The phone rang the day before Thanksgiving. It was a call I'd been waiting for all day. The surprise in my doctor's voice was not comforting. "The biopsy revealed suspected thyroid cancer," she said. The inflection in her voice on those last two words-thyroid cancer-came through loud and clear. My 4-year-old ran circles around me as I tried to focus on what she was saying.
Thyroid cancer. Radioactive iodine... what?
Happy Thanksgiving.
It started 4 years earlier at my post-partum check-up with my first son. My doctor ho-hummed through the average-joe check-up when she ran her hands across my neck. Her eyes went to the ceiling like she was trying to figure out a math equation. If a train is traveling west at 65 mph...
She actually brought another doctor in to take a stab at the problem. And another train is traveling east at 45 miles per hour...
"You have a nodule on your neck," she said. Double gulp. I think the trains just derailed.
After I made a stupid joke about when I was to start chemo, both doctors looked at me as if I had lost my mind. "You need to see a specialist."
The specialist told me it was a thyroglossal duct cyst. Try saying that with your hands tied behind your back. She explained it as something I'd had since birth that had likely been affected by my pregnancy. No harm done. She wanted to keep tabs on it for kicks though. A biopsy revealed nothing out of the ordinary as did all of my other ultrasounds.
In March of 2010 I gave birth to my second son. I hadn't felt my neck in awhile and in doing so after he was born, I convinced mysef it had gotten bigger. I made an appointment to see my doctor in July.
"It's gotten a little bigger, but it's probably nothing. Let's schedule another biopsy in November just in case," she said.
Um, did you hear a train horn?
This brings me to the day before Thanksgiving. The phone call that changed things. A lot of things. Necklaces will never look as pretty on my Frankenstien neck, I can't get my life insurance upped, and I no longer have a thyroid. I'm pretty sure that last one's gonna suck. A lot.
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