Good grief I have just 3 more weeks on this hideous 11 month beauty bashing treatment for my liver and then I am completely cured! The lower face and serious chin jowel and neck inflammation has been devastating. I actually didn't leave the immediate neighborhood or house for months it was so severe at one point. People don't look long at fat lower faces. With no exaggeration I resemble the octuplets mom. It's been rough, a curiosity and delight that people used to noticeably take in gazing at me has been totally gone.
I went to a very fancy endocrinologist who found that I have one hormone level that would be normal in a pregnant woman but was totally abnormal in a male. Great, just what I wanted! It's the interferon treatment. So I've been doing cardio for 45 minutes a day and weightlifting every day (with an occasional break of just doing stomach on some days) since Dec.20. My legs are slabs of strength and my stomach on it's way to unreal in another 5 months. I'm developing at a rate I can live with and it's actually remarkable for someone on chemo, but the face and neck remain the same! It's so bizarre and nightmarish. The humility was fine for a little while, then it was funny and then I was just mad mad mad all the time about it. I still am. I don't know who I'm looking at when I look in the mirror. That's not me. That's an eggplant.
I've always been sleek looking so being 'the guy with weird sh*t going on with his face' has almost reduced me to hysteria - and I AM that guy, sad to say. Non super vascular doctors and other naturally puffy people have tried to be of comfort saying that maybe this is how I always looked and just noticed or that they don't really see it or its not that bad, however I MUST stick to what I know is true: That I am not mad and imagining this, that there is the me that was there before this treatment waiting underneath and that I am ultimately very alone in this knowledge and just have to stick with it, knowing that my observations are true.
