Anna Vs. Her Thyroid, Round 2
Jun. 15th, 2005 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperThose of you who have been on my Friends list since before last summer may recollect that I had to have thyroid surgery last August--just after last year's Writer's Weekend, in fact. The short form of the story was that my thyroid had wigged out and made five, count 'em, five nodes in my neck. The biggest one was about 6cm in diameter, and when we had it biopsied, Swedish Medical Center said "intermediate possibility of cancer".
My doctor said, "Er, let's have that out then," and I went in and had half of my thyroid removed, along with the nearly baseball-sized lump. That left three little ones on the left side, with the remaining half of the gland.
Today I went in for a followup appointment with my endocrinologist, to discuss the results of a recent followup ultrasound we had done. Turns out that one of the three remaining nodes, all of which had been under 1cm at the time of my surgery, has now doubled in size and is up to 2.1cm or so. This seems to be a matter of my thyroid freaking out when half of it was removed, going, "AAAAH CAN'T! MAKE! ENOUGH! HORMONE!", and then deciding that the solution to this problem is to make bigger nodes.
So we're going to have the new big one biopsied. We'll have to see what happens next--but I really wanted to make it through this summer without any further medical adventures. >:|
My doctor said, "Er, let's have that out then," and I went in and had half of my thyroid removed, along with the nearly baseball-sized lump. That left three little ones on the left side, with the remaining half of the gland.
Today I went in for a followup appointment with my endocrinologist, to discuss the results of a recent followup ultrasound we had done. Turns out that one of the three remaining nodes, all of which had been under 1cm at the time of my surgery, has now doubled in size and is up to 2.1cm or so. This seems to be a matter of my thyroid freaking out when half of it was removed, going, "AAAAH CAN'T! MAKE! ENOUGH! HORMONE!", and then deciding that the solution to this problem is to make bigger nodes.
So we're going to have the new big one biopsied. We'll have to see what happens next--but I really wanted to make it through this summer without any further medical adventures. >:|
