I decided to blog about something that has affected so many of my friends, myself included. It has nothing to do about parenting or maybe it does in a round about way.
This is the story of my thyroid and how I was introduced to becoming familiar with the little gland. Picture me driving to Central Oregon last summer (I know you really don't know what I look like, just know I have dark hair), I am with my two boys heading over the mountain. My hubby stayed home because he has this thing called a "job" which does not allow him to leave town on a drop of a dime. Anyway, back to the story. I am cruising along, the boys are in the backseat doing what they do when I rub the side of my neck and feel a lump !
Panic starts to set in a little bit but then I am thinking it is probably just my lymph nodes and they are swollen for some odd reason. I get over to our destination and call my mom so she can give me her diagnosis. No, she is not a doctor, she was a CEO of a bank but with Webmd.com can't we all just figure out what ails us. She says it could be my lymph nodes if I had recently been sick which I hadn't. Thanks mom, no help there. So then I call my friend who is heading over to meet us the next day and ask her to bring a heating pad, yes, heat will help, ice and heat.
So, I spend the first night icing it which does nothing except makes my neck cold and my kids ask 1000 times if I am okay. The heating pad arrives the next day and it also does absolutely nothing. So I wait and worry and worry and wait until I can get back to town to see my doctor. The next day my youngest wipes out on his bike going full blast down a hill and breaks his nose but that is a whole different blog.
I finally get in to see my doctor the day after I get back into town. He looks at it, orders an ultrasound and says he thinks it is my thyroid. Okay, no problem. Two days later I am in getting my ultrasound, mind you this is after I have looked up EVERYTHING I could find about thyroid issues on the internet. Anyway, the tech (who is not supposed to say anything) says to me "you have many nodules on your thyroid but most of the time they are non-cancerous". WHAT ?????? CANCER ??????? I start freaking out to say the least and ask if I can talk to the radiologist. I go to the waiting room, call one of my best friends and start crying on the phone. All I can picture are my kids, Jenny is telling me to calm down, everything will be just fine and we will get to the answer. Thanks again Jenny ! The radiologist is out to lunch and unable to talk to me so I leave the office still freaked out and crying. I get to the car and immediately call my friend Sarah who has had thyroid cancer. She talks me off the edge and says it will all work out. Another phone call I made was to a friend who is a doctor and can calm me with just a few words. She told me worse case scenario is I have thyroid cancer, I go through the process and in six months look back and say "that wasn't so bad", thanks Elizabeth for being there, you are an angel who walks among us and I am not the only one who thinks this.
My doctor who is a great guy calls me the next day and not only informs of where to go next but actually had his mom there to talk to me since she too has experienced thyroid problems. What a wonderful doctor !
So, I figure out what doctor I am visiting next with the help of a connection I have who knows A LOT about the medical community. I go to the appointment, she confirms I have 3 nodules on one side of my thyroid and 2 on the other. A nodule is a mass of tissue, most of the time it is thyroid tissue but sometimes it is cancer. As several doctors have told me if you were able to choose a cancer to have you would want thyroid cancer, it has a very high curable rate but 93% of the time these nodules are benign. I volunteer to have the largest of the nodules biopsied right there in the office. I swear this caused zero pain but another friend of mine who went through this after I has called me a "liar", so use your best judgment.
I got the confirmation a few days later the largest nodule (the one I could feel on the side of my neck) was benign !!!!! CELEBRATE !!!!!!!!!
Now, I had a decision to make. Leave my thyroid in and let the docs monitor it or have my thyroid removed. I originally thought they would only take half of my thyroid but with three nodules on the other side they wanted to remove the whole thing. These nodules will never go away, they will continue to grow, lots of people leave them alone but I was not one of those people. I honestly took about a week trying to decide what to do but during that week I probably rubbed the side of my neck 10,000 times trying to determine if it was getting bigger. I even named it "Ned".
Two weeks later I went in for surgery. I had the BEST surgeon in Portland so if you find yourself in this situation get a hold of me and I will direct you. The surgery was a few hours long, I woke up with a little bit of a sore throat and a very sore neck, nothing else. I stayed one night in the hospital and went home the next day.
So, what I really want to stress here is this. Thyroid nodules and thyroid issues are very common. Fifty percent of women will have nodules on their thyroid by the time they are 50 and the percentage increases with age from there. I have several friends who have had their thyroids removed or have had thyroid issues for years.
What is kind of ironic are nodules can cause fertility problems in women and I actually had to go through fertility to get our first son (another blog story for later). My blood levels always showed normal because the nodules were contained inside my thyroid, so there really were no signs until I felt the lump.
A dear friend of mine just last week got confirmation her nodules on her thyroid are benign (thank God) and now she is trying to figure out where to go next. See, they are VERY common.
It took about four months to get my medication right (I will have to take daily supplements the rest of my life) and I feel really good now. I will be honest, the four months waiting to get the meds right was the worst part of all of it. I was tired and had no energy, not easy to do with two active boys. They put you on one dosage and can not adjust it for 6 weeks so that is why it takes so long to get it right. I was lucky, I have heard of others who it took about 12 months to balance their levels out.
So, there is the story of my thyroid and I guess also the story, of the death of my thyroid. Not sure why I decided to blog on it, I just did. Oh, and my scar...... you can barely see it.
This is the story of my thyroid and how I was introduced to becoming familiar with the little gland. Picture me driving to Central Oregon last summer (I know you really don't know what I look like, just know I have dark hair), I am with my two boys heading over the mountain. My hubby stayed home because he has this thing called a "job" which does not allow him to leave town on a drop of a dime. Anyway, back to the story. I am cruising along, the boys are in the backseat doing what they do when I rub the side of my neck and feel a lump !
Panic starts to set in a little bit but then I am thinking it is probably just my lymph nodes and they are swollen for some odd reason. I get over to our destination and call my mom so she can give me her diagnosis. No, she is not a doctor, she was a CEO of a bank but with Webmd.com can't we all just figure out what ails us. She says it could be my lymph nodes if I had recently been sick which I hadn't. Thanks mom, no help there. So then I call my friend who is heading over to meet us the next day and ask her to bring a heating pad, yes, heat will help, ice and heat.
So, I spend the first night icing it which does nothing except makes my neck cold and my kids ask 1000 times if I am okay. The heating pad arrives the next day and it also does absolutely nothing. So I wait and worry and worry and wait until I can get back to town to see my doctor. The next day my youngest wipes out on his bike going full blast down a hill and breaks his nose but that is a whole different blog.
I finally get in to see my doctor the day after I get back into town. He looks at it, orders an ultrasound and says he thinks it is my thyroid. Okay, no problem. Two days later I am in getting my ultrasound, mind you this is after I have looked up EVERYTHING I could find about thyroid issues on the internet. Anyway, the tech (who is not supposed to say anything) says to me "you have many nodules on your thyroid but most of the time they are non-cancerous". WHAT ?????? CANCER ??????? I start freaking out to say the least and ask if I can talk to the radiologist. I go to the waiting room, call one of my best friends and start crying on the phone. All I can picture are my kids, Jenny is telling me to calm down, everything will be just fine and we will get to the answer. Thanks again Jenny ! The radiologist is out to lunch and unable to talk to me so I leave the office still freaked out and crying. I get to the car and immediately call my friend Sarah who has had thyroid cancer. She talks me off the edge and says it will all work out. Another phone call I made was to a friend who is a doctor and can calm me with just a few words. She told me worse case scenario is I have thyroid cancer, I go through the process and in six months look back and say "that wasn't so bad", thanks Elizabeth for being there, you are an angel who walks among us and I am not the only one who thinks this.
My doctor who is a great guy calls me the next day and not only informs of where to go next but actually had his mom there to talk to me since she too has experienced thyroid problems. What a wonderful doctor !
So, I figure out what doctor I am visiting next with the help of a connection I have who knows A LOT about the medical community. I go to the appointment, she confirms I have 3 nodules on one side of my thyroid and 2 on the other. A nodule is a mass of tissue, most of the time it is thyroid tissue but sometimes it is cancer. As several doctors have told me if you were able to choose a cancer to have you would want thyroid cancer, it has a very high curable rate but 93% of the time these nodules are benign. I volunteer to have the largest of the nodules biopsied right there in the office. I swear this caused zero pain but another friend of mine who went through this after I has called me a "liar", so use your best judgment.
I got the confirmation a few days later the largest nodule (the one I could feel on the side of my neck) was benign !!!!! CELEBRATE !!!!!!!!!
Now, I had a decision to make. Leave my thyroid in and let the docs monitor it or have my thyroid removed. I originally thought they would only take half of my thyroid but with three nodules on the other side they wanted to remove the whole thing. These nodules will never go away, they will continue to grow, lots of people leave them alone but I was not one of those people. I honestly took about a week trying to decide what to do but during that week I probably rubbed the side of my neck 10,000 times trying to determine if it was getting bigger. I even named it "Ned".
Two weeks later I went in for surgery. I had the BEST surgeon in Portland so if you find yourself in this situation get a hold of me and I will direct you. The surgery was a few hours long, I woke up with a little bit of a sore throat and a very sore neck, nothing else. I stayed one night in the hospital and went home the next day.
So, what I really want to stress here is this. Thyroid nodules and thyroid issues are very common. Fifty percent of women will have nodules on their thyroid by the time they are 50 and the percentage increases with age from there. I have several friends who have had their thyroids removed or have had thyroid issues for years.
What is kind of ironic are nodules can cause fertility problems in women and I actually had to go through fertility to get our first son (another blog story for later). My blood levels always showed normal because the nodules were contained inside my thyroid, so there really were no signs until I felt the lump.
A dear friend of mine just last week got confirmation her nodules on her thyroid are benign (thank God) and now she is trying to figure out where to go next. See, they are VERY common.
It took about four months to get my medication right (I will have to take daily supplements the rest of my life) and I feel really good now. I will be honest, the four months waiting to get the meds right was the worst part of all of it. I was tired and had no energy, not easy to do with two active boys. They put you on one dosage and can not adjust it for 6 weeks so that is why it takes so long to get it right. I was lucky, I have heard of others who it took about 12 months to balance their levels out.
So, there is the story of my thyroid and I guess also the story, of the death of my thyroid. Not sure why I decided to blog on it, I just did. Oh, and my scar...... you can barely see it.
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