Cancer

Hopefully, it's over. The worst that could happen would be that they'd find that the right thyroid was malignant and have to go back in after the left one in a week. But my surgeon assures me that there is only a 2-5% chance of that happening. I haven't spoken to him since the surgery, though. Actually, I did but I was still so loaded from the anesthesia that I barely remember it and wasn't lucid enough to ask questions.

 

Okay, I am home now. During the next week, my job is to worry that the biopsy will find that it was malignant. Since I last wrote here, the surgeon came to see me. He told me some of the stuff that he had apparently told me while I was in recovery but I was too loaded to remember any of it. While the surgery went well, it was a difficult one. He said he spent twice as much time on as he usually does because I don't have a very large neck and everything was close together. However, he didn't hit any nerves.

Apart from the lobectomy, removing the right lobe of my thyroid, he did an an isthmectomy, in which the narrow band of tissue that connects the two lobes also is removed. He removed the nodule and most of the tissue, except where it was too tightly embedded around a nerve, leaving at least two nodes intact. Since I have intact nodes on the right and my entire left lobe, I may be able to retain normal thyroid activity and not have to take synthetic hormones or medication. However, I will be seeing a specialist about that because they sometimes want to suppress the activity of the other lobe in order to prevent nodules from forming in the other node.

In the unhappy event that the biopsy finds a malignancy, because my surgery was so difficult, they won't be able to do another here. Rather, I'll be sent somewhere else, probably Bangor, but I am very much hoping and praying that doesn't occur.

 

The first night after coming home, I didn't sleep much. I felt like I was going to drown for the congestion, as I could neither cough or swallow very well. Consequently, I couldn't sleep lying down, so I got some sleep sitting at my office chair because, even though our bed is adjustable the head wouldn't come up high enough for me. I did sleep in bed some, but I had to keep getting up and walking around. Last night wasn't so bad. I slept in bed all night, although I woke up frequently and did have the head up as far as it would go, despite the fact that I normally sleep flat, often without even a pillow.

The doctors assure me that I can move my head whichever way I want, but I am still pretty sensitive about moving it around because it "feels" as if it might come open. There isn't much pain involved in it, in fact far less than I had anticipated but knowing that my throat had been cut open just a couple of days ago is an uncomfortable feeling.

 

My slashed throat is held together with steri-strips. Yes, there is a pulling sensation, as there is some elasticity to them, I think. Unfortunately, my experience in the medical field was in emergency medical services, and nearly every patient we transported with cancer later died of cancer.

 

I do understand that not everyone who gets cancer dies of cancer, but that was not my experience in EMS, largely because we transported those who were already in pretty bad shape.

 

I did not find my research into thyroid cancer to be nearly as horrifying as when I attempted to learn more about prostate cancer. Although that too, is generally thought of as one of the cancers least likely to be fatal, the more I read about prostate cancer, the less I wanted to learn about it. I have a book that is nearly a thousand pages on prostate cancer yet, although I had it, I couldn't bring myself to read it. The more I read, the more it scared me.