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.