLaren and they have sucked for the last couple of years, but this year they are starting to turn it around and do well. In the driver’s championship they are third and in the constructor’s championship they are third. They do not have a chance of winning, but they are the best of the rest. My eldest son will watch some parts of the race with me on Sunday morning. It is nice that he enjoys spending time with me and watching it. It reminds me of growing up and watching sports with my friends and their parents. I am listening to some old music from the 90’s, when we use to watch Much Music and watch music videos. Growing up in high school I was a bit introverted and was not really much into attending parties or things. I did not drink any alcohol so it was a different experience as most people my age wanted to drink. The one thing that my friends did like though was that I would voluntarily be the designated driver and no one ever worried about me risking having a drink and driving home drunk. I knew some people that would drive home drunk and always thought how foolish that was. If any of my friends would have called and asked for a ride home I would do it without hesitation. My really close friends never drove home drunk so it was a non-issue. What they did do though was sing at the top of their lungs with the windows done. A popular song was Sinead O’Connor – Nothing Compares To You….I am not sure exactly why, but I just have a fond memory of this. I would like to point out, this was not the type of music we listened to.

When talking about acts of kindness, I had gone to the corner store once and managed to do something really stupid. Somehow I managed to lock the keys into my car while it was running. I did not dare call my parents otherwise I would not have heard the end of it and most likely lost car privileges. I called my best friend who was having dinner at the time. He left and came to pick me up. He drove me home and I grabbed the spare keys and drove me back. There was no judgement for doing something so stupid, and he came rescued me quickly.

Any pain that I had is gone now. Mentally I have gotten over it at this point. My blood pressure seems to still be low. I am not sure if it is due to my migraine medication or not, but it normally does not have too large of an impact. If I get up too suddenly, I am a bit light headed. I am sleeping through the night now that I can move around my bed a bit more. I still love having the adjustable bed as does my youngest son. My eldest son started a gratitude journal for school work and my lovely wife did the motherly thing and read it. She told me that he wrote about me and his gratitude for helping him in hockey and video games and for exposing him to another language so he can learn 3. The primary lesson I learned is my wife will snoop and read my private journal. Luckily I can defeat her by having my journal open to the public so she does not need to leak my thoughts to others. I beat her to it.

For dinner we had sushi and I realized how much smaller my stomach is now. I can not eat anywhere close to what I did in the past and I need to remember to really chew the food a lot. If I eat too much too quickly I can feel the discomfort. I also understand how people can get dumping syndrome after a month or so. Initially you are very careful when eating and really pay attention to it. Over time as you adjust you can get a bit more careless about what you should do and it is easy to start cutting corners. I was told not to eat in front of a TV or get distracted, but I found it was far easier to eat in front of a TV or during work. When eating food I enjoy I just want to eat more, but if watching something it distracted me from wanting to eat more. Melanie mentioned that during chemo treatment I would not eat too much for a day or so, but I would easily make it up in the next day or so. I will not be able to do that now and will need to make sure I eat on a more consistent basis. Food just tastes odd for a day or two, and I would just eat baked potatoes for meals for two days.

It has been a couple of days now since I received the news from the surgeon and any negativity over the news is now completely gone. I have faith in my cancer care team and do not fear what may or may not happen in the future. I have undergone chemo treatment already and know what to expect. This second round I am sure will be more difficult as I can not eat like I did in the past. With the news that I had it in so many lymph nodes I do not know if I have the option to opt out of treatment. I will persevere no matter what to give me the best chance of destroying any residual cancer that may still be present, especially since it is not really showing up on any scans. I can understand how the difficulty increases after having stomach removed. On the cancer forums there are a couple of people with stomach cancer who are going through the same thing. I have not heard from them in a couple of months and am curious on how their treatment has been going. I have some reference points from a work colleague whose mother went through this as well as others who have gone through cancer and have had a re-occurrence of cancer later. Personally that does not worry or scare me. I am not sure if that is a good thing or not, what I have gone through so far has not been pleasant, but I think I have the strength, resilience and most importantly the support system to deal with it again in the future. Right now I am just concentrating on things that spark joy….avoiding vacation time and making sure that me and the boys can gang up on my wife.

Quoc Hao