'twas the night before...

'twas the night before D-day and all was quiet. My children were gone, already dropped off at my husband's cousin's house. It took everything in me to keep it together when I dropped them off. I balled my eyes out as I packed their little bags thinking we might never see each again. I'm starting to tear up as we speak now. My children 2 and almost 4 as of next month, know mommy is going to the hospital tomorrow to get her boo-boo removed by surgery, but still  quite oblivious to the scale of the situation. They just know they are having a sleep over with their cousins. My youngest is a bit clingy so I did end up having to sneak out which broke my heart in a million pieces.

Surgery was originally scheduled for 10:40 am but was changed to 9:10am. I have to be there 2 hours prior which means I must check in at 7:10am. We are leaving around 5:30, no one wants to fight Pittsburgh rush hour traffic. 

I have never had a surgery before where I have been put to sleep so I am fucking scared out of my mind! I'm scared of dying on the operating table basically. I hate getting IVs so I'm not looking forward to that either, and since I'm having surgery I have to shave my legs lol. I don't want to be wondering around in a hospital gown with some hairy man-beast legs lol  on the bright side of things at least I should be able to eat some lunch since my surgery was moved up an hour and a half! Optimism... Optimism...

I doubt I will get any sleep tonight with my anxiety level being at 100. So how did I find out I had thyroid cancer? Good question, funny story.

I was at work one day, it was thanksgiving day actually. I work at a hospital and one of our doctors was in to see her patients and she was sitting at the nurses station putting in orders. It must have just been how I turned my head that she noticed my neck was swollen. She said to me "you need an ultrasound of your thyroid you have a goiter." Now this totally struck me off guard and I wasn't sure how to react to that, he'll she's the doctor not me. My only reply was "well I had my values checked over the summer and everything was normal." "I don't care." She said "you need to have an ultrasound, I'm sorry I'm a doctor." And she left the floor. "We'll that was rude." One of the nurses said. I didn't think it was rude. To me, it was ominous, because that conversation replayed itself over and over in my head every day. I googled goiter and looked up all the possibilities and everything from graves to hashis, to cancer to hypo and hyperthyroidism came up. Finally like a month later I went to my pop for a uti and mentioned to her what this doctor said. And she had said "yea your neck does look a little swollen" I said " hey fat people have fat necks how was I ever supposed to see this. I gained like 50lbs with my first pregnancy and still needed to loose 25 of it so nothing looked abnormal to me. Anyways my pop ordered the ultrasound and sur enough there it was a big ol goiter on my left side, about twice the size of my right lobe which is perfectly normal. I have no symptoms, it doesn't affect my breathing, swallowing, or changed my voiced, it doesn't give me a cough that doesn't want to go away. I said it cohabitated with me so well I would have never known! So anyways my pop referred me to an ENT who wanted to "investigate" my goiter further which was my biggest fear at the time. Silly me. I though oh just put me on some synthroid and call it a day. Ha! He ordered a bunch of bloodwork and then.... an FNA or a fine needle aspiration... which is a biopsy of your thyroid with a thin needle where they just use local anesthesia and ultrasound to help guid the needle in your thyroid to aspirated enough cells so they can tell if you have cancer or not and they have to put the needle in multiple times. In my case they have to poke me 4 times to get enough cells for a sample. Then a few days later the results came back as papillary thyroid carcinoma and that's how we got where we are today. Crazy huh?

I wanted to upload a pre surgery pic of my and my neck but my phone won't let me for some reason, maybe I will figure it out and do and pre and post surgery comparison.