Battlestar Galactica the THIRD

Well, so I'm still awake.  Earlier today, I was wiped out from a walk and figured I'd be asleep on the couch by 9pm.  Now it's 3:17 and I am still wide awake and I just had a snack.  I'm going to blame this on the absence of a thryoid, I guess.

This is my third episode of Battlestar Galactica in a row since Jim went to bed.  It's getting silly.  I thought perhaps my anxiety-fueled sleeping problems were a result of my thyroid problems, or perhaps my job, which can get a bit stressy for me.  Perhaps, though, my sleeping problems are a result of my

BRAIN

!!!

I now return me to my Battlestar Galactica watching, already in progress. I'm drawing the line at three.  Most likely.

Oh, YAY!

Well, I am still awake and still paranoid, but the episode finally downloaded without my having to open up Jim's computer.

HOW WONDERFUL IS THIS NEWS?!

Here I come, o Galactica crew, here I come!

(P.S. I know it's just a show and it's not real.)

Great. I'm awake and paranoid and I can't even watch Battlestar Galactica.

So, during my time off to have surgery, be subsequently hospitalized, and to recuperate, instead of reading books (I've read about 100 pages of a book), I've been watching Battlestar Galactica on the Apple TV.  Jim engineered the whole Apple TV thing and now he's asleep.  Meanwhile, I'm awake and paranoid and I can't sleep. Just now, I finished an episode, so I bought another, but I can't get it to load without using his computer, apparently.  This is a problem because I don't want to open up his computer and try to use it without his permission.  We don't do that stuff in this house.

BOLLOCKS.

Why am I paranoid, you ask?  Okay, you don't ask, but I'll tell you anyway.  I am paranoid I have other cancer. I'm going to spare you the gory details of this.  I'd actually written them out, but for the purposes of not publishing said gory details on the Internet, I then hit the happy backspace key.

Suffice to say I'm not sleeping because I'm convinced I have all different sorts of cancer.  And I can't watch Battlestar Galactica.  And it's really exciting right now.

BOLLOCKS.

Sunday blahs

Apparently, being grateful to be alive on a gorgeous Sunday with a holiday Monday immediately following does *not* preclude extreme crankiness.

Here's what my incision looks like today. I pulled the paper off last night. I'd had enough of paper (I know, that's the ONLY time you'll EVER hear me saying that).

Please refrain from commenting on my desperate need for a makeover.

Joel's Comic Life and My Blog Thoughts

My friend Joel Arandia created some wonderful comics when he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.  I love these; what a great way to deal with a diagnosis like cancer.  Here's a link to his series, Joel's Comic Life, located on his Flickr page, where you can see more of these:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joelio/sets/935583/

Joel's comics have been making me think about how illness moves us.  Since my diagnosis, I've been yearning to create stuff, in all of the different ways I like to express my creative self.  I haven't had a huge amount of time/energy/space to do a whole heck of a lot of that yet, except for here, on my blog.  

Blogs are seen as means of reaching out to others, and my friends and family have lately been commending me on my ability to reach out to others for support via my blog.  And my blog is certainly a tool for that, inasmuch as being creative can include a reaching outward.  

But creative expression has to start with - or at least must be composed of an equal element of - reaching inward.  And I guess I want you to know that this blog, for me, is not just about me trying to pull you in for support. Rather, my blog is where I've been choosing to create, to vent, and to think.  My blog is where I can meet you now, at these times when we are not together. It's also a great way of keeping you informed about my condition... and maybe one day will help other people with thyroid problems, too.

I do love the Internet for that.

Pathology is in

I'm home from the doctor's office, where in addition to checking in with Dr. Lee about my hypocalcemia, I also got to hear my pathology results, some pertinent details of which are included below:

• The tumor was 1.7 cm (about 1 cm larger than we thought), partially encapsulated, and malignant (papillary thyroid carcinoma, just as we thought) 
• 30 enlarged lymph nodes from the midsection of my neck were removed, and all were clean (no evidence of cancer - WAHOO)
• Parathyroid tissue was included in the pathology, which explains some of the parathyroid damage (still unsure whether it's temporary or permanent)
• Based on my age and tumor size, lack of apparent lymph node involvement, etc., that places me at a stage 1
• The tumor cells did not have any weird variations identified (in other words, I had standard-issue papillary carcinoma)
• When I still had my thyroid, I also had Hashimoto’s auto-immune chronic lymphocytic thyroiditis (chronic thyroiditis/Hashimoto's thyroditis/etc.)

All of this is very good news.  It seems* like they've got the cancer and we'll be following up to make sure with radioactive iodine treatment and scanning.  I will be having the radioactive iodine treatment once I recover, most likely in October (probably the first week or two of the month, right after I see Sufjan Stevens in concert!!).   

Even the Hashimoto's disease diagnosis was excellent to hear, because I've been having symptoms of thyroid disease for YEARS, and since about 2004, I have suspected they were thyroid-related.  In 2004, I went to an endocrinologist to get to the bottom of my exhaustion.  I had all of the symptoms of hypothyroidism and a few symptoms of hyperthyroidism to boot, here and there. Still, my tests came out in normal ranges.

Over the last year and a half or so as well, I've been gaining weight and swelling up with water in such weird ways, not in proportion at all to the amount of exercise I as getting.  As I wondered why, I kept hearing hints that perhaps I as just getting older and had to watch my weight better.  While I agree with that assessment, I also knew something was up.

And I was proven right - that I do suffer from thryoid disease - when they tested my removed thyroid. It saddens me to realize that I probably wouldn't have been diagnosed by my current endocrinologist had it not been for the cancer finding; my surgeon, however, preliminarily diagnosed me with it before he even saw the test results.  Because he's a genius and I love him.

Ah, well. At least they caught it all - and I'm relatively young.  Many women have to be in their 40s before they find out what's really wrong with their thyroids. 

So I'm glad on all fronts at this point.  More blogging soon.


* If they didn't get all of the cancer, we'll find out as a result of the iodine scanning in October.

Agenda for tomorrow

Well, I'm home from the hospital (BIG yay for that).   Hypocalcemia bites.  I was hospitalized on an emergency basis at a local hospital.  I summarized the incident in a recent post, but I'll probably write a lot more about it when I can stand to do so.  That time is decidedly not yet.

Meanwhile...

Tomorrow I visit with Dr. Lee for a check-in, a couple of weeks early in light of the hypocalcemia episode, and also to see if my pathology results are in (they took out the thyroid and a handful of other glands - handfuls of glands! haha! - and sent them for testing to see how much spread there had been from the initial nodule in the thyroid itself).

In our chat on the phone today, by the way, Dr. Lee explained that they had not removed my parathyroids, but they'd seen them and they'd had to peel my thyroid apart from them - so they could definitely have been traumatized, which could have caused Lisa's Hypocalcemia Incident of Ought Nine.

I know I should, but I can't get used to not having had a detailed ultrasound of my entire neck (rather than just the front/thyroid area) before the surgery to see if the spread had been more extensive within my neck than what they saw.  Logically, I know the following:

• They believe they caught the cancer early
• The iodine study will catch anything else anyway - and then a decision can be made about whether to yank more nodes through a more detailed surgery
• If there was significant lateral nodal spread (I just decided that was the technical term for it without consulting the big thyroid book) that couldn't be dealt with via iodine alone, they'd likely need a second surgery for it to avoid the trauma of dissecting my entire neck at the front, middle, and sides

So then why can't I stop obsessing...?  I think my mind needs something to pick apart at all times, lest it get lazy and relax or something.

And in other news...

I am sad that I couldn't try G's homemade soup; she had been planning to cook for me on Friday when all this ER business went down.

Spending time with a friend, who is also a professional chef to the stars and is planning to cook a health-giving soup for you is something not to be missed... but I missed it, because G (whom I hadn't seen in person in about two years or something ridiculous like that!!) showed up on Friday, just in time to help me unload the ingredients for the soup and then immediately haul into the cab with us for the ER trip.

What a wonderful friend she is, though.  Just that short time with G made me happy.  I hope the time together made her at least a little bit happy, too, because in addition to being out some nice ingredients (which she left for me, but I don't know how to make the soup), after two years of not seeing me, she suddenly got to see me feeling horrible.  I was almost out of calcium, which caused me great physical discomfort and caused cloudy, irrational thinking, I realized later.

So basically, I was acting like the usual anxious and irritable version of me when I'm stressed out, except multiplied by a factor of umpty-shitsticks.  When last she saw me, I looked like the village loon, freaking out vocally about catching simultaneous H1N1 and MRSA in the hospital emergency waiting room while concurrently getting angry with Jim for not being able to anticipate exactly what I was thinking and then take the only right action based no no input from me.

Ah, well. I hope to lure G back over here to cook some soup one day soon. While I have the ingredients, and she said she'd give me the recipe, I'd have to make Jim cook it or wait until I felt up to standing around and cooking, which I don't yet at the moment.  And Jim's been such a saint, I don't want to make him cook me soup in the summertime (G was volunteering, after all).

So perhaps I'll just lobby for a date with G when I'm functioning again, send back the non-perishables and eat the perishables, which happen to be a few deep green things. I do love those green things, which is a plus. And at least I still have the gorgeous flowers G brought.  They are absolutely incredible. I just wish I'd thought to bring them to the ER so I could have had them in my hospital room.  Then again, I would have done a lot of things differently if I'd known what was in store on ER night...

But that's another story for another blogging day.  Or for two hours from now, when I'm still wondering where else the cancer could be and simultaneously not sleeping.  We'll see what happens.