Assorted random Fridayness

[annathepiper]

-0: I am waking up early again, before my alarm clock goes off. Grf. I was awake at least an hour before the alarm today, and it didn't help either that the arrival of the garbage truck in our neighborhood at EARLY-THIRTY IN THE MORNING was extremely loud. I rolled grumpily out of bed and staggered over to the window to pull it shut, which diminished the noise, but which did not let me get back to sleep.

Given the new news about the misbehavior of my thyroid, I'm back to being suspicious of unusual sleep patterns like this. But at least I'm not completely brain-dead on my feet. We'll have to see how long this keeps up this time around, though.

+/-0.5: Speaking of my thyroid, I now have a biopsy scheduled for 6/28. Which is SOON, and therefore a little bit nervous-making. Though I'd like to get it out of the way ASAP, I guess.

+1: Weird things cross my brain when I am lying half-awake in bed early in the morning. Like my first mangling of any lyrics off of My Hand, My Heart; I'm pretty sure that the third track does not in fact go "for bringing me here / and guiding my hand / in this land / the land of the second PANTS". I blame Mystery Science Theater 3000.

+/-2: Hrmm, looks like my job duties are about to change again, and this time into something a bit more high-profile: I get to run the main BVTs for our stuff on Longhorn. Starting Monday, I need to shadow the person currently doing it, and look over her shoulder and absorb everything there is to know across next week. This ought to be entertaining. Especially given that Thursday and Friday, I'll be out for half-days anyway! We'll have to see how it all goes; I've been feeling underwhelmed at work lately, and having something that'll give me known daily duties again would be nice. On the other hand, I don't mind the freedom to figure out my own daily duties. Really, I'd much rather be writing--so as long as I have something to do at work I'm kind of 'meh' about it all.

+3: mamishka and jessicac have kindly invited me along for a road trip up to Vancouver on Thursday of next week--to see the preview of Serenity playing up there! Yeep! Guess I'm finally going to get to see the thing. ;) And from what Meems has to say on the matter, the vigor of the responses to all these previews is really rather bowling over the folks involved with this production.

+4: Friday of next week, I get to go to a SHIP PARTY. That'll be fun, too!

Days without a rejection from Luna: 22
Days without a rejection from agents: 4

Comments

[kaseido.livejournal.com]

Massive Firefly envy! How fun!

Hey, is it true that you need a passport now to cross the border? I'm trying to figure if I need to get one again for my trip up in August...

[annathepiper]

From what I am hearing, driver's license + certified copy of your birth certificate should be adequate. But that'll change as of the end of the year and you WILL need a passport at that point.

Me, I ordered a certified copy of my birth certificate from Kentucky and I have that handy now. I also applied for a passport renewal, but I have no idea whether the new passport will get to me in time. I'm not counting on it.

[kaseido.livejournal.com]

good info - thanks!

[annathepiper]

You're quite welcome. :)

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

Woo hoo!

We'll have to get together afterwards and chat about the spoilers we can't discuss online. :-)

[annathepiper]

That could be fun!

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

*blink* *blink*

You too with the thyroid?

There's no such thing as a coincidence.

(I'm all but recovered from a total thyroidectomy, and waiting to see an endocrinologist...)

I'm willing to compare notes if you are...

[annathepiper]

Whoa. Talk about your serendipity!

Yeah, I had me a partial thyroidectomy last summer, and just now discovered that my thyroid is still acting up. I don't know yet whether this means I'm going to have to have another surgery or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if it comes to that. The doctors who've been involved in the whole thing seem to be on top of stuff, though!

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

*nods* Mine was bigger than that; it had pushed my windpipe over and all out of proportion. Kinda scary in retrospect. They pulled the mass itself, pathologised it while I was still out on the table, figured out it was papillary carcinoma, pulled more, still bad, and just went for the whole thing, including one (healthy) parathyroid gland...

They've got me on generic synthroid, and will do what's called radioiodine ablation sometime soon to nuke (literally) the rest of it... Fortunately this isn't nearly as bad as regular chemotherapy, since only thyroid tissue concentrates iodine, and I-131 has such a short half-life... I'll be Radiation Boy for a weekend, but that'll be it.

That and getting used to blood draws... but the vampires around here are pretty damn good.

[annathepiper]

Yow. Yeah, I was told about radiation treatments as an option, when I went through my original round of thyroid stuff last summer--but given the history of cancer in my family my doctor pretty much advised to go straight to the surgical option. Given that one of these nodes has gone and gotten bigger, I'll be definitely unsurprised if they have to have the rest of it out. I guess it'll just be a question of what the biopsy shows.

How long were you on the table? They had me out for only two and a half hours, and then they took about a week to test the hell out of the lump that they took out.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

They had me out for about two hours, and they did the pathology on the fly; they took the lump out first, figured out that the margin was still involved, took more, still bad, and just went ahead and yanked the rest of it along with some lymph nodes and one parathyroid, the latter of which turned out to be healthy. By the time I was awake enough to ask questions, they had answers for most of them.

I'd have to agree with them, if you've got a history and it keeps growing like that, it may well be time to have out with the rest and do the Radiation Girl thing... *sigh*

The part I like least about this is that it ties me to the healthcare system for the duration. Fortunately, the prescriptions have long since gone generic and are quite affordable, so once the radiation bit is done and over with, as long as I can keep some kind of paycheck coming in I'll be fine.

[annathepiper]

Yeah, it's the long spate of medical bills I'd have coming in after another round of surgery that'll really be the annoying part of all this--insurance will help, but there will still be several hundred dollars' worth of expenses out of it, dollars solarbird and I can ill afford right now. >_< The expense of actually buying the Synthroid, if I got put on that, would be only the least of it.

It's somewhat reassuring that my current contract will at least keep me employed until October. It'll be getting the NEXT job that'll be the tricky part.

[cruisedirector]

*has mental image of Russell guiding hand in pants and head explodes*

Thanks. *g*

Hope the thyroid is nothing serious! Have had a week of minor medical disasters around here and those are scary enough.

[annathepiper]

Glad to be of service. ;)

And thanks. I figure as long as the node isn't cancerous, I can cope--it'll just be annoying to have to have the other half of my thyroid out and to have to go on synthroid. But we'll see what happens.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

The thing of it is, as I'm learning the hard way, even if it is cancer, because of the thyroid's sensitivity to iodine, more than likely it will easy to (quite literally) nuke without giving you much more than an upset stomach and a long weekend of not snuggling. Compared to other forms, this stuff is a walk in the park with a beautiful woman. (yes, yes I am the king of weird analogy, why do you ask? :)

(Pooh Bear doing his stoutness exercises is my "health" icon..)

[annathepiper]

Aww, I LOVE the Pooh icon! :)

I was wondering about how the iodine treatment worked and how much it interfered with the daily course of one's life. Sounds like the answer to this is 'not much'. Cool.

And yeah, I was told by my doctor that if I had to have any cancer at all, 'thyroid cancer' was totally the proper kind to have, just because it's so easy to deal with. But that said, I'd still pick the 'no cancer' option on the checklist. ;)

Though I'm still curious as to what makes thyroids wig out like this in general--what is screwed up with mine to make it generate nodes like this. Especially big ol' 6cm ones. I haven't yet managed to uncover anything in poking around the Net that can point to any sort of reliable understanding about what ultimately causes thyroid issues.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Yes, "not much." Basically you're out for a long weekend. And aside from the upset tummy (for which they probably have lots of good drugs :) there don't appear to be much in the way of side effects, particularly if you've already had most of it surgically removed. (I have seen some articles raising concern about long-term effects, but I think most of that was also concerning where they were using it in place of removing tissue instead of in addition to. (That's also where you get a big enough dose to where they put you in the isolation ward for two weeks.)

Your doc is saying the same thing mine is about this being easy. I agree with you about the "none", but *gallic shrug* you gotta do what you gotta do.

As for wig-out? I think I figured mine out; I spent the latter half of the 1980's doing 40-50-60 hours a week sitting in front of unshielded monitors. All that radiation was pointed at.. guess where? Right. The lit says that papillary thyroid cancer is most often caused by radiation exposure, and, well, unwittingly, I pretty much set myself up for it.

Modern monitors are fine; they're shielded. But those old-timey dummy terminals? Feh.

20/20 hindsight...

[annathepiper]

Heh. Given that I've been playing with computers pretty much since 1986 or so, I wouldn't be surprised if that was some sort of factor with my own thyroid. It'd be interesting to see some data on that. HrMRmm.

But then, I've also got the family history, what with my cousin also having thyroid issues and my mother having had cancer. So I also wouldn't be surprised if monitor radiation was only a contributing factor and not the actual cause. Hard to say!

[cruisedirector]

Both my father in law and a good friend have had their thyroids completely removed...once they adjusted to the hormones they have done very well. Just the idea is scary, I know! I hope it ends up being something else entirely...

[annathepiper]

Ah, this brings another man into my pool of people I've heard of with thyroid issues. I'm having a discussion with technoshaman about all this stuff right now; he's another male who's had a thyroidectomy. The vast majority of folks I've heard tell of who've gone through this have been women, but it's interesting to know that men have had to deal with it as well.

It does help at least that I've gone through the surgical procedure once already, and it turned out well, so the uncertainty of that wouldn't be a factor. Just need to get past the biopsy, now. :)

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

*nods* I'd never had more than an ER visit before this, and I'm older than you are, so the idea of general anesthesia the first time was a little scary.. but fortunately I had good people around me, both medical and chosen-family, so I was fine....

BTW... going to go ahead and add you. Oh, and check out my other Pooh icon. This one I usually use for "thoughtful"... :)

[annathepiper]

Yeah, I noticed you added me on! I've reciprocated. ^_^ And I love this Pooh icon as well!

My thyroidectomy last summer was my first experience with a general anesthesia... but that part wasn't really scary for me. I found the idea of being unconscious while a surgeon was cutting into my neck almost comforting. ;) I was mostly curious as to what it was going to be like, and the answer turned out to be 'almost instantaneous subjective loss of time'. My only prior experience with such things had been my wisdom tooth removal, for which they only gave me a local and lots of nitrous, so I was still conscious for that. Just very, VERY loopy. :)

And having Dara around was a great comfort as well through the whole process.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

What was a little disconcerting for me was being mostly-concious but not remembering it... I remember waking up in recovery, being moved to my room, and then asking what time it was, and discovering it was an hour and a half past when I thought it should be... and later learning that there were 45 minutes between the move and the time check that I don't remember...

OTOH, given that jenkitty and tabbifli (kendaer's wife) were there, I felt, and feel, totally safe about it.

[annathepiper]

That would have weirded me out too. The closest I've ever come to that was when I had my wisdom teeth out, and they had me on nitrous. I never actually passed out, but I was definitely off in la-la land, and the entire procedure seemed to me in subjective time to take only about five minutes. And it was really an hour. Very odd feeling!

But glad to hear you had your beloved and friends on hand to look out for you too. :)

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

But glad to hear you had your beloved and friends on hand to look out for you too.

There's a fine line there, and a definite tendency to creep over it... :)

[annathepiper]

Indeed. :)