Pre-diagnosis thru treatment and on...

It all started with a lump on the right side of my neck last June. As background, I'm a pediatrician, in practice for 16 years at that time, healthy, and aside from pregnancy related days, had missed only 2 unscheduled days of work in 13 1/2 years. When I noticed the lump, I guess I knew it was significant, or I probably wouldn't have called Billy G., an ENT colleague. I almost dismissed it because it had benign qualities, but I thought maybe I'd felt it the month prior and and that it hadn't been that big. When Billy felt it, he thought the location was odd and ordered an MRI. That did show an abnormal node which led to the open biopsy I had July 2009. Several possibilities had been voiced, but the result presented to me at my follow up visit wasn't one of them, Papillary Thyroid Cancer. Something in the way Dr. King spoke to me post op, even though I was not fully recovered from anesthesia, raised a red flag to me that he was concerned about something. Friend's told me I was silly, but it turned out I was right. Being a doctor still didn't prepare me for the news. He handed me the path report as he started to talk to me. I heard "thyroid cancer blah blah blah, thyroidectomy blah blah blah, neck dissection blah blah blah". I tried to ask some intelligent questions and thought I was okay, but leaving his office, the last patient of the day, on my birthday, I began to bawl as I hit the hallway. That would have been tough enough, but the results were just preliminary, the slides had been sent to PA for confirmation. It was more than a week before I got the confirmation, and that was a really loooong week. From there, a visit to an endocrinologist to get plugged in for care after surgery, CXR, neck U/S, bloodwork.
To give myself a little time for recovery between the biopsy and the pending total thyroidectomy (TT) and right neck dissection, I put the surgery off until end second half of Oct. You might wonder why wait so long, but this cancer isn't presented as being anything urgent. It is slow growing and has a low mortality, it's the "good cancer" is what I heard, but 3 operations later it doesn't seem so good to me. To be continued............