May The Odds Be Ever In Your Favor

I've never been a big fan of probability and statistics in general, but even less so when they are mixed with such serious matters as my own health.

It's hard to retrospectively talk about how the odds looked good each step of the way.  Something like 90-95% of all thyroid growths are benign.  Even once it was determined to be a solid nodule, the likelihood that it was benign was still around 80%.

But this was part of how I knew I liked my surgeon the first time I met him.  He said:  It's great if you're in the 80% that's benign, but if you're in the 20%, you don't care at all about the 80% because for you, it was cancer 100% of the time.

Exactly.

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During the first surgery, they removed the right lobe and the isthmus of my thyroid.  There were two nodules: one was the giant one that I had found, measuring in at 4 cm, and one was much smaller, at 0.7 cm.  Pathology results showed that both nodules were cancerous, but there was no sign that the cancer had spread.

I have papillary thyroid cancer, which is the most common and least aggressive of the thyroid cancers.  Specifically, mine is a follicular variant, but that isn't important since all variants of papillary cancer are treated the same way and have the same good prognosis:  totally treatable and curable.  After getting the rest of my thyroid taken out, I'll have to go through radioactive iodine treatment to kill any thyroid cells that are left behind, and then I'll be on replacement thyroid hormones for life.

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I was looking at a chart earlier today about the odds of getting different types of cancer and the risk of dying from that particular cancer.  I've read a lot about how sometimes thyroid cancer is called the "good kind of cancer" because it is so treatable.  Obviously, this is a poor choice of words, since there is no such thing as a good cancer.  But at the same time, I do feel at least a little lucky, because it could be so much worse.