Surgery for Christmas

I met with Dr Denys this morning and got some answers.

The biggest questions I had were

• Where will the cut be and how long?
• Will the surgery be more like the first or second surgery as far as recovery?
• When could I do it?

He answered these and even drew me a nice picture. If you have ever gone to see Dr Denys there is a good chance he has drawn you a picture. I asked him to draw a line on my neck where the incision will be so that I can show my wife. He just made a small dot which is going to be the top of the incision. It is about an inch below my jaw bone under my ear. This means I will have a vertical cut this time where the previous cut was mostly horizontal and low. Good news is that it is mainly skin and fat tissue that will be cut so there will be very little or any messing with muscle, nerves, etc...Hopefully that means it will heal quickly. (Maybe a post Christmas snowboarding trip is still a possibility)

I edited the drawing with photoshop to show the green area in his drawing is where lymph nodes have been removed already. The yellow area is where he will remove more lymph nodes. The theory is that if we remove just the one lymph node again we may see another in a few months. There could be small cancer cells in the other lymph nodes that are not able to be detected yet. If we remove all of them then we will increase the odds of not having to do this again. 

I scheduled the surgery for Dec 18th. Which is the day I went into the MTC back in 1996 14 years ago. Man I am getting old. 

It could be an outpatient surgery with a drainage tube/bag but there is a chance I would stay a day at the hospital. We will have to wait and see. He said to plan on going home but bring a bag just in case. 

Dr Denys said the surgery would last around 1.5 hours and he knew exactly what needed to be removed and what he was going to be doing. There is not going to be much or any exploring or discovery while I am sliced open and under.  

He said the drain tube would stay in for maybe 3 days and then he could take it out. So hopefully by Christmas I will be feeling mostly recovered and ready to play with the kids.

The day before Thanksgiving (last week) I got a call from Dr Maturlo. (Endrocrinolgist)

I had an appointment the day before that I missed because I was expecting a call before coming in just in case I did not need to come in at all.

Well, come to find out I should have gone in. The tests came back with elevated levels of thyroglobulin and the scans showed another cancerous lymph node the size of a small marble. Basically the same thing we found out in March only 8 months prior.

What does this mean? More Surgery.

Dr Maturlo told me to meet with Dr Denys and have the lateral lymph nodes removed.  Basically, I need to remove them all and be done with it. I could tell she was somewhat frustrated that there is still cancer in my neck from the Thyroid cancer that was removed 3 years ago. Of course her frustration is matched and more intensified by mine where after I hung up I could not help but wonder "why did we do surgery in March?".

I immediately called Dr Douglas Denys' office and set up an appointment for the following week. Until then I did not have many answers and I had to wait a week. We told a few people, but not many since we didn't know the details yet.

Bad news before an anticipated Thanksgiving but nice that Dr Maturlo called me to give it to me rather than wait for a future appointment that could have delayed things and cost more money.

Testing Testing and more Testing - Am I clean from cancer yet?

Two weeks ago I did what I hoped would be the last of the large tests to see if the cancer was gone or not. It started with a shot in the rear end with Thyrogen. (around $1300 a shot) I then returned on Tuesday for the second shot in the neighboring cheek. (another $1300, dont worry, having met my $5500 deductible this year I am only responsible for 20%) By Tuesday I have spent an ipad3 worth of money on a sore rear in an effort to trick my body into thinking that it is HYPO thyroid. It is critical that I am hypo thyroid for my blood test later in the week so we can see if my thyroglobulin levels are where they were supposed to be. I can either stop taking my synthroid for 2 weeks or get this shot. Looking back on this I am wondering why I did not go two weeks and buy an iPad 3. Since I was in Provo already I did get to run a few errands one of which was buying a $10 bow saw at Sears and cutting a few large branches that fell on my rental property near BYU. Something about cutting some wood into smaller pieces that was therapeutic that morning.

On Wed I had a weird unrelated visit to the ER after having unbelievable abdominal pain.

On Thursday afternoon I went to do the blood tests.

On Friday I was able to move my appointment for the CT (Cat) and PT (Pet) Scans up from 8:30am to 7:30am since I had a flight to catch to Phoenix and had to be at the airport in SLC at 12. When I arrived to the Utah Valley Outpatient building (the one near Kneaders) after registering they pricked my finger and managed to squeeze out an enormous amount of blood to test my blood sugar level and test my kidneys. Those tests went well so they put an IV in my arm and gave me some radioactive liquid in a syringe to prep for the tests. Then they had me sit in a dark room and drink a lemonade (they asked if I wanted different drinks and I chose lemonade since I rarely want a soda). I sat in the dark room on a recliner (hospital style) with a blanket (also hospital style) in scrubs for around an hour in and out of conscienceness. Eventually they came to get me to take me to the room with the petscan/catscan machine.

I layed on the thin bed with my arms on my side (held in place with a velcro strap) and the bed moved into place. First were the cat scans where I moved back and forth 3 times and each time the machine would say (breath out, breath in, stop breathing). After the CT Scans the bed moved outside of the large donut so only my feet were inside of it. The PT scan took around 35 mins and every few minutes the bed would move and part of my body closer to my head would be scanned.  Eventually it was done and I changed my clothes and headed home for final travel preparations and goodbyes. I did get a paper to show the airport security just in case I set off the radiation detectors, but I did not get to use it as I set nothing off out of ordinary when I went through security.

Now I had to wait till next week to see what the blood, CT and PT scans showed.