Angst, antipathy and thyroid cancer

Well what a great reason to start a blog... Thyroid Cancer. It started innocently enough with a visit to my primary care physician. It's morphed into a primary focus of my life, in a very short amount of time. End of January I was told to start looking for a new job inside the company, or possibly lose my current job. Great... 24 years with a large corporation means nothing as corporations are not human beings. Now if I had a maid and had scads of money, and that maid worked 24 years with me, would I tell her.. sorry, you have until March to find a job?
No that would be unbelievably cruel and unethical but when a corporation does it, we shake our
heads and vote-in our mainstream corporate candidates. And it's because the bible belt only has 2 standards of morality they're interested in: Protecting fetuses and stopping homosexuals.
If a billionaire corporation fires a highly rated employee... well that's not important. It flies below their brain's radar.... ok I'm giving them too much credit...
After chasing leads for a month, I got a job but that's getting ahead of the story.
At the same time (mid-Feb) I got my semi-yearly blood work and trotted off to my doctor for what I thought would be a quick and quiet visit. All went well but this doctor likes to feel for lumps and bumps and swollen glands. This time he found one right where my Thyroid lives.
A good doctor that he is, he told me, this is new, it was not here 6 months ago or I would have found it. Let's get you an ultrasound... it's probably a cyst. The woman doing the ultrasound
said... it looks like thyroid nodules, they're fairly common. Oh good, I thought.... and enjoyed
my weekend after googling nodules and finding out 95% of them are benign.... well that depends
but it's basically true. Monday the results are in, it's a nodule and doc orders a precautionary
biopsy. I should have gotten a biopsy from the same hospital where the thyroid doctor actually lives but with a 95% benign number, it didn't even cross my mind.
Friday, 5 days later, in the teeth of a snowstorm, I drive to the hospital and soon they're injecting lidocaine into my nodule (doesn't hurt more than a shot, honest) and then taking a biopsy. Had I known that the lidocaine might not be fully circulated in the nodule, I would have
move the stuff around while they had their backs turned... but anyway, the first biopsy hurt
though it's not supposed to hurt hardly at all... not excruciating, I just groaned...which you
shouldn't do because that moves the thyroid.... the second biopsy didn't hurt at all.
Then a bit shaken, I walked back to my car and drove home in the snow more or less on
autopilot. Now given the size of my growth, fairly large, I, in retrospect, should have realized
that only 2 biopsies is a bit low... and that they must have found something the second time.
3-4 is more normal, for prostates and stuff it could be 6-12, for example. If you are in there
already and have a captive biopsee, why not take some more tissue....well the answer may
be that they saw what they saw on #2 and didn't need to go further. Or that the lump
was mostly fluid so they needed fewer samples... the first answer!
I had a nice weekend, still consoling myself about the 95% number. My sister told me
she knew a guy, a former IBMer and runner who had thyroid cancer at 50 and had his taken
out.... and is on synthroid and fine today.
Meanwhile it's off to a conference in Orlando where I am giving a pitch on Day 4 of 5.
And hoping to attend classes. Sunday is fine and there's no news, of course. Monday the results must have come in because there was the doctor's call to my home phone but I got the message at 4:45pm. No diagnosis... but suddenly I was worried again. Ok so I'll call the
doctor's office first thing in the morning. And the doctor is very practiced at not tipping his
hand... so Monday night, I slept soundly and Tuesday morning I decided, I'd better lift weights because I sure wouldn't want to exercise later if I got bad news at 9am.
Off to the conference at 8:15am and eat a quick breakfast but decide against coffee.... That was
a good idea I think! I don't trust the sound quality on my cellphone outdoors where it's going to be pushing 80 degrees, so I go inside and use a payphone and a calling card number.
Over and over I call, and finally the secretary puts me through to the doctor. And my life
changed when I heard these words: "Uhmmm geez, you're out of town this week, when do you get back?" I tried not to freak out, standing there with Disney music playing softly in the background. I said: "Doctor it sounds like you have bad news for me".
He said back: "I'm sorry it is bad news, you have Thyroid Cancer but it's the best kind you can get." Well I lost it but didn't cry, more like I hyperventilated. Then we talked turkey and
he recommended a thyroid surgeon. Wow, from ultrasound to surgery... in 2 weeks.
Look, I know what my fate would be in the 3rd world, or even the second world.... these are
slow growing cancers but they can eventually spread, so in a decade or less, if I grew up
in Pakistan or Jamaica, or Niger, I would be prepared for disease and death even though
papillomal Thyroid cancer is 99%+ curable, especially if the lump is investigated fairly soon.

But I'm spoiled here in the first world, I'm 49.9 years old. With surgery I won't necessarily have to die by 55 or sooner.
Now yesterday I visited the surgeon and I needed a thyroid function test (just to make sure my thyroid isn't hyperthyroid because that's a surgery risk, even if you are getting rid of the thyroid).
Usually cancer is present with no change in overall thyroid function. But sometimes by pure
accident really, both diseases can be present. And the doc will probably look down your
throat to see if your vocal cords are involved - he goes through the nose to do this but as squeamish and bigbaby as I can be about some procedures, this was fine... except the decongestant caused an anaphalactic reaction and I sweated profusely and nearly fainted.

Then he ordered an MRI to check if my lymph nodes were involved yet. Even if this is the case, they can dissect the nodes and remove cancer during the thyroidectomy, but the like to know ahead of time... also it can show the presence of cancer since a biopsy can be misread by
a pathologist and you can always get your slides fedEx'd to another pathologist... one the surgeon likes to work with. Sometimes they see weird cells but never know what you've got.

Anyway, I'm awaiting these last results, I'm scared as hell of losing my singing voice during the
operation, which can happen but I also know that life is good in other ways and I can give up singing to be alive.

Oh and a funny thing happened after I got the bad news about Cancer... I found a job to take the place of my current job that is ending. This happened 2 hours later...
All in all it was a Black February and one crisis just segued into the next, seamlessly.

/Paul