"We can rebuild him. We can make him better than he was before"

Haven't spent that much yet, but working on it.

If you admit to knowing what that title is all about you must be about as old as I am.

Here is a funny story.  JoLynne went to the library the other day and rented the video of "The Six million dollar man" just so she could watch that part at the first and hear them say those immortal words.  We ended up watching the whole episode.  Ummm...It wasn't quite as good as I remember

Speaking of rebuilding, we are now in Miami.  We came to meet with a famous oral surgeon named Robert Marx.  He has done a lot of work in reconstructing people's faces after radiation damage.  The meeting went very well.  Dr. Marx and his team were so kind.  At one point they had me remove my bandages to look at the wound directly.  Most people when they see it for the first time are pretty taken back.  Not these guys.  They went right to work, photographing, taking x-rays, pulling on my skin all over the place to see where I had extra.  After looking for a bit, the micovascular surgeon put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eyes and said, "We are so glad you are here.  We can help you.  We have treated much worse than this with great success.  Oh, one more thing, you need to gain weight."  I guess that means more ice cream in my stomach tube.  I wonder if you can overdose on ice cream.

The real question now is timing.  Dr Marx said, and we agree, that the most important thing is to control this cancer.  They don't want to do anything to interfere with my cancer treatment.  He and my oncologist in Houston are going to talk today or tomorrow and try to work out a schedule.  Once we have the scan in mid February we should know for certain if the treatment is working.  That will help us to know our next step.

Little Havana

My version of dominoes

In the meantime,  JoLynne rented us a little apartment in Miami.  It's pretty dang cool.  I think it's called "Little Havana."  Everything is in spanish, the food smells amazing, there are monuments all over to Cuban war heroes.  We went walking today and stopped and watched a bunch of old people playing dominoes.  There was some disagreement about the game and lots of raised voices.  I don't usually take my dominoes so seriously.  I thought that playing dominoes meant stacking them in a line and then pushing the first one over and watching the others fall.

More promising signs

Nurse JoLynne

We met with the doctors again yesterday.  This time it was with both research doctors, Dr. Wang and Dr. Gottschalk.  They were both very interested in the swelling around the known tumor sites.  JoLynne told them that she had been peeling off bone from inside my wound.  I'm not sure if I mentioned that before.  We have several areas of known tumor.  One of them we can see plain as day though the gapping hole in the side of my face.  It looks like a mound of bone that grew out of my natural bone.  The other day JoLynne was poking at it with her tweezers while changing my bandage and chunks of it started coming off.  She kept at it for some time until she had a gauze full of dead tumor bone laying there.  Sometimes I am grateful that I have no nerve in that part of my face.  I just kind of assumed that this was dead tumor caused by radiation 18 months ago.  The research doctors felt that was unlikely after so much time and were more inclined to think it was being killed by T cells.  The doctors decided that they wanted to take a look inside of my wound.  I warned them that it wasn't pretty but they wouldn't be dissuaded.  So JoLynne took off the bandages and you could kind of see their jaws drop.  In the awkward silence that followed JoLynne said "Few women have been able to see inside their husbands head quite like this"  That broke the tension.  We all had a good laugh.  That JoLynne, she is a funny girl.  Anyway, they took some samples from the wound and JoLynne put the bandages back on.  The doctors wanted to know where she had her nursing training.  She smiled and said, I'm not a nurse.  I have a degree in zoology.  Eric is my only patient.  Anyway, swelling around the tumor in my temple continues.  The amount of drainage from that area has more than doubled in the last few days.  All of those are encouraging signs.  I hurt more too, which I don't like but if that means it's working, I will deal with it.

A sneaky cruise:  Don't tell!

On Monday we fly to Miami to meet with a reconstructive surgeon.  He is a very famous oral surgeon and we feel so grateful he is willing to see us.  After that we are flying Adam and Elizabeth to Miami and going on a four day cruise.  We told our doctors here we were going to Miami for the reconstruction consult, they were okay with that.  We didn't tell them about the cruise.  Sometimes it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission.