Until this year, I'd never realized how much in life I took for granted. I guess wrist surgery with months of physical therapy plus a cancer diagnosis with ongoing treatment all in one year really packs a pretty powerful punch of perspective. To have your body function the way it is supposed to, to be able to get up in the morning and say "Today, I want to go here" or "I feel like doing this" and be able to just do it is something that is normally so insignificant and yet in reality so incredibly amazing. I don't think I'd ever realized this before. Although "you don't know what you got til it's gone," I'm lucky enough to have gotten it back, and I appreciate it all the more.
What I'm trying to say is that the reason for my absence on the blog is that my presence has been elsewhere. I didn't realize how terrible I had been feeling until I started feeling better, and as soon as I did, I dove headfirst back into life. The first weekend after having recovered from surgery and the stomach bug, we were out of the house for a day of shopping and errands by 9:30 in the morning. On top of that, I decided to start completely rearranging my craft room that weekend. And come Monday, I still felt like I'd had a restful weekend. After weeks of deciding whether it was worth the energy to shower before lying on the couch to read, this was such a huge deal. Since then, there's been a lot of shopping, cleaning, rearranging and reorganizing, visiting family, spending time with friends, going to dog class, playing games, going on walks, working on craft projects, and decorating the house, and I'm still finding time to relax and rest in all of that.
On top of the normal list of craft projects I want to do, it's almost Christmas, which means I keep adding Christmas-related projects to my list. There hasn't been a ton of progress on the cancer quilt, but that's okay because it's still serving its purpose. I'll work on it when I feel like it, and will probably get a lot accomplished while I'm in radioactive isolation. There will be a quilt update soon, but in the meantime, here's what's been keeping my crafty side busy:
Curtains for my door at work:
Curtains for home (sidelights and bathroom):
Stockings for the mantle:
Some snowflakes, yet to be hung:
And some mistletoe:
Things are not completely golden though. My scar is healing, I'm working full time again, and I've felt so much like myself again that at times, I've forgotten that there's even anything still wrong. There isn't a day that goes by where I don't think about cancer, but lately it's been feeling like something that happened a long time ago. So getting a call from the endocrinologist this past Friday and learning that my TSH levels are crazy bad was a bit of a shock. Normal TSH levels are supposed to be around 0.35 - 4.00 uIU/mL. For a cancer patient, the target is the low end, maybe even lower. My TSH is at 39. Apparently, at this level, the nurse would have guessed that I wasn't taking my medication and I was exhausted all the time (neither is true).
This is all frustrating and complicated for a variety of reasons. My TSH level is high enough that we could go ahead with RAI treatment right now, with no need for Thyrogen or going hypo. We can't do that though, because I haven't gone on the low-iodine diet yet (you know, since we'd decided it was easier to wait until January and then I could actually enjoy my holidays). Even if I had started the diet on Saturday after finding this out, you have to be on it for an absolute minimum of 1 week before treatment. After accounting for weekends, that would put us right at Christmas, which means the earliest that treatment could have been scheduled would probably be around the 27th. The problem with that option is that it would mean leaving my TSH high for 2 more weeks, and that is no good. Since TSH stimulates the thyroid, having a very high level is telling any remaining thyroid cells in my body to go into overdrive and is encouraging them to grow. Since there's still the possibility that there are cancerous cells remaining, you can see why this is a bad idea.
So in summary, I have to up my synthroid dose to try to bring my TSH level down for a couple weeks so that I can bring it back up again next month for treatment. While this is not an overly big deal, it's just an unwelcome reminder that I'm not okay yet.
