Power of Positivity

 (please excuse the expletive)

I haven't posted an update in some time because there really hasn't been much to post about. The first news that I don't think I shared here on the blog is that my scan that was done on Oct. 11th came back negative for any cancer cells. Ecstatic doesn't begin to describe the feeling I got when I received the email from my endocrinologist.

So, what does that mean for the future of my treatments?

It means that all I have to deal with now is adjusting my medication every few months, continuing to follow up with my endocrinologist, and go for one more scan next October. Funny that I'll see him more than I see my dentist and my PCP. I've been on the same amount of levothyroxine for 2 1/2 months now and I'm feeling great. I haven't had much of any changes in symptoms that you'd typically expect of supposedly being in hyperthyroidism (which is where they want me to be in order to suppress any possible return of cancer cells). I was hoping it'd help me lose weight, but no such luck. Occasionally I'll have a bout of insomnia where I'll wake up at 3am and can't go back to sleep or I'll be wide awake until 1am. However, when I was severely hypo, I didn't feel much of anything either, so who knows where I currently am in terms of my blood work and T3, T4, and TSH. I go on 12/21 for my blood test and then I have the follow up on 12/30 to determine if any change needs to happen with my medication. The only difficulty has been remembering to wait an hour after I take my meds in the morning before eating anything. You bet I'm watching the clock like a hawk! I don't know that I'll ever get used to not eating immediately upon waking, but that's my new normal now and it usually means I eat breakfast quite late or on the go. Not ideal, but it is what it is.

My scar is healing up very nicely and I'm very pleased with the progress. For about 5 weeks, I used Mederma. I noticed that my scar started to itch and that all around the scar was red. It was still puffy despite the ENT telling me it would go down. I started using ScarAway strips during the day and Vit E oil at night. The bumpiness and redness went away within a week.

This was taken on Oct 27th.

This is today.

I've become a little bit more relaxed about putting my ScarAway strips on (unless I know I'm going to be in the sun), but I'm still using Vit E oil at night. Hopefully in a few more months, it'll be barely noticeable.

Now on to a slightly different topic.

As the end of the 7th semester of PT school quickly approaches, I reflect back on the last 2 or 3 years and think that this journey has been anything but easy for me. PT school is freaking hard. It's even harder when you add juggling a family into that mix. Then, it's even harder when you have to deal with cancer. BUT, there are several things that have kept me going through feeling like I was going to fail and why am I doing this and why am I putting myself and my family through these tough times. What are those? My husband, my family, my dearest friends (especially Luciana because she's the only one who has truly understood exactly what going to school and juggling a family feels like and is going through it right there with me - we're almost done...almost done...), my classmates, etc. However, the ONE thing that I feel that has really and truly gotten me to where I am is the power of positivity. For the first 2 years of HG's life, things were dark and hard. After listening to myself, I realized I wouldn't be friends with me if I had to hear what I was saying all the time. So for all of you who had to deal with me, I apologize from the bottom of my heart. I wish I could go back and re-do things. I didn't feel like my old self. You know...the me before HG. The one who loved life. I have never really been a negative person and I hated myself for thinking that way. I had to take a step back and look at myself as an outsider and when I did that, I realized that my negativity was not only affecting myself, but my relationships. I made a decision at that moment that I was going to change my ATTITUDE because all you can really change is yourself. I took the positivity pledge.

Changing my attitude from negative to positive made a world of difference in how I felt about myself, how I interacted with others, and how others viewed me. I realized that after I changed my attitude, my whole world changed for the better. I was happier. I was enjoying my child (for the most part 😜). I was enjoying my family. I was enjoying my time spent with friends. I was enjoying being me. Does this mean that I never had negative thoughts? No. But they became few and far between and I shared them with my husband, my rock, and he helped talk me through my feelings. Don't get me wrong...this change was NOT easy. It took time. It took conscious effort to change my thinking. Sometimes I had to fake being positive to trick myself. Fake it til you make it! (If you have some time to watch these two TED talks, I highly recommend watching them: 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XFLTDQ4JMk and 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVmMeMcGc0Y ). Seriously. Watch them. Starting small and thinking at the end of the day of at least 1 positive thing helps tremendously. Start somewhere and it's like a snowball effect. Eventually, I saw so many more positive things in my life than I had seen in the 2+yrs prior.

I also noticed that the patients in the clinic who were happy and had a positive outlook, even when their situation might not have been very good, had much better outcomes and progressed faster and were discharged faster than those who had negative attitudes or who perseverated on their ailment.

So, how does this tie into my thyroid cancer? I don't have any doubt in my mind that keeping a positive outlook on something as terrible as the C word helped keep me sane. It didn't and doesn't do me or anyone else any good to be negative, so why not just be positive?

This semester has been pretty chill and very low-stress (something that I definitely needed). Besides getting my necessary school work done and being in class 3 days a week, I have been filling my days with taking care of myself mentally, emotionally, and physically (yay for exercise!!), having lunch with old friends, meeting new friends, spending time with friends, spending time with my son and my husband, going on family walks, doing exercise with my family (tennis isn't THAT terrible), and just overall enjoying my life right now.

Until next time! And remember, only YOU have the power to change YOURSELF. 😘

Follow up appointments: Tuesday 9/20/16

I'm a few days late to the update, but I've been busy with school work, cooking, and continuing to attempt to catch up with Game of Thrones.

On Tuesday morning, my mom and I went to my follow up appt with the ENT who did my surgery. He removed my SteriStrips and stitches. We discussed "wound" care and I have to clean it twice a day with hydrogen peroxide to break up the scabs and follow with Bactroban (antibiotic ointment). Ever since taking a wound care class, I've had a hard time even opening that hydrogen peroxide bottle, but I'm following doctor's orders. Also at the appt, we discussed the results of my pathology report. He told me that he actually did remove 12 lymph nodes during surgery (even though I swear he told me none had to be removed) and all of them were directly posterior to my thyroid. The pathology report came back with only 1/12 as being malignant and it was completely contained within that node. I did not have any cancer in the blood supply to the thyroid and the 4 cm nodule was almost completely malignant, but it was completely contained and found no where else in the thyroid. This is good since it means that I'm in the low-risk category for recurrence. He informed me that I will still have to go through the radioactive iodine treatment because of the size of the tumor, but the chances of my cancer coming back after that are very extremely slim. I have a follow up with him again next week to talk about scar management and so he can see how my scar is healing up after doing my wound care for a week. Taking the SteriStrips off hurt worse than the actual removal of the stitches.

After going to the ENT, my mom and I headed to my school and saw my school director and a few of the students in the class below me. They signed a card for me and my little (mentee) gave it to me. It was so sweet of them and was great to see some familiar smiling faces!

My mom and I then had lunch and headed to the endocrinologist appointment. The endo discussed the process for the RAI, the low-iodine diet, my blood work, and post-RAI expectations. He takes a very laid-back approach to the whole thing (which is kinda a relief). He told me that as long as I don't eat a lot of seafood or sea products like nori (which I don't), soy (which I stopped eating in July after I found out about my enlarged thyroid), or a lot of processed foods (which I eat very minimally), he said that I would be fine eating low-iodine for one week instead of two. He scheduled me to take the RAI pill on Sept 30 and I will need to stay about 6ft distance from people for 3 days. I will not be able to sleep in the same bed as my husband for 7 days and 21 days for sleeping in the same bed as HG. HG will have a much harder time with this than I will for sure! Just after 3 days of me sleeping in a separate room/bed than him after surgery, he was coming to find me at 2am. :-/  If anyone has any suggestions on how to keep him out of whatever bed I'm sleeping in, that would be helpful (he will already be sleeping with my husband). 

Anyway, I will have blood work done on Sept 28th to check my thyroid levels and if they are ideal for RAI, I will continue with my scheduled appt on the 30th. If not, I will take the RAI pill at the beginning of the following week on Oct 3rd. I have a full body scan scheduled for Oct 11th (HG's birthday). I don't know if they give me the results right after, or if I have to wait to hear if I have cancer elsewhere or if the RAI took care of any residual cancer cells. My hope is that I will be cancer-free, whether I hear the news that day or another day. I will then have another scan done in a year to determine if I remain cancer-free. The endocrinologist also said that there have been updates with the amount of time allowed for getting pregnant after RAI. They used to say 2yrs is ideal, but they are now saying 6mos is enough time and is safe. I do not even want to think about it until my second scan a year from now is over, but at least we don't have to wait 2 yrs as anticipated before. :-) He also sent me for blood work to check my calcium levels and turns out they were high. So he had me stop my Rocaltrol/Calcitrol and just continue with my 1,000mg of TUMS 3x/day. This is good news because it means that my parathyroids have started kicking in and doing their job!

All in all, I feel that the appointments went well. My scar isn't pretty right now, but it's definitely healing. 

Tuesday - day of stitches removal













Wednesday - day 2













Thursday - day 3












I spent today in the kitchen prepping food for my low-iodine diet which I started today (yes I still have energy surprisingly and haven't felt fatigued like I hear will happen at some point before RAI). I made banana bread, spaghetti sauce, cashew milk, poppy seed dressing, and a salad (which I ate for lunch). I had the spaghetti sauce for dinner over some pasta with a side salad and the sauce was really good! Tomorrow, I'm going to pull up the low-iodine cookbook and see about making some potato salads they have in there. The hardest part about this diet is that I can't eat out at all, all processed and canned foods are out (black olives are a no-no since they come from a can...waaaahhhhhh!), and no dairy products can be consumed. I can eat eggs, but only the whites. I have to only used non-iodized salt (I'm upset about this because I LOVE my pink Himalayan sea salt).  I will have to cook my own beans, which isn't a bad thing, but I've just never really been successful at making them. They always turn out not quite done (even after cooking them for ungodly amounts of time in the crock pot). Oh well...maybe I'll finally be able to conquer the one thing that doesn't go well for me in the kitchen.

That's all for now. Until next post...

Beginning of my thyroid journey

This is going to be quite a long post since it's the first one. I'll start from the beginning.

In July, when I was on my clinical rotation in Austin, I noticed my neck looked swollen on the left. I thought this was very strange, but I also wasn't sure if I was seeing things since I had never noticed it look like that before. Maybe it was my shirt that accentuated that part of my neck? How long has it been swollen...weeks, months? I was baffled, but being in PT school, I knew that it was where my thyroid should be. I leaned my head back to check my thyroid size and, sure enough, my left thyroid was slightly larger than my right. 

I asked around and everyone told me to go see a doc just in case. I got in to see a doc in Austin by the end of that week and they did blood work and an ultrasound. I explained to her that I felt like I had some symptoms of hypothyroidism, but I've had those for a while and I always have a reason for them, so it didn't really strike me as something I should have been concerned about until now that I noticed my enlarged thyroid. My blood work came back normal. The ultrasound, on the other hand, detected a mass that she said was 1.5cm in size. She wanted to do a biopsy because of it being larger than 1.3cm. I didn't want to continue my care in Austin, since I don't live there and commuting back and forth for thyroid stuff is dumb, so when I came back to Houston and saw my regular doc at the beginning of August, he referred me to an ENT. I saw the ENT on the 15th and he agreed about the biopsy and I had that done on Wednesday, the 24th. The ENT office called me Thursday and scheduled me in Friday the 26th to discuss my results. Never once did I think it would be cancer because every single doctor said, "The likelihood that it is cancer is very slim (5%) and you shouldn't worry about this at all...I'm sure it's nothing. They are almost always benign."

Friday morning, August 26th, the day before my 35th birthday, I went in to the office and I was very nervous. My blood pressure was sky high! I sat down in the exam room and he came in. He sat down and said, "Well, the biopsy came back as positive for thyroid cancer." Wait...what? Did he just tell me I have cancer? I'm young, healthy, do everything I can to take care of myself health wise, I hardly ever go to the doctor because I'm rarely sick, what?! This really isn't happening to me. This is a bad dream and I'm going to wake up tomorrow and this will all have been a dream. The next thing I heard him say was, "It's treatable and curable". So yes, I have papillary thyroid carcinoma. Luckily, I am young and the diagnosis was the best I could have received because this is the least invasive and most curable cancer. However, I am now going to have to have my whole thyroid removed because they can't risk cancer coming back on the other side. He wanted me to have surgery by mid-September. I told him if we could wait until October, that would be better because I was supposed to start my clinical rotation that next Monday. He wasn't too happy about me saying that, but he said we could work with that if that's what we have to do. 

After the appointment, I had to figure out what was going to happen with school. I spoke to the director at my school and she gave me an option for the remainder of my program. I could defer this clinical rotation and get all my medical stuff dealt with now. Go to classes with all of my classmates in October like normal. Do my clinical rotation that should have been done now in January instead of my internship. Walk in May with my classmates. Do my internship in the summer and get my paper diploma in August after I'm through with my internship. At first, I absolutely did not want to do this because I have been in this program long enough and I just want to be done. She told me that missing classes in October for a week is NOT possible because that would be like missing 3-4 weeks of classes since it's a short semester. So, after speaking with my parents about it, I took her up on her offer. This will set me back slightly with school, but not too much and I can still take the board exams in July if I want to or I'm feeling ready for them. The boards are also offered in October, so I could do that if I needed to. I'm feeling at peace with my decision about school and glad I'm not doing my rotation right now because dealing with the tremendous amount of doctor appointments would have been a nightmare if I were in the clinic. 

I saw my endocrinologist for the first time on Aug 31st. He was very nice and he is one of two doctors in the office that treat patients post-thyroid cancer. He spent a lot of time with me and explained everything so calmly. During that visit, he did another ultrasound to ensure that the cancer hasn't spread to my lymph nodes. Turns out my mass was actually measuring 4cm! That's HUGE! He only found one lymph node that was enlarged with something questionable (the rest looked good), so he did a biopsy of that one. All in all, it was a positive visit and I felt encouraged about the life-long relationship I will now have with an endocrinologist. I have heard horror stories of people switching endocrinologists many times until they found the right one for them because the endocrinologist just looks at the numbers and not them as a person and how they're feeling. I hear the hardest part of this entire journey is finding the right balance of medication to make you feel semi-normal again. I'm honestly not looking forward to taking medication every day for my entire life, but it has to be done.

Yesterday, I had my pre-op appointment with my ENT. He informed me that my lymph node biopsy came back benign, which is excellent news! This means that I will not have to go through a lateral neck dissection surgery to remove that lymph node, so the surgery will be a routine total thyroidectomy. I'm a little nervous about the whole thing because I've never gone under general anesthesia before and the only surgery I've ever had was to remove my wisdom teeth when I was in high school. Thankfully, I have my family who will be there and many friends who have offered to come visit or help in any way they can, so I know I have a huge support network cheering me on. Naturally, my blood pressure has been through the roof lately because all of this has been slightly quite stressful. For the most part, I've tried to remain as calm about this as I possibly can. No sense in getting overly and outwardly stressed about it because that doesn't do anyone, especially myself, any good. Some days are harder than others stress wise (mostly days when I'm scheduled to see a doctor), but I've been doing things to keep myself busy like reading all three books in the Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children series or going to IKEA, buying, then building a bookshelf so I could organize my son's books that have been strewn all over our bedroom floor for the longest time.

So what's ahead? 

They'll remove my whole thyroid. My surgery date is September 12th. One week after surgery, I will start to eat a low-iodine diet to ensure that my body is starving for iodine. Three weeks after surgery, I'll then have to do radioactive iodine (RAI) treatment where I'll be secluded from literally everyone for a few days. I swallow a pill and then any thyroid cancer cells or any thyroid cells that are left will soak up the iodine and die. After that, I'll have a nuclear body scan done to make sure all the cancer cells are gone and I'll have to do those once a year for 5 yrs to ensure that I remain cancer free. I'll also be put on thyroid meds for my whole life since I will no longer have the ability to produce those hormones naturally. Good thing is that once I have surgery and go through the radioactive iodine treatment, I should be cancer free.  One bummer though is that, ideally, I need to wait 2 yrs after the RAI treatment to even start trying for another baby. That wasn't quite the timeline Hector and I had anticipated, but we will do what needs to be done to ensure a healthy mommy and healthy baby. 

I will be out of commission: no lifting, exercising, or driving for about 2 weeks after surgery. I'll meet with the ENT on the 20th to remove my stitches and Steri-Strips and then later that afternoon, I'll meet with the endocrinologist to ensure that my hormone and calcium levels are moving in the direction they need them to go. 3 weeks after, if my levels look ideal, I'll do the radioactive iodine treatment. I'll have to be about 6ft distance from anyone and I have to follow certain precautions when eating, drinking, showering, etc to contain my body fluids and make sure they don't come in contact with anyone. After those 2-3 days, I'll be able to be around anyone, but can't sleep in the same bed as Hector or HG for 21 days (which will be super hard on HG) and I have to limit my time in close proximity to them since I'll still be slightly radioactive and the doctors don't want me to expose them to too much radiation. I need to make sure to ask if I can lay with him until he falls asleep and then move to the other room. Last thing I want to do is expose him to radiation!

How did I get thyroid cancer?

No one knows exactly. I don't have any family history of any cancer. But what I've read about thyroid cancer is that it is most prevalent in women ages 30-50 and higher incidences are recorded in individuals who have been exposed to excess radiation as young children or young adults. Only thing I can think of is dental x-rays...maybe they didn't cover my thyroid like they should have. Who knows? Oh well...only thing now is to spread the word about thyroid cancer and how it can be prevented. From here on out, I will make sure to demand my son's thyroid be covered at all dental appts where he will need x-rays and tell other mom friends of mine to make sure they themselves and their children to take precaution when having any sort of x-rays taken.