I haven’t written for a while, mostly because I haven’t known what to write. I’m in a kind of frustrating wait zone at the moment, half-way between an ‘all-clear’ and ‘more treatment’. But I had a phone call from my endocrinologist today, so that has sparked me to write something.
I’m having the first of two injections this morning of a very expensive drug, Thyrogen, ahead of my radioidine ablation this weekend. Thyrogen costs $1901.52 for two doses, but is fortunately on the pharmaceutical benefits scheme (PBS), and so only costs the patient (me!) $36.10. We were given a prescription for the Thyrogen on our […]
It seems the good spirits of my last blog post were a little premature. A shortish time after I had got through chronicling how well I was feeling, I noticed a letter in the mail box. The letter was from my surgeon to my endocrinologist, CCd to me, and included my pathology results. Radioactive iodine […]
“What?” has been Meghan’s favourite phrase this week, as I’ve had a very weak voice but still insist on saying things from different rooms or over noises like the dishwasher or television. Other than that, I’m recovering well. I’ve had some swelling in the last few days, and a bit of nausea to boot, but […]
Predictably, following surgery I’m feeling even more unwell than I was last week. But there are some immediate upsides too. Aside from the pain in my neck, I have a pretty nasty cough and apparently my left vocal chord isn’t working because the laryngeal nerve was “stretched” to give room for the tumour to be […]
Blergh. That’s how I’ve been feeling for the last week or so. And this, too: Can’t sleep but always tired. Can’t concentrate. Feel like I’m going to be sick after eating. Getting light-headed. Heavy breathing. Just generally feeling crappy. 7 days to go.
This week, I had my first surgical consultation with the team of doctors at Royal North Shore Hospital who will be removing my thyroid, the 8cm tumour attached to it, and the lymph nodes nearby. The head surgeon, a Professor of Surgery at a Sydney university who has reputedly done 14,000 thyroid removals, was first […]
There are a couple of ‘C-words’ that are pretty taboo in society, but one of them in particular has a lot of power to cause ongoing angst, lack of sleep, and some off-the-wall reactions in people. I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer on March 25 following a series of tests including an ultrasound, x-rays, a […]
The Kitteh Does Play Cat in a Box by Travis Holland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Based on a work at www.youtube.com/tah727.