What to expect

Ive meet with so many doctors. And they all end the appointment with a review of what symptoms to expect. There's a lot of pretty serious ones, so they all want to make sure we are aware and able to prepare for them.

-Erbitux (chemo) rash, aka bad acne that can be very painful and leave scares.
-Erbitux also causes very dry skin allover your body. It can cause deep cracks on your fingers and feet. Some people even lose toe nails.
-Radiation causes your skin to basically get a really bad "sun burn." It can blister, crack, and bleed.
-My radiation treatment is a wide field that covers from my jaw bone down to mid-chest. Because the field covers my jaw bone, there are a lot of symptoms that will affect my mouth. My jaw bone will be compromised from the treatments, so later in life I can never ever have a tooth extraction because my jaw bone will not be able heal right.
-Dry mouth (since the radiation will kill my salivary glands), which causes mouth sores and ulcers, and cavities, and makes it difficult to eat.
-Loss of all taste buds (which in combination with dry mouth, makes eating anything seem like eating sand. Tasty.)
-Sore throat (understatement of the century) described as feeling like raw meat, like a blister that has opened up and oozes (which is called Mucositis- your throat is oozes a great amount of mucous). Some people end up needing feeding tubes because it is either too painful to swallow or they just completely lose the ability to swallow.
-Loss of my voice - due to all the trauma in my throat, my cords will not be able to function properly, but hopefully this will be temporary. I never regain my "normal" voice and will always sound hoarse. They also told me to never expect to sing again.

They said that it is a big misnomer that chemo is more difficult then radiation. It is actually the opposite. Chemo is used to make the radiation treatments more effective. The vast majority of my side effects will be from radiation.

Also, many times radiation and chemo are done separately, but my treatments are being done concurrently, making the side effects of both a lot more extreme.