Facial Upgrading

Posted by Roie R. Black on Mon 01 December 2014

Today, after an intense day of air traveling back to Austin from KC, where we spend Thanksgiving visiting with family and working on our second house, we went to visit Dr. Scholl. It has been 11 days since Dr. Yu did the "debulking" surgery at M. D. Anderson, and it was time to pull out all the stiches put in during the surgery, and see what Dr. Scholl thought about the entire process.

Dr. Scholl walked into the room, and started examining the work to see what he thought. The area around the patch, which Dr. Yu had to cut away to remove excess tissue, then sew back on, was pretty red, and was beginning to worry me, since it looked like an infection might be setting in. But Dr. Scholl just looked it over and said they the redness looked quite normal, given how soon after surgery it was, and all the radiation I have had in the area. Things just do not heal that fast when the big machine has blasted you as intensely as it has done to me. Phew!.

All in all, Dr. Scholl said things looked pretty good, and he proceeded to cut away all the stitches. I will say one good thing about the work they have done on that side of my face. Since they zapped the nerves across the left side of my face from about the top of where my eye used to be all the way down to below my mouth on that side, he can do pretty much what he wants to do with me just sitting there. I cannot feel anything, and he pulled out all the stitches with no problems. I had a bit of bleeding around one small section of the area about a week ago, but even that was fine when Dr. Scholl was done. The end result looks better, I will not say "much better", since I am still adapting to my new look.

Sadly, I think they missed a lot in my Robert Redford picture I asked them to use. Oh well, the area is now in pretty good shape, so we will let the Hollywood special effects folks see what they can come up with for an artificial eye on that side.

Next Visit

Our next medical adventure happens after school ends, which is on December 14. I will have a few days of furious grading to do to finish out the term, then we head back to Houston for my second CAT scan to make sure the cancer is still gone. Dr. Scholl did ask us if Dr. Yu had found anything abnormal in his surgery, which he did not. That is a good sign, since he was looking right in the area where the cancer had been, and if anything was wrong in that area, it might mean more bad news. So, Cheryl and I were both relieved, and we are hoping for a good scan on December 18. Hopefully, my ticket will get punched for the next three months.

I seem to live in three month increments these days. As long as nothing has been found, I am fine with life. Well, except for drooling when I try to drink anything, and the difficulty I am still having chewing and swallowing, but I suspect a lot of that is just the new "normal" I will be living with.

Christmas Planning

Cheryl and I are pretty confident that the CAT scan will go well, and she has a physical exam on December 19 to get done. After that, we are planning to drive back up to KC for more work on the house, which is getting much closer to being done! We will spend Christmas with the family again, then drive back to Austin the next week end.

After that, and after New Year's celebrations are done (we do not know what we will be doing for that!) We will probably be in for a two-week stay in Houston for the special effects team to sculpt my new eye. That seems like a long time to do this work, especially since they say the eye will only last about a year, then I will need another one! Boy, that seems to mean I better find interesting things to do in Houston, since we may be vacationing there every year for more eye work!

Hmmm, maybe the AFLAC Duck can pony up some more cash, and I can go for another ride on one of the Collings Foundation's other fighter jets!

F4 Flight

One of the technicians from the Collings Foundation was supposed to head out to California last week to inspect the work going on to rebuild the J-79 jet engine from the F4D Phantom II fighter jet (it has two of them so it can fly around 1600 mph) that I will be riding in. The engine has passed all the tests and looks almost ready to ship back to Houston. It will be a bit of work to reinstall the engine and reconnect everything to the F4D, and I hope to get over there to see some of that work. I used to watch that kind of thing as they built the jets at McDonnell Aircraft, where I worked as a student back in the mid 1960's (wow, that has been a while!) Anyway, they are pretty sure most of that work will happen after the holidays, so this may work out well. I will be in Houston for two weeks anyway, and if we can time things right, they may get my Phantom jet back in the air while I am there, and we can do my ride during that time as well.

I am in the process of getting my technology lined up for the flight. The only missing piece now is a recording GPS unit I plan on attaching to the jet so it has a good line-of-sight to the sky and can track where we fly, and how fast we are going. The data from that recorder will be something I can plot out using Google-Earth and retrace the flight later. I have seen things like that done before, and it is pretty neat. I am not spending that kind of money on this flight without a good record of the flight!

Jim Petty's New Adventure

My ground crew for the F4D ride includes Jim Petty, my good friend from Oklahoma City. Jim built his own airplane, a Falco, sold as a kit by Sequoia Aircraft (http://seqair.com) This is something I always dreamed of doing, but never quite had the time or money to get done.

Jim's Falco

(This is actually the first flight this airplane has ever made without Jim being at the controls!)

Jim will be coming down to film the F4D flight from the ground, at least the part where we will be in view. We will be up for an hour, so we can cover a lot of ground in that time. (I do plan on one high speed pass over the airport to scare the folks on the ground, including Cheryl, and that is what I hope Jim can film for me!)

Anyway, Jim just sold his airplane, which took him 14 years to complete, and which he has been flying all over the country for many years. It was hard for him to part with it, but the cost of keeping the plane flying was just getting to be too much. So he put it on the market, and Telvio Santos from Brazil gave him a call and wanted to buy it. After some negotiations, that is what happened, so Jim said goodbye to his bird a couple of days ago and it looked like he was going to have to rent something to fly any more. But life is full of strange twists.

It turns out that Telvio had another friend in Brazil, Eduardo Letti, who already owned a Falco, and it was this friend who talked the Telvio into buying Jim's plane. Both of these two folks came to OKC from Brazil to complete the purchase and get the craft ready to fly back from OKC to Brazil, a long flight, much of it over water!

It took a while to do some modifications to the bird to get it ready for the flight, but they got all of that done and the Falco with it's crew of two headed out for the flight. They carried a GPS tracker, that reported the position of the plane to a satellite every 10 minutes, and the entire flight back was available tracked on a map online for Jim and anyone else to watch! At this time, the plane is in a small town near the mouth of the Amazon River where they have to do some paperwork to get the plane registered in Brazil, so the flight is going well.

The odd twist in this story is this. The new owner's friend, Eduardo, is a corporate pilot who flies a Boeing 737 for a private owner all over the world. When he is not doing that, he is paid to be available just in case (tough job for a pilot). Eduardo is the owner of the Falco that inspired Telvio to buy Jim's bird. But it turns out that Eduardo's Falco has been sitting in Chicago, and he only flies it on those occasions when he makes it up that way. Since Jim knows the Falco inside and out, Eduardo asked Jim if he would watch over his bird for him, and Jim offered to let him keep it in his hanger in OKC. Well, as it turned out that is exactly what happened, only now Jim has a new job. He has to keep this Falco in flying condition for Eduardo, meaning he has to maintain it and keep it flying (all at the expense of it's owner) and the Eduardo is even going to pay for the hanger space.

So, Jim sold his plane since it was getting too expensive to fly it, and now has an almost identical one sitting in his hanger that he has to fly, only this time it costs him nothing. Talk about a nice turn of events! Wish I was that lucky!

I expect Jim might need to test fly this second Falco down to Houston when I take my F4D ride! I hope so, since I would like to see this Falco, it looks really nice:

Jim's new Falco

Some day, I may do battle with the FAA and get my medical issues straightened out so I can fly again. I doubt that I will be building anything like this, but I would like to check out in a glider and fly this one more!

Grob Sailplane

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tags: Cancer, Aviation