It all started a few weeks ago. For the last nine months I've been a student in a diagnostic medical ultrasound program. In the grand tradition of medical field students, we practice on each other most often. This means that by the time you get through your junior year you've been scanned twice every week, covering most of the major organs. I call it the "30,000 mile tune up". It's pretty easy to become a hypochondriac when you start seeing all sorts of things inside you that you didn't know you were there, but for the most part I haven't worried about it because even the "common" cancers are rare.
A couple weeks ago we started learning how to scan thyroids. For those not familiar, it's a gland that sits in the neck in front of your trachea and esophagus. Being scanned is pretty boring so I either study or tend do zone out, then out of no where the instructor comes up behind my partner and asks, "What's that?" Both of my instructors looked at it and concluded that I "really need to get that look at". Fast forward a week and I'm lying in a "real" ultrasound suite talking to the radiologist about what she sees on the screen. She took one look and said, "It's papillary carcinoma" and I'm thinking "Ugh! I'm too busy to be sick."
My doctor (Dr. Morrison! who is fantastic) referred me to an endocrinologist for a fine needle aspiration. He tried to reassure me by giving me the statistics (which I'd already learned in school) for how unlikely it was that I might have cancer, but then again that radiologist had seemed pretty certain. The fine needle aspiration was not fun. The "nodule", as they call it, is on the back side of the thyroid so they basically had to push all the way through my neck. It felt a lot like someone trying to push a pencil through my trachea. I was so lucky that my friend Lacresha was there to hold my hand.
Afterward I went home and passed out. The next day I woke up feeling like I'd been punched in the throat. I feel like there was a bit of false advertising there with respect to just how bad I'd feel the next day. Let's just say that in a bar fight, I'm probably not the person you want on your side. I'm not as tough as I look.
I was lying on the couch the next morning generally feeling liked I'd lost a UFC match when someone from the endocrinologist's office called. There are certain things I've learned over the years to be highly suspicious of and two of those are incredibly quick responses to medical tests and news that can't be given over the phone. When they asked me to come in the next day a sense of dread settled into my stomach. I'd spent the last week feeling like Schrodinger's Cancer Patient, a person both simultaneously with and without cancer while I'd waited for the definitive proof, but this settled it for me. I knew the news would not be good.
The next day at the doctor's office, my boyfriend, my friend Lacresha, and I were shown into a room. The nurse, Katie (who is also fantastic) said, "The doctor will be in to see you and then I'll be back afterward." Oh. Crap. Let's just say it's not good if the nurse needs to see you. When you have a biopsy there's a number of possible outcomes: You don't have cancer, your biopsy was inconclusive and they want to redo it, you don't have cancer but you have premalignant cells which means you get to look forward to future biopsies, or you have cancer and the shit has hit the fan. Aside from the first option, none of these were prospects I really wanted to entertain, but it was certain to be one of the latter three because nurses don't see you after the doctor unless there's a "next step" to engage in.
The doctor showed up a few minutes later and started with, "I want you to know how glad I am that you came to see me." Yep, screwed. He went on to talk about how fortuitous it was that I was in sonography school, and really it's hard not to believe that there isn't some synchronicity to the universe. Because of the position of the nodule, it would have been years before it became palpable and although I had been getting sick a lot and feeling worn down, it's easy to attribute that to my other health problems. And then the doctor said, "You have papillary thyroid carcinoma."
So what's next? I'm meeting with an oncologist next week to discuss scheduling my surgery in the next few weeks. They want to do another ultrasound or CT to doubly confirm that there is no lymph node involvement in the neck area as those would need to come out at the same time. Then they'll cut me open and take out my bowtie (mine and my classmates' nickname for the thyroid). A few weeks after the surgery they'll go over the results and determine whether I need radiation therapy. The endocrinologist said that although there's always a chance they'll decide again it's quite likely they'll want to do it, so start placing your bets now on which super power I get from being an irradiated human. About a year after that they'll do a test for something called thyroglobulin which is an incredibly sensitive test for papillary thyroid cancer. If that's clear, I'm cured!
I'll have to take thyroid hormone medication for the rest of my life since I'll no longer have a way to produce it on my own but other than the pills and a scar on my neck (that I'm already planning on saying I got from an attempted mugging) I'll be just like everyone else, sans my bowtie, which is sad because everyone knows bowties are cool.
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