A Little More Progress and a mystery

I am scheduled for another checkup in early December but thought I would do another summery now, as December is looking rather busy.  Everything looked normal at my August checkup, including my MRI, so not really anything to report about that.

Weight: My normal weight used to be over my desired weight, so these days I'm a little better than normal and working hard on establishing a new normal.  Weight is no longer a radiation or cancer issue.  The task of holding to my desired current weight is made more difficult by my recovered sense of taste, as reported in the next entry.

Taste: In the last post I thought I was pretty much recovered except for a slightly muted taste and accompanying muted desire for my favorite foods.  Well, now the muted part is completely gone and everything tastes as I remember, with all the same old issues to be dealt with such as enjoying a great meal and even though I'm getting full, emptying my plate anyway just because it's so good. Chocolate is back to being chocolate, which I now only allow myself in small doses, strictly for medicinal purposes of course.  So I'm saying that taste is no longer an issue.

 Mouth and throat: I still experience slight "dry mouth" symptoms and probably  always will, so I just accept that and either deal with it or ignore it, as the situation warrants.

Skin: The skin on my left neck and shoulder felt somehow different at the time of my last post but I now think it was simply still healing, as the difference is now much harder to detect.  The left side seems just a tad less sensitive than the right side.  I'm guessing there will be no difference by the time another four or eight months have gone by.

Hair: There is no longer any trace of the radiation hair loss on the back of my head.

The Mystery: It was shortly after the August MRI that I rather suddenly developed the symptoms of L ’Hermitte’s Sign which is the occurrence of a tingling buzzing feeling in the lower small of my back, rather well expressed as feeling like I am receiving a slight electric shock.  This occurs fairly often when I bend my head forward, bringing my chin down near my chest.  The cause is supposedly some trauma to or inflammation of the spinal cord.  It seems that it can in some cases be the result of radiation of the spinal cord and shows up around six months after treatment – and this was the six month mark.  This was worrisome, so I went to see my oncologist who assured me that the path of the radiation was kept away from the spinal cord and the amount of radiation was so low that he simply doesn’t believe that radiation could be the cause.  At any rate there is apparently nothing to be done for it and it will usually eventually go away by itself without any sort of treatment, often after several months.  My primary doctor (at my yearly October checkup) didn’t know what to make of it either, even after consulting with some of his colleagues, although their feeling was that if I have never had those symptoms before and then suddenly did have them six months after the radiation -- then what else could it be?  So the overall recommendation seems to be to just monitor the situation and wait to see what happens before taking any further action.  This is in line with my feelings, so that's what I'll do, at least for now.