I feel....

Like someone is slowly choking my neck 24/7. Tightness wraps my entire neck and it's numb to the touch. Rotating my head pulls on the taught skin. My smile is still a distorted ghoulish grin with the high potential of drool.

Breathing through a stoma surprisingly feels natural. Except for the occasional large lung luggie that plugs the hme - good times. An odd phenomena is that when i get a tickle at the back of my throat (mouth/esophagus) this makes me cough, but the cough is through the trachea/stoma so it does nothing. My body hasn't figured out they are no longer connected. A larry tube isn't really the most comfortable thing in the world. Putting it in feels like, well like you are shoving a plastic tube into your neck. Dr.Seth told me yesterday that i can start using the adhesive hme's (no tube). However, the infection at the edge of my stoma only just closed up and the area is still sensitive. I'm going to hold on that a little longer.

Thongues are a funny thing. (I dubbed my THigh flap that sits in place of my tONGUE a Thongue. It is just a mass of thigh skin that fills the space where a tongue would be.) I can't feel it at all. When i drink water i only sense the coolness everywhere else in my mouth - it is as if the water is levitating at the top of my mouth. I can't feel that i don't have a tongue. Rather it is as if my tongue is pinned down. Although for a split second yesterday i had the phantom sensation that i licked the inside of my teeth. My Thongue is molting - creating 'granular tissue' which has the lovely propensity to bleed - particularly during the middle of the night.

The silence is surprising. I can't laugh, i can't grunt or moan. Just silence. I'm getting accustom to sound of my synthesized voice, getting faster with keyboard in hand trying to keep pace with conversation.. Here's the thing. When someone hold the door open for me, i can't say thanks. I could fumble with my phone and type it and by then they would be gone. I could smile - but even if i wasn't masked it would be a crooked grin with a tad of drool, lovely. So i try to nod my head and smile with my eyes. 'What kind of dog is that?' The girls are always by my side, so they fill in the blanks. Random chatter with strangers isn't a necessity in life, for sure. I will adapt. I will figure it out. But for now, it is just silence.