ear pain & mucus

If they have not already done so, I would push someone hard now for a prescription for a phlegm suction pump. There are recent threads here, but the search option will provide lots of additional threads.   My mucus started late week 2, was constant from treatment week 3 thru week 6 post.  Super abundant.    Tell yourself it is sort of a good thing.  The mucus comes from your throat cavity, not your lungs.  It is the abused tissue providing moisturizer and bio-film to fix the tissue.  It is part of why the tissue eventually heals.  It still pretty much sucks.

Suction pumps are not a controlled substance, so anyone can probably write the order, my chemo oncol's nurse ordered mine.  Probably will come from whomever does prescription oxygen supplies in your area.  My co-pay was $4 per month with Kaiser-Colorado.  You can also buy your own, but shop because they can be pricey.  I bought a Schuco 330 pump for around $170 plus about $50 for fast shipping, but you'll have to hunt for that price.  It eliminates the need to gag and spit, and can allow you to manage the accumulation.  They are very simple to set up and operate, I liked the 330 because it was quieter than others, it was cheaper than others, and turned out to be durable.  Mine ran fairly constantly for weeks.  My prescription one was a Devilbis, and was portable, and went everywhere I went.  They are not very complex, most are side products of industrial air pump companies.  Devilbis makes lots of pumps.  A pump sucks things down a tube and deposits them in a plastic jug.  Every now and then you get up and empty the jug.  There is a small plastic filter for air, I replaced one on my Schuco, none on the devilbis.  Took 2-3 minutes.

Mucositese is one of the great miseries of  treatment, you can try to manage the misery, I have no clue on how to prevent it.  Recovery is the cure, probably several weeks from now.  I'm told there is a four part protocol to follow in dealing with it, but no one ever briefed me on the protocol.  Reportedly it involves the lidocane mouthwash you should have by now.  A big factor is going to be hydration.  Swallowing only gets tougher, so probably most of us end up back at the chemo infusion center getting infusion doses of saline drip, 1.5-2.0 liters daily for me.  That will also continue for weeks, including in to recovery.   It's inconvenient, but also allows the nurses in infusion to keep track of you.  Mine became extended family.  Hopefully others here will pitch in on muscus management, mine lacked any finesse, I just stuck the wand in my mouth and sucked it out.   Eventually my throat healed enough that it stopped.  

There are a great many products to up calories, but for some reason most people have to stumble into them on their own.  A post here will probably get lots of caregiver response.  My wife made me lots of chicken soup.  Canned and stock was hideous, but fresh soup from whole chickens with the fat left in the broth pulled me thru.  We learned to mix an egg in and turned it into eggdrop soup.  Then we started adding additives like Benecal, and a bowl of soup broth started having 600 calories.  

Ensure is an interesting subject, most of  us ended up drinking lots of it without developing any fondness for it.  It is useful tho.  If you are struggling now, a peg tube is probably a good idea.  I never got a peg, but I got a PICC (a port run thru your arm).  You are going to get stuck with plenty of needles, a port reduces that by several orders of magnitude.  You will probably lose lots of weight.  I lost 45 lbs, several posters here lost much more.  I ended up getting hydration 7 days a week.  Even tho my HMO's infusion center was only open 5 days a week, the staff can find a way.  Easiest is probably simply home nursing services.  They bring you boxes of stuff, give you training, answer your calls.    With a port, ya hang the bag and screw it in.  My infusion center was a warm, sunny upbeat place staffed by the finest people on the planet.  I hope yours is as well.  They are built specifically to get you thru this.

 Don't rule out milk.  I was afraid of it coating things, was having enough problems with ensure.  Discovered in recovery it was not the milk in ensure I had a problem with, it was the thick sticky corn syrup.  Now 7 months into recovery I am drinking 2-3 gallons of non-fat per week.  Nice protein and calcium, washes down even dried breads and crackers.    

Most of us struggle, there seems to be no easy way thru.  But know that you will come thru.  This cancer does not have the numbers that deseases like breast cancer have, but it is not a rare cancer, and around 40,000 people in the US get treatment pretty much identical to yours every year.  This is going on worldwide, so the path is well trod. I didn't discover this site until my last week, but it's been a godsend since then.  In about two months you will be here seeking guidence on if taste will return, will mucosites ever end.  It will and does, and then you will be writing posts like this.