November 1, 2014
The results are finally in. There is good news and bad news.
Bad news first.
The cancer did in fact spread to a couple of my lymph nodes. 2 out of the 3 that were removed were positive for papillary thyroid carcinoma.
- Cytomorphology of all tumours: Tall cell. This basically means it is a more aggressive version of papillary thyroid carcinoma and that means that I will need radioactive iodine treatment. I was so hoping I could focus on my recovery and start to put this whole treatment thing behind me.
- The other bad news is that I have not been able to get an appointment earlier than Dec 11, even with my surgeon sending in the reports to the endocrinologist and putting in a word for me. Honestly, I don’t want to wait that long to begin to think about the radioactive portion of this process. I just want it over with.
Quick, give you the good news you say? Well, this stuff on the report looks good.
- Lymph-Vascular Invasion: Not identified in any of the tumours (Good because I don’t particularly want any “invasion” going on inside of me). This also means that the cancer hasn’t gone into either the lymphatic or vascular systems.
- Distant Metastasis: Not applicable (Good because metastasis isn’t a good thing and not applicable is better than applicable).
- The biggest tumour is 1.9 cm, which means it is 0.1 cm away from stage 2 cancer. How arbitrary, but we’ll take it.
- The surgeon “accidentally” removed one of my parathyroid glands. But that’s okay because I have three left to do the job (and by the way, that was benign).
Other information:
- I had 4 tumours (or foci) which makes it multifocal.
- The tumours were on both sides of my thyroid, which makes it bilateral. Good thing I got a total thyroidectomy.
- It is technically Stage 1: T1b N1a
Here’s what that means (according to this website):
- T1b: The tumor is larger than 1 cm but not larger than 2 cm across and has not grown outside of the thyroid.
- N1a: The cancer has spread to lymph nodes around the thyroid in the neck (called pretracheal, paratracheal, and prelaryngeal lymph nodes).
There’s other stuff but I won’t bore you with those details. As for how I’m feeling…
One of my first thoughts was how the initial endocrinologist who gave me my diagnosis, downplayed the fact that I was concerned about radioactive treatment. Grr. Why not just acknowledge it as a possibility and talk to me about it? Because guess what, now I have to get that exact thing done that I was afraid of the whole time. So there’s some anger.
It appears that I take a little time to really absorb information. It took me about 12 hours to realize that I was upset and that as much as I didn’t want to admit it, I was secretly trying to be optimistic. Everyone led me to believe that I could be. “Highly unlikely there is any spread at all”. The results squashed that right outta me.
Maybe it’ll be over after the next hurdle. That’s what I’m telling people so they aren’t too sad.
But there’s a part of me that wants to give up on optimism and just go with realism instead.