Thyroid Cancer Anyone?

FLAtoNYC · Jul 29, 2008

Thank you for sharing your story. You will be in my thoughts and prayers as you begin school this year. Good luck!!! You are amazing for keeping your dream alive and not giving up.

cardiacRN2006, ADN, RN · Jul 29, 2008

If you can get through cancer then you can get through nursing school. Good luck to you and I pray your scans come up 'clean'.

lilag02 · Jul 29, 2008

Wow! You are an incredibly strong person...kudos to you! I hope that your scan comes back just fine, and like pp said, if you can beat cancer, you can get through nursing school!

My mom had to have the radioactive iodine treatments done (no cancer though, just hypothyroidism), and she said they were tough. Not to mention every time they change her meds....thyroid issues are hard enough to deal with, but you made it through cancer.

Good luck! Prayers and well-wishes sent your way!:typing

Laura

Daytonite, BSN, RN · Jul 29, 2008

i was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in my 4th semester of nursing school and had two surgeries then while finishing up school followed by two i-131 treatments over the next 6 months while i was a working new grad plus the body scans. i know what you are going through. you cannot be on thyroid replacement when you are prepping for the scans which is why you get horribly tired (hopefully, you have no active thyroid tissue left in your body). i used to take my thyroid pills with me to the body scan to take when the scans were done--the technician laughed and said i wasn't the only one doing that. the fatigue is so incredible and indescribable. lying down doesn't even help. all i can tell you is that you just have to find it within you to keep pushing yourself to get things done during the day.

do you know the type of cancer? mine was a well-differentiated follicular ca. at the time i was crazy stressed out about it. i worried until i was 5 years passed the initial diagnosis and every little ache or pain set off alarms. i wish i could tell you that this fear never goes away because it doesn't, but it will keep you vigilant and alive. you will always have a family doctor or internist that you see on a regular basis because you need that prescription for synthyroid and periodic thyroid panels drawn. needless to say, you will never be able to buy life insurance. on the bright side, you will be one of the healthiest people walking around and medical insurance will always be a job benefit that will be at the top of your list when you consider job offers.

over the years i've learned a lot about thyroid cancer. (1) most are slow growing ones. that's a very good thing. (2) the cure rate on them is very high. another very good thing. (3) mine happened 33 years ago and i've been on thyroid replacement since then without any thyroid cancer recurrence. that's a really good thing. before synthyroid armour thyroid which is an extract from pig thyroids was used and it was not as high quality as synthyroid, so your t3 and t4 levels could fluctuate a lot (4) my last full body scan was 3 years post i-131 treatment. i haven't had one since and that must have been 30 years ago. i've had a couple of cts of the neck in the last 10 years, but they were for problems related to parotid cancer that came up in 1996. one thing you can do is ask for a prescription for cytomel which is synthetic t3 to take before thyroid and body scans. you take this instead of synthyroid before your scheduled body scans. it buys you 2 weeks of less fatigue when you have to prep for these body scans. 2 weeks of less fatigue is better than the 4 weeks leading up to it.

cancers where the cells can be "differentiated" (the individuality of the organ tissue that they come from can still be determined) are more easily treated. it is the "poorly differentiated" tumors and cancers that are rapidly growing out of control and are more likely to kill if not detected early that are the buggers to treat.

you just have to go through the treatment no matter how inconvenient it is. my thyroid cancer was my first. 20 years later i developed a parotid tumor and most recently colon cancer. i'll take surgery and radiation therapy any day because they are local treatments. with this last colon cancer i had to have surgery (piece of cake) and chemotherapy because this colon cancer was poorly differentiated and a rapid grower (lucky me) and had already spread to one lymph node. i had no symptoms of it and the only reason it was found was because my internist had me do my yearly fecal occult blood screening. i was shocked when he said all 3 were positive for blood and he sent me for a colonoscopy (i had just had one 2 years before that was normal). i was even more shocked when they found a 3 cm bleeding tumor at the ileal cecal junction! the 6 months of chemo was a *****, not to mention the crimp in my daily life and the permanent side effects it left me with. but i am still alive. sometimes i feel like a dogged eared, three-legged mutt that limps around from its dogfights--but i'm still standing. the oncologist smiles when i tell him this and he hugs me. he told me last week that his goal is to be a "smoking spot" in the bed before he finally dies because he wants everything done to be kept alive if he ever gets sick. it was the way he said it. his nurse and i were laughing so hard at the time just imagining the picture. it just summed up his dedication to saving people from cancer.

make you sure get your own copies of the surgical report, the radiologist's i-131 treatment reports, and all thyroid and body scans and keep them in a file of your own. i didn't know that i could do that 30 years ago. in 1995 when i needed my records, the hospital had already destroyed them because they were 20 years old. now, i get copies of all these kinds of records and reports so i can copy and take them to new doctors i am seeing.