Saturday, September 24, 2016

Two years, three months later...

The Zoloft worked so well that I haven't written in a couple of years.  I still have the drive, but life is pulling me in other directions. That sounds too passive, but... it's mostly true. I never expected to be a manager, never expected work to be so exhausting that I just wanted to turn off my brain in the evenings.

See? The days just flow into each other, just the magma of time sort of hardening into a weird... series of surprises. Like, the other day. The pharmacy called in a prescription for me, and my nurse practitioner said that before she'd fill it, she wanted me to come in for my annual checkup.

I hadn't planned on that, or for her to find a lump in my throat. One ultrasound and two suspicious nodules later, I'm going in for a biopsy next week. I really want this to be a one-off post. Like, maybe I'll post again in two years from Sweden and remember this week as an anomaly.

The nodules aren't too big - one is 11 mm, and the other is 9 mm. And a mildly prominent lymph node, I don't even pretend to know what that means. They automatically biopsy any nodules bigger than 10 mm. What's not great is that the nodules have internal calcification and 'increased vascularity.' It means probably not a simple cyst, and probably something my body thinks is foreign (that's a little calcium shell it's building around it.) Those are red flags.

Anyway. Thyroid nodules are super common. Benign nodules with the features above are ... not AS common, but still pretty common. That's good! The odds are that this is not thyroid cancer. And if it IS thyroid cancer, then looks like they caught it really early. They take out the thyroid, give me synthetic hormones the rest of my life, and I sit back and relax. The doctor didn't quite come out and say it, but she implied that the only people who die of thyroid cancer are the ones who refuse treatment.

Biopsy is on September 29th. I don't know when the results will be in, but here we go.

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