Thyroid Cancer Awareness: My Story

I normally don't make posts like this, but there's a first time for everything, and this one is for a good cause. September is thyroid cancer awareness month, and it also happens to be the month I go back annually to have my lymph nodes tested by my endocrinologist. So as my contribution to thyroid cancer awareness, I'm going to share the whole story with everyone here.

I was 21 years old when I found out I had cancer and that is one of the most frightening things you can be told at any age. No one in my family has any history of thyroid troubles of any kind. I had no warning signs, no thyroid problems, no hormonal imbalances. My doctor just found a lump on my throat when she was doing a routine exam. I hadn't even noticed it beforehand, but once she pointed it out, I could see it when I looked in a mirror. I have a thin neck and it looked like I had an Adam's apple when I swallowed. It was over half an inch in diameter and I didn't even notice it. Please, make sure your doctor checks your neck when doing routine physicals. He or she will know what to look for much better than you do!

The first thing my doctor told me as reassurance was that thyroid cancer doesn't generally present in women until around age 40, so I shouldn't worry too much yet, but she was going to do an ultrasound of my neck to be sure. And when my doctor got the results of my test back and found out it was a complex mass, she referred me to an ear, nose, and throat doctor that said the same thing: he had never seen a case of thyroid cancer in a woman so young, so not to worry too much, but he would do fine needle aspirations to be sure.

Fine needle aspiration is a type of biopsy where, instead of actually cutting you open to check for cancer, the doctor inserts a needle into the tissue and draws out some of the suspect mass for testing. It sounds a lot scarier than it is! Though it was a little weird to be awake and trying to joke with my doctor to lighten the mood while he had a needle in my throat, there was only a slight pinching feeling and it really wasn't so bad.

The part that wasn't so great was that the doctor had to do this more than once. The first two aspirations didn't have enough tissue and were inconclusive. Then the third time, the moment of truth came... and my doctor told me he hadn't found any cancer cells in my biopsy. However, he said he had found mutated cells and wanted to take the lump out before it turned into cancer, which I agreed was probably for the best. This would be my first surgery, the lumpectomy.

Some of you will wonder why my doctor didn't consider just taking out my whole thyroid at this point so there would be no possibility of cancer. Well, the thyroid is such a vital part of your endocrine system and without it, you have to take hormone supplements every day for the rest of your life. If there was no proof I had cancer there, why remove such an important organ?

Now, here's the part where I'll admit my own shortcoming: I did all of this, all of these half dozen doctor's appointments over a two-month period, without telling my family. My then-roommate went with me to one of those appointments, but otherwise I had done all of this alone and without telling a good deal of the people I knew. At the time, I told myself it was because my grandmother, the woman who raised me, had already lost one daughter to breast cancer and even mentioning that word in the same sentence as my doctor's visits would scare her unnecessarily. Now when I look back, though I'm pretty sure that was half of my reasoning, I think I also believed that telling everyone about it would make it real, and I still wasn't ready to use the phrase, "I might have cancer."

Even when I finally told my family about the surgery, I made a point to emphasize that the surgeon wasn't removing the mass because it was cancer - it was because it might turn into cancer. And after my surgeon removed the mass, he told me that it looked good, that it didn't look like cancer, and that he had removed all of it. I went home from that outpatient surgery believing that I didn't have cancer because I was 21 years old and healthy and my doctor had told me so.

Until he didn't. I was still on disability and waiting for my stitches to stop itching when the lab results came back from the mass that had been removed and the surgeon's office called me. The nurse wouldn't tell me anything more than that I had to come in and talk to the doctor, but that was more than enough to set my imagination going. Fortunately, my doctor called me not long after and decided to set my mind at ease... sort of. He delivered the news that the mass had been cancer and that since my ultrasounds had shown other, smaller masses that might also potentially be tumors, he wanted to talk about the options when I came into the office that Friday.

I will fully admit that the phrase "talk about the options" is pretty much the last thing I ever expected to hear from a doctor at 21 years of age. Everyone along the line had told me that I was too young for cancer, and wasn't I? I was young and healthy and had never been a drinker or drug user. I had smoked maybe a handful of packs of cigarettes in my life. Normal young, healthy people didn't just get cancer, I argued with myself. I kept expecting (or more realistically, hoping for) an Archer-esque phone call: "I mixed up your chart with another patient's. You're totally cancer-free!"

But what I'm telling this story to illustrate is that anyone can get cancer at any time. It isn't something you can stave off by avoiding known risk factors. Sometimes it simply happens and as scary and world-shattering as it is, take it from me: you're strong enough to deal with it, and you're strong enough to beat it.

I wasn't sure I was at first, either. I still remember putting on a calm facade for my PCP when she told me it was a complex mass and what that could mean because she had a high schooler shadowing her and I couldn't break down in front of a seventeen-year-old girl. I also remember wiping my tears away on my jacket sleeves when they left the room because I wasn't sure when they were coming back in. I remember going straight home to my grandmother in a daze, waking her up in bed at 9am, and explaining the first surgery to her with a fake smiler and even faker bravado. But I also remember going back to my bathroom in the little trailer I lived in at the time, standing in the shower, and blasting If Today Was Your Last Day at full volume so no one could hear me crying. Hell, sometimes I still have to focus on calming breaths when I notice one of my lymph nodes is swollen.

I guess my point is that thyroid cancer can happen to anyone, at any time, whether you're in the risk group or not, whether you're a smoker or not, whether you go out drinking every weekend or only ever had a sip of wine that one time at a birthday party and hated the stuff. So please, don't skip your physicals. And if your doctor finds something, don't be afraid because you can do it. The people that care about you will support you, and so will your sisters and brothers that fought or are still fighting.

It's like the teal, pink, and blue band on my wrist says: No One Fights Alone.

DON'T Look at the Fucking Flowers

Language warning, ladies and gentlemen. This is going to be a rant in no way related to my usual posts, because I rarely get worked up enough to do this.

Well, I have officially lost all faith in humanity again. A teenage girl on my Facebook friends list just shared a video of a soldier coming home to surprise his wife and baby daughter. Of course the wife falls to her knees in disbelief, cries, hugs him and doesn't let go... a beautiful video. But the text on the post? This girl is sharing this video to tell her boyfriend he needs to surprise her with flowers like this... "then again maybe not, it'll ruin [her] makeup."

You have no idea how seriously I wanted to tell this child her post just made me want to ruin her fucking makeup with some projectile vomiting and a backhand to the face.

Do you really have to have your own infantryman that has been deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, to have your heart stop when you see that deployment bag, to understand how very emotional this moment is and how FUCKING INSULTING it is that a teenage girl whose boyfriend works in an auto parts store would share this and joke about it? Or is the next generation in this country even more fucked up than I ever suspected?