Treatment

Friday 9th

Ok, back to BLACK Friday 9th Jan.
After the diagnosis we got told a bit more information from my dad’s ENT specialist. She told us that she had removed the tonsil on the side of my dad’s neck and that was thought to have been the primary tumour. Unfortunately my dad had gone with this for some time and there were metastasis (daughter/sister tumours or whatever you would like to call them). It is pretty common that this type of cancer is diagnosed late and there are therefore metastasis already formed in around 70% of all cases.
However, my dad did not only have metastasis on the same side as primary tumour had been, he also has metastasis on the other side of his neck…. This is not good.
On a positive note the scan of the lungs had found nothing!!!
But to be on the safe side they booked a PET-CT Scan in order to see if there are any metastasis anywhere else (more info about PET-CT scan later).

So to the treatment:
My dad will have radiotherapy (strålning) once a day for 7 weeks, a total of 35 sessions. He will also have chemotherapy (cytostatika/cell gift) once a week during these 7 weeks. We were told that this is an extremely aggressive treatment and the side effect may be severe and that is something to be aware of. The oncologist told us that my dad was lucky in that way that they are working very closely with the pain unit and that this unit is the best in Sweden.

The plan is to start treatment Monday 9th Feb. This may feel like a long time to wait and I did also question this straight away. They said that it is natural to feel like this, you want them to start NOW, there and then, and preferably YESTERDAY if you could!!

However, they explain that the reason for this wait of four week is that they need to make sure that my dad gets the best possible treatment. He will undergo dental and jaw x-ray, he will have his PET-CT scan, he will have a dental examination to decide if any teeth need to be pulled out before treatment start, they need to create the mask (takes around 2 days) which he will wear during the radiation, and then they need to do another scan with the mask to see that they will target the metastasis in an exact way. (I will give you more exact info about this once treatment has started.)

After all this information we took the car home…..