It was Monday, August 20th, and I had just gotten back to my office after lunch. I was playing with my necklace while I read some emails, and I felt a lump on the right side of my neck just above my collar bone. After going to the bathroom to check if there was actually something there (yes, it was visible), I did what anyone in my generation would do - I googled it. And then I got on the phone and scheduled a doctor's appointment for later that afternoon.
At the doctor's office, they took blood to check my thyroid function and had me schedule an appointment for an ultrasound. The blood work came back normal, which meant that my thyroid was functioning as it should and I didn't have one of the thyroid-related autoimmune diseases. But when we got the ultrasound results, it showed that the lump was a solid nodule, which probably meant nothing but might be something and so I needed to get a thyroid biopsy to check.
The biopsy itself was quick and painless, although we ended up having to wait about an hour and a half for a 5 minute procedure. (The technician who assisted on the procedure was so nice about it though - she felt so bad that we had to wait so long because they had gotten backed up that she got us lunch passes to the cafeteria.) Unfortunately, my results came back as suspicious for follicular cancer, which meant that I had to have surgery to remove the nodule even though it might be benign (~80% of the time, they are) because they couldn't tell for sure.
We met with a surgical oncologist on September 19th (just under a month after finding the nodule), I had surgery on October 2nd, and on October 15th, I learned that I did indeed have cancer - papillary carcinoma, follicular variant.
It may be strange that the only date that is so concretely stuck in my head is August 20th. That's not when I learned that I would need surgery, or when I found out for sure that it was cancer. But that's the day that I found the lump on my neck - the day when everything really did change.
No comments:
Post a Comment