My uncle is, as I type, undergoing surgery to remove the cancer that previous surgery and radiotherapy didn’t kill.
He is having his voicebox and associated lymph nodes removed, his windpipe redirected to an opening in his throat, and an artificial voicebox inserted.
This isn’t a General Question post, but I do have questions about odd things. Will his hayfever clear up (and how to cope if it doesn’t)? Will he still talk with a discernable accent? What aren’t I thinking of that’s important?
I would really appreciate your anecdotes about the successes, spectacular failures and weird occurences that you know of. Humour is good. Truth also.
He’s going to be out of town for at least a week and then may come back here for speech therapy. If you have any practical suggestion for helping out (he has good family support so the basics are covered) or helping through, they would also be most welcome.
Haven’t freaked out about this until today. Making up for lost time.
I heard from someone at work that their FIL had the same op. Horror after horror of infected site, ripped out tubes & dislodged valves followed by a partial reconstruction - only to be topped with; 'But he’s a fucking alky - never did anything the docs said."
My uncle is not an alcoholic, so I hope he’ll miss out on many of those experiences.
He’s through the initial op (will need a valve inserted later), sitting up and writing out silly jokes on his whiteboard. A good start.
My daddy did this - both the prior surgery/radiation followed by a second surgery.
I don’t know about the hay fever, but no, no real accent that I can tell. Buy then, dad doesn’t talk so much any more - he does as needed, but long convos are rare. Um, there does tend to be dribbling around the voice box/stoma, so he wears something to cover it and absorb it - they’ve had trouble fitting his prosthetic well, though, so that has something to do with it, IIRC.
He’s really hard to understand on the phone.i miss being able to have an easy chat with him - I’m not in town enough to adjust to listening/understanding well. My mother and brothers who are in town do better, though.
Thanks. Uncle J was warned before the surgery that he probably wouldn’t be able to use the phone. Which is going to be particularly hard on their son. My cousin’s based overseas (he’s just come over for the surgery and seeing his dad into speech therapy) and I think he’s going to set his parents up on Skype.
Aunty’s going to enjoy getting the last word. I am so burning in hell for that.
