I never thought it would happen to me. Nobody does. Then one day your thyroid surgeon's office calls to tell you that yes, indeed, you had cancer. But let me start at the beginning. It's important because I didn't pay attention to the signs and maybe if I tell my story, I can help someone else.
I was 18 when I got pregnant with my first child. She was planned. And I'm glad I had her when I did. I had just turned 19 two weeks before her birth. I gained a lot of weight with that pregnancy though. A LOT. I chalked it up to the fact that I ate everything all of the time once I got past morning sickness in my 5th month. I'm not entirely sure how much I weighed after she was born but I never did fit back into my pre-pregnancy clothes. I was huge. By the time she was a year old I was even bigger. My mom thought something was very wrong. At the time she was in nursing school and she read and researched EVERYTHING. So I knew that she knew something was wrong. So I went to the doctor.
I weighed 202 pounds. You know what the asshole told me? I needed to go on Weight Watchers like his wife and lose weight because I was too fat. He also told me I needed to lay off chocolate and junk food because I had pimples. What? I don't eat a whole lot of junk food. And who the hell are you to tell me I HAVE to go on Weight Watchers? He was extremely rude. I walked out of his office that day not wanting to ever see another doctor again. I was embarrassed, upset, wondering why he was such a jerk.
I managed to get my weight down to 195 and I got stuck there. A plateau. Then I got pregnant with baby number two. After I had him I lost a significant amount of weight but not enough. I ignored my exhaustion. I associated it with the fact that my son didn't sleep for the first 16 months of his life (but that's another story). I started getting fatter again. We moved 900 miles away when baby number 2 was 6 months old and my oldest was 3 years old. I still ignored the exhaustion. I ignored the brain fog. I fought through not wanting to get up and took care of my children anyway. I got depressed. I got suicidal. I got pregnant.
We were 900 miles away from home, only my sister in law and her friends to lean on, I was home sick, scared, sick as a dog, and pregnant with a 3rd baby we couldn't afford. I wanted to die. And still I didn't know I had cancer. We moved back home 6 months after moving away. I was happier, no longer suicidal because I was home. But I was still sick.
Things seemed ok after I had baby number three. I lost over 40 pounds because during the last month of pregnancy I had 8 gall stones and severe pain and I couldn't eat. Water made my gall bladder hurt. It put me into early labor but they stopped it. I was sent home to live on Gatorade and Percocet until I had the baby. Then I could think about getting my gall bladder out. So was that it? All that time, being so sick and tired, was it my gall bladder?
No. It wasn't. My thyroid was slowly growing a tumor. And then I found myself pregnant with baby number 4 because I was the stupidest 20-something year old on the face of this earth. But I thank God every day for being pregnant with that baby. Why? Because that's when my mother saw it. The huge protrusion sticking out of my neck. From my throat area to be exact. She freaked the hell out. She freaked me the hell out. She said I needed to get my thyroid tested immediately.
My OBGYN ran a thyroid work up. All came back normal. I stopped thinking about it. I was focused on the 3 kids I had and the baby on the way.
After he was born I got very ill. I was delirious most of the time that I was awake. That's WHEN I was awake. It got to the point everyone thought I had narcolepsy. I'd just randomly fall asleep. And they couldn't get me to wake up. Eventually I just slept all the time. I couldn't take care of my kids. My sister lived upstairs from me and she and her boyfriend used to sleep downstairs because I wouldn't wake up for the babies. My son Cooper was 2 years old then and he used to be awake in the middle of the night all the time for no reason. He's now my early riser at 9 years old. So my sister and her boyfriend used to stay awake with him because I couldn't.
Finally my mother convinced me to go to an endocrinologist. The very day I saw him he was concerned immediately. He felt the huge lump in my throat. He poked, prodded, and felt around some more. He did a needle biopsy right there in his office and sent me for blood work. The blood work came back normal. Again, as it did a year prior. The biopsy results came back negative for cancer. What a massively huge relief right? Wrong.
They told me, after an ultrasound that it was too big to leave in there, cancerous or not. So on February 19, 2008 I had the left half of my thyroid removed along with the golf ball sized tumor. No. Scratch that. It was the size of a baseball. The tumor was absolutely huge. It had invaded one single little blood cell. But it wasn't cancer according the first biopsy.
Then I got the phone call 2 weeks later. "I'm sorry to inform you, but the biopsy results came back and you had cancer." I froze. No I didn't! It was benign. No. It wasn't. I indeed had a rare form of thyroid cancer. They told me it was noninvasive (in other words it was contained to just my thyroid) follicular thyroid cancer. My mom was there. She hugged me so tight and cried. I remember thinking, what's the big deal? They got it all out. They scheduled me to have the right half of my thyroid removed 2 months later.
I found out afterward that my thyroid was actually dead. As in it was decaying inside me and would have started poisoning me. But my blood work was still normal. How can a dead, decaying thyroid still function normally? And how could the first lab have made such a gross error in diagnosing my cancer? All questions to this day I don't have an answer for. I never asked why the first lab was wrong. I had too much to deal with on my plate already. And the doctors didn't know why my thyroid supposedly was functioning normally while also being dead. Decaying. That's disgusting! No wonder I was so sick all those years.
I was supposed to go for a radioactive iodine treatment after the complete removal of my thyroid to kill any possible thyroid cells that may be left in me. But the same hospital that told me I didn't have thyroid cancer screwed that up as well and I never got it done. I'm glad for that though. But that's another story that will take time to write about.
I have to go to my oncologist-endocrin doctor every 6 months for blood work and neck ultrasounds to make sure I remain cancer free, especially since I never got radiation therapy. It's been over a year since I last went. BUT in May of 2014 I had a third thyroid surgery. An ultrasound tech who decided to go higher up my neck with that little probe thingy (I think that's the technical term for it haha) found a piece of thyroid tissue that was missed from the previous 2 surgeries 6 years before. They again wanted me to do radioactive iodine treatment to kill it and not have surgery because the piece of thyroid was so small. I said no, I'll go for surgery. Don't you think if my thyroid was dead and decaying 6 years ago, that any piece left is also dead and decaying? Also, I don't want radiation unless I'm going to die RIGHT NOW without it. So they went in and took out the itty bitty piece of thyroid. No radioactive iodine for me! No. Radiation almost always causes other cancers 5, 10, 20 years down the road for people. If I can live my life without it and live for a very long time and not get cancer from cancer treatments, then that's the route I choose. It's the route I chose.
I'm not completely healthy today. I just don't have cancer anymore. Without a functioning thyroid I've got a multitude of side effects I have to deal with from the thyroid replacement medication. But if I don't take the medicine I will get sick. And I WILL die. Slowly, painfully, and very sickly. Insomnia, weight fluctuation, extreme body temperature changes every 5 minutes, exhaustion, depression, anxiety (just to name a few) are side effects I'll take any day over death. I'll deal with them all because it means I'm still alive. I'm here to take care of my children and watch them grow up.
Since the cancer, I've had a 5th baby. She is the product of thyroid medication and birth control medication clashing with each other. Something even the doctors didn't know could happen. I'm glad the medicines clashed. I love my Toddler Tyrant! That was another journey, for another blog post though.
I'll end with this: Fuck Cancer! Fuck you! I fought you and I won!
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