I have a couple recurring themes in this treatment for my throat cancer.

One is that I can't predict how I  will be on any given day.

Over the weekend, I was feeling pretty good — enough to play two rounds of golf, although I did neither particularly well.

In fact, I have stopped betting on my golf game, because it was a lot like being hustled by pool sharks. (In the last bet, I shot an 87 with a 10 on one of the par-4 holes and Neil Fulce shot a 75. There's a lesson learned.)

Nonetheless, I showed up Monday at the dentist's office for a teeth cleaning. My hygienist,  Nancye, thought there might be an issue of having my teeth cleaned while undergoing chemotherapy and radiation.

Turns out there is. Apparently, as your teeth get cleaned, there's a lot of bacteria that gets shuffled around in the mouth.

I wasn't worried about that when I went in. I was worried about gagging in the process, so I brought my own barf bowl with me. I just thought that was being considerate.

I was approved by my cancer doctors for the cleaning, but only if I had 2000 mg of Amoxicillin (antibiotics), which is nearly 10 times the dosage I had at home.

But then I developed a new malady in my mouth — a sore on the back side of my tongue.

I shared this with my radiation oncologist, Dr. Dean Davis, who expressed surprise I only had one sore. I'll get more he assured me.

Oh, goody. In addition to fatigue, nausea, retching, hair loss, constipation, diarrhea,  hemorrhoids and coughing, I can add tongue sores to the mix.

While we're at it, let's add dry mouth.

I'm beginning to envy the baseball players who spit every time the TV camera looks at them.

I'm missing my tendency to drool. Especially at night when my mouth feels like a curled up, parched tile in the desert.

The good Dr. Davis suggested, and I couldn't agree fast enough, to skip the teeth cleaning until the end of my treatment. I'm pretty sure this will save a big mess on the dentist's floor, notwithstanding my handy barf bowl.

I have a new mouthwash called Biotene which is supposed to help reduce plaque and stimulate saliva. I could use less of the former and more of the latter.

My health agency, Blue Shield, sent out a nurse to watch over my treatment. She's from Riverside. My wife said she sounded old over the phone.

So to my surprise, when Margaret showed up at my doorstep, I noticed she adds to a long line of pretty, blonde, blue-eyed nurses caring for me. I'm fine with that.

I wanted, and got, an ugly nurse at my vasectomy, but I say bring on the pulchritude in my current medical need.

Margaret's goal is to get me the treatment I need without wiping me totally out in the process. Drugs could be our friends here. Hydration is another friend.

I'm on board with those goals. No sense bashing fish's head too hard to make it wiggle, I always say.

I get free cookies at Dr. Dean Davis' office now — the signal that my radiation has begun.

I went in last  Monday, Nov. 12,  for what I thought was just to get X-rays. I did get the X-rays but only as a prelude to strapping me down for radiation.

Therapists Jesse and Wayne lined me all up, explained how they would begin on my lower right neck and work around to my lower left neck.

They said I wouldn't feel a thing.

For now.

It will take awhile — a few weeks of five-times a week radiation — to eliminate my tastebuds, dry out my mouth and inflame my throat so I can't swallow. Dr. Davis said I can eat well at Thanksgiving but not Christmas.

That's why I have this stomach tube so I can be fed directly into my tummy. With liquid such as Ensure.

The tube may be my new best friend during that time. But it is not now. I have to clean this reddish-brown guck around my stomach port. The good doctor tells me that's mid-body mucus.

I'm guessing the higher you go up, the more green it gets.

Speaking of colors. Not only has my tumor shrunk with this chemo stuff (about 50 percent), but it has turned from an old hamburger sort of tint to a pinkish glow.

That's good news, the doctor said. Well on its way to being cured.

Meanwhile, back at the radiation table, here's how that works. My white mesh mask and shoulder braces lock me in while this big round machine does a three-fourths orbit around my neck.

The actual radiation can't be seen, but it sounds like an anemic horn from a Model T. The therapists leave me alone in the room (no sense all of us getting hurt), while the pre-programmed machine zaps me.

It'll take a little time to hurt me, but rest assured, the regiment is determined to  do some serious messing with my throat.

On Wednesday, I went back in for more chemo. Not as much as before, but enough to make me tired.

That's the nature of this beast. They wipe you out.. You recover. They wipe you out some more. You recover.  Broken record until you're cured.

And while the chemo was less, it still knocked me down almost as much as the first time. Four times I went to kneel at the porcelin god Wed., Thurs. and Friday, and then I went crazy, with five more trips between Friday and Saturday morning.

That prompted me to call Dr. Anthony Ciarolla who said I could stop taking the chemo tablets for awhile. On Sunday I felt pretty good, but this Monday I was light headed most of the morning and feeling nauseous.

As I've said, people who have this disease actually survive stuff. And I'm learning it's not good stuff. 

P.S. I went out and played 9 holes at Buena Vista Golf Course last Monday with my brother. I took a Vicodin because my stomach tube hurt. I went pippyup Tuesday morning. The good doctor tells me narcotics will do that to you. What good is a pain killer if it just causes you more pain? Answer me that, drug lords.

This has been an event filled week on my cancer journey.

I returned to  Dr. Dean Davis' office  where I was fitted with a white mesh cancer mask about six weeks ago. Still fits, which means my head hasn't swelled or shrunk.

The purpose of the mask is to keep my head still while they radiate my neck, the location of my cancer lump that has been shrinking quite nicely since my chemotherapy has begun.

My ever attentive wife, Mary, took pictures of the mask, the machine which lines me up so the radiation doesn't wander off into my brain and cause possible damage or improvement.

The nice lady with me in one of the pictures is Lorri, my own special cheery therapist. She was quite impressed that I kept a taped mark on my chest since September.  I attributed that to only showering once. (just kidding)

I got a new CAT scan to see how much my lump has shrunk. I think I mentioned that I can no longer feel the lump in my neck, which is how this whole journey got started.

Lorri called that responding to treatment.

Since this stuff has been in the blogs and newspaper, people have been talking to me about their experiences. So I asked my assigned nurse, Doris, what is it I'm really in for.

She thinks six or seven weeks of radiation, which will basically ruin my mouth and throat. I'll get dry mouth (of which I already have to some degree), lose my taste buds and fry my throat so I can't swallow food.

How fun.

Then it will take months to heal all that so that my estimated time of being back to normal is about May.  Hard to put a good spin on that, so I won't.

So how am I going to eat, you may ask. Why, through a tummy tube.

The call it a PEG tube, which is not named after some babe named Peg who had a fascination with tummies. It is  a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube, or PEG for short.

On Tuesday, Mary took me over to Mercy Hospital where Dr. Ishaan Kalha of the Advanced Gastroenterology Center is going to tube me. I'm glad "Advanced" is in the name; wouldn't want a Backward G center.

After signing  more  paperwork than I did for  my mortgages,  I  got put  in  one of those gurney bays surrounded by curtains. The lady next to me  was a little vocal about her two-day fast for her procedures; I only had a 16-hour fast for mine.

Some technicians asked her questions including how tall she was. "5-foot-4." How much do you weigh? In a barely audible whisper, she said, "201." I took that to mean okay with the height, but not so much with the other.

I got a very pretty technician named Yvonne who wheeled my gurney into the operating room. She explained this whole PEG procedure to me.

The doctor will put a camera tube down my throat, look for a nice place in my stomach (can't imagine any bad places in there), make a small incision in my skin, stick a (I'm presuming crochet-like needle) into my stomach which they will use to pull out the tube that the doctor sticks down my throat.

One question.

Will I be out for this. "Yes."

Good, I thought. That will keep me from making a mess all over the room.

Dr. Kalha came in, assured me everything would be fine and asked Yvonne to clean and shave my tummy. And, the doctor said, make sure to clean the belly button.

While Lorri became the first woman to shave some of my chest hair some weeks back, Yvonne wielded that razor over a much more expansive area. And then, just like they did to actor Steve Carell in "The 40-year-old Virgin," she pulled out remaining stubble with tape. Though I had peach fuzz compared to him.

Then Yvonne put that brown guck all over me and dipped into my belly button, becoming the first woman since my mother to do so.

As always, there is the normal expectation and then what actually happens to me.  A 15 minute procedure and a half hour in the recovery room. I didn't wake up for 2 and 1/2 hours.

Then I tossed what remaining cookies I had in my system. I held it until the recovery room technician, Bob, could find a plastic bowl. I would have thought those would have been a little handier in a gastro unit.

I was supposed to be able to take liquids right away and solid food a couple hours later. It was all I could do to get a can of chicken noodle soup down in six hours.

Now I can only lie down on my back. I was supposed to have some tenderness around the tube site. I got searing pain about every 45 minutes or so. The relief was to take deep breaths. Which you can't do and sleep too.

Dr. Kalha explained to me on Wednesday afternoon that the pain was from cinching the tube tightly — again so my guts didn't spill out. He loosened it.

I went out Wednesday morning in some discomfort to get the newspaper. To pick it up, I had to genuflect. I will tell you right now, I have genuflected for God, but never for my newspaper.

For lunch, I had chicken Parmesan. It went down real well. I looked at my tube afterward and saw no tell-tale spaghetti sauce. Seemed to me to be a good sign.