In my last post I ended rather abruptly with my little people’s response to the news that I had to have a third cancer surgery. This was November of 2013. In December 2013 I had a third lumpectomy and finally received the news, ‘We got it all.’ Thank God. It was beginning to feel like the never ending story, nightmare edition. After that surgery I still had radiation on my treatment plan. My last day of radiation was Valentine’s Day 2014. I had hoped to be at the end of my cancer journey then, but there was still this little issue with my thyroid to be addressed. The doctor wanted to send me off for surgery ASAP to have my thyroid removed, but I said no, I was so exhausted from everything else that had been going on. I got them to push the surgery out to September that year. And it’s a good thing that I did….
Around June that year, somebody finally woke up and realized that I wasn’t taking any thyroid medication. Apparently I had been needing it for awhile and my labs done the previous summer reflected that, but somebody dropped the ball on it. Here I was just staggering around without a clue in the world. So, they finally get this figured out and one of my doctors gets a script filled for a synthetic thyroid medication. I picked it up and grudgingly started taking it. It’s difficult to describe what happened next.
Have you ever seen the tv show Stargate SG-1? On the show there are these evil alien parasites. They kind of look like a scary snake and a piranha had a child together. These little scary aliens then attack people, climbing into their bodies with them, wrap around their spinal cord and proceed to take over the humans body. The human is helpless, watching the world go on before their eyes and watching their very own bodies betray them and perform all sorts of atrocities. They are a prisoner inside their own head, unable to control their body or their voice. Meanwhile evil is running the roost. Now, imagine being that person. That was kind of what it was like.
Shortly after starting the thyroid medications, I started experiencing some…changes. I really don’t remember a lot of the leading up moments, mostly just the ‘light bulb’ moment when I really realized that there was a major problem. I was standing in my kitchen, yelling at my family like some kind of deranged lunatic, when the thought suddenly popped into my head, ‘I’m not even angry. Why am I yelling?’ But I couldn’t stop. It was like there was something else driving my movements and it wasn’t me. After thinking about when it had started, I came to the conclusion that it must have something to do with the thyroid medication. So I quit taking it. I went in to the doctor and said, ‘Look, doc. I would rather not take that medication and die young, than live to be ninety and have everybody show up to my funeral only to say, ‘Thank god that B!#$% has finally died!’’ (Please excuse my language here. I was not in a good place.) Thankfully, the doctor took my concerns to heart and got me switched over to a different medication that did not make me crazy. Thank You Jesus!
In September 2014 I went in for the surgery and got my thyroid removed. Which turned out to be a good thing as it turned out that I did in fact have a papillary carcinoma in the thyroid. But thankfully, unexpectedly, the mass had shrunk after all of the chemo I had and I was just under the cutoff for the radioactive iodine. I was so thankful as it meant that the entire treatment was just that one surgery. Believe you me, that was more than enough.
It took months for me to ‘recover’ from the thyroid surgery. Mostly because apparently my thyroid had been still working more than the doctors had given it credit. They pulled the thyroid and didn’t up my dose of thyroid meds. It took months for them to get them up to the proper levels.
When our daughter Kate was diagnosed as relapsed in leukemia in March of 2015, they still didn’t have my levels all the way up. Which freaked her out one day in particular. She was in the icu and had fallen asleep. I had been intending to get up and go home, but was just so tired, I just couldn’t get my body moving. I fell asleep…and I NEVER fall asleep in the hospital. Except on the very, very, rare occasion that I am there overnight and can get to sleep. Never during the day. Until that day. I woke up to the sound of her urgently yelling my name. I just about levitated out of that chair in that moment, certain that something was massively, profoundly wrong. It was me. My falling asleep just completely freaked her out. She woke up to me sleeping and thought that there must be something seriously wrong with me for me to be asleep. Maybe not surprisingly, I didn’t fall asleep in the hospital again after that.
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