So after spending the weekend coming to grips with the fact I wasn’t going overseas on my once in a lifetime trip (oh and the fact I had cancer) I went in and saw the Ear, Nose and Throat Specialist that my GP had recommended early the next week.
(Tip always pay to see a specialist in their rooms and not at the free clinics they run once a month at the hospital, especially for the initial consultation, it gets everything rolling much quicker!)
He was a big man, bigger than me and i’m 6’4, he was a lot heavier too and had massive hands, it made no sense. How could a man as large and cumbersome as him be a specialist for such a delicate area? I went into his office, he was kind enough to fit me in at the end of the day even though there were no spots until the next week, I think my GP had phoned him directly and made a special request.
(Tip be as friendly as you can with your GP and don’t be afraid to ask for favours, they can pull more strings than you think)
So I walk into the room and wouldn’t you believe it one of my good friends brothers is in their doing his rounds, he was in training to be a doctor! We had a chat and then the specialist needed to speed things up. He had a prod and poke of my lower neck, looked in my ears and up my nostrils and then for the fun part, he sprayed some putrid anesthetic in my nose and then stuck a camera down my throat. The spray tasted horrible, made me dribble snot everywhere and the camera made me gag. Seeing my throat on TV was pretty cool though! After all of this he gave me a date for surgery, a four week wait in the public system (going private would have only sped it up by one week and I’d have had the same surgeon, the public system here in Australia isn’t all that bad for serious problems, if you needed a knee reconstruction though you would need to wait a year at least) he then talked me through all the possible complications which were limited. The main one was that he might damage my vocal chords and id sound like a 60 year old life time smoker who desperately needs a soother. Meh I trust you and your oversized hands good sir!
I then spent the next few weeks living a bit of a holiday in my hometown. Plenty of dinners out, trips to Melbourne and the beach and a bit of sport and xbox. Life was great!
I rocked up to the hospital at 7am as advised, they got me into my gown and compression socks and then I sat waiting with others. It reminded me of a seen out of a Nazi war time film, it was all a bit depressing. There was one interesting thing to come out of this wait though, I was one of four in the room, and the other three were all aged 40 – 60 they asked each of them what they were in there for and all of them were in there for a smoking related illness. This made me mad. I also noticed a lot of very overweight people getting around the hospital and these two things made me wonder how much money is being spent of smoking and weight related issues? Imagine if that money could be invested into education of renewable energy and then the health care resources that were freed up could then be used on emergency departments or research. *Sigh* At least I know I ill never smoke or become overweight. Your health is too important.
So after waiting in this room for about 3 hours, I was escorted off, my Mum said goodbye and I said “I’ll see you when i’m “Thyroidless and drugged up”. I hoped on a trolley in a pre-op room, signed some papers, answered quesitons and then two guys who I used to go to school with (one of which I am still mates with) walked into the room, they are both theater technicians, they made jokes about shaving me, touching me and sticking things in my mouth while I was unconscious and I said “knock yourself out! I cant care if I dont know whats going on right?” a few laughs were had and then the anesthetist came in, hooked a line up to me and gave me some stuff to start to make me more relaxed. It was good. They rolled me into the theater and I can still picture it today. They said, you probably wont remember any of this and I said “bull! ask me a question and I’ll answer it when I wake up!” They put the gas on my face, asked me who won the Brownlow medal the week before (I went to the Grand Final!) and then….. I fell asleep.
The next thing I new, is a woke up to my mate next to me. I said some rude stuff about how my throat felt in my dazed state and then got wheeled to my room. That whole afternoon is a bit blurry. I remember eating ice and people coming and going but that’s about it. I was awake a lot of the night, I spoke to the nurses a lot that night, I told my whole Friday the 13th Cancer the day before moving overseas story to one who I swear almost cried. I didn’t ask for her number though (Do you think patients ever pick up nurses? That would be a good effort!) The next morning I took my first ever thyroid hormone pills 200 mcg of thyroxcine. Thryoid hormone replacement is a strange thing, I have never felt the same since. It is amazing how much the thyroid controls. Your metabolism, heat levels, energy, sleep patterns and emotions just to name a few! I will get into the ups and downs of hyper or hypo thyroidism later though. So after having my first pills, they took some blood and sent me home. I spent the next few days recovering from the surgery, my voice was scratchy, I had a sore neck and couldn’t swallow easily, but it all went away pretty soon, except the voice, that took weeks.
I went for a follow up appointment with the ENT surgeon a few weeks later, he checked my scar and asked me how I was and then gave me a run down of how the surgery went. He said it went great, except that they found some cancer in my lymph nodes as well. Bummer! This didnt really change the planned path though, he said he would refer me to an Endocrinologist to organise some Radioactive Iodine Treatment (RAI) the idea is that Thyroid tisse uses iodine in your body to created the thyroid hormones. So by starving your body of iodine for a month before hand and then feeding it some iodine laced with radioactive material, any remaining thyroid tissue would effectively soak up its own poison! This would include any cancer that had spread beyond the thyroid as it is made up of the same tissue were ever it spreads too.
I saw my Endocrinologist a few weeks later and he did all the normal stuff, poked, proded, asked questions etc… he explained everything about the RAI including the preparation, such as the requirement to go off your thyroid replacement hormones for a few weeks before hand to raise your Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) (This is the hormone that tells your Thyroid to make Thyroid hormones, so by not having a thyroid and not having my replacement hormones, your body will make lots of it), this meant that I would be fully Hypothyroid for a while which was no fun at all! I was extremely tired, woke a lot at night, got grumpy very easily and just generally felt poor (There is an injection of TSH you can have but Medicare dont cover it so it costs 2k per injection! And you need like 3). I also had to eat a low iodine diet during this time which meant avoiding foods with iodine in them. Do you know what foods have iodine in them? ALL OF THEM! Trying to do this diet at the same time as being hypothyroid was a killer! All I wanted to do was eat normal food! I couldnt eat any dairy products, no store baked breads, limited meat and pretty much nothing commercially made. I lived off fruit, vegetables, home made chips and some red meats. I lost 6kgs.
This preparation time came with other problems though, going out for meals with friends or family was near impossible, you explain you cant eat certain things and they dont understand, you tell them you are tired and they dont understand, you get andry at the flick of a switch and they dont understand why. This was the hardest part, no matter how many times you explain to people what you are going through they will never fully understand unless they really research it themselves or experience it themselves. I felt like people just thought I Was down about the cancer, or in a bad mood full stop. This was not the case. Hypothyroidism is hell, I had never been so tired, moody and in general felt so bad. I still cant find the words to describe it.
After just under a month of no thyroid hormones or iodine in my diet, I went in for my pre RAI treament check to make sure my TSH was high enough and thank god it was! I could not go another baked tomato, or saltless seak and chips! So then I was to go off to the hospital for my RAI Treatment the following week, I was happy too finally be getting it all done. Ill tell you all about that next time!
thyroid story 